Oupa, Dina, and the power of the press
IMPLAUSIBLY, it turns out that Dave King was correct in his furious missives in which he described the top brass of the SA Revenue Service (SARS) as ethically dubious characters prone to taking liberties with the truth.
King, who has been battling a mammoth R2.8-billion tax claim for nearly a decade, will no doubt see Friday’s departure of SARS boss Oupa Magashule under a corruption cloud as evidence for his contention that the tax service is a cesspit of cronymism, arbitary audits and corruption.
Others who’ve found themselves at the wrong end of an audit — including economic freedom fighter Julius Malema and shady Czech businessman Radovan Krejcir — will no doubt share the sentiment.
It probably won’t matter that the man who commissioned the probe into Magashula was finance minister Pravin Gordhan, who preceded him as tax czar and under whose authority the King case began.
No, instead Magashula has rubbished SARS’s reputation by lying about his relationship to ex-convict Timmie Marimuthu and lying about offering to organise a cushy job for one of Marimuthu’s church pals.
As the judges who conducted the Magashula inquiry wrote, if SARS loses credibility, it “would have a direct effect on whether taxpayers will be honest in the determination of the amount of money they owe”.
After all, why should you sweat over whether your income is “capital” or “revenue” when the SARS boss is splurging your cash on hiring casual acquantances of his mates?
Of course, you can understand why Magashula would have lied about knowing Marimuthu. A former apartheid cop who has since found God, Marimuthu was found guilty of dealing mandrax in 1992 but escaped going to jail after his sentence was changed to “correctional supervision” by the office of Durban’s former deputy mayor Sipho Ngwenya.
At the 2002 Jali commission into prisons, one anti-corruption investigator testified that “we were anonymously informed that Marimuthu has paid a lot of money to certain officials to stay out of prison”.
Marimuthu has made some- thing of a career out of getting close to the right people, and supposedly boasted that he had Oupa “in his pocket”. It got so bad that SARS even sent him a letter warning him to stop boasting about this. (Well, it turns out he wasn’t fibbing.)
In a bizarre address to an American church group, Marimuthu extolled the virtues of getting close to powerful people who can do you favours. “In a Christian vocabulary we must not use bribery, corruption. We use it loosely. Let me say something to you: your money must make room for you. If you don’t bless somebody to get a job, then the heathen will do that, and you’ve lost out.”
But the overriding point from this week’s events — which saw communications minister Dina Pule also get her marching orders — was that neither would have got the chop but for the vigilance of the press.
Magashula’s relationship to Marimuthu first emerged in this newspaper and the City Press, while Pule’s antics have been a staple of the Sunday Times’ front page for a year.
Pule, after all, had leant on the telecoms companies to “sponsor” the ICT Indaba to the tune of R25.7-million. It then emerged that her “boyfriend” Phosane Mngqibisa had drawing rights to that money.
Dina refused to deny any relationship until a few weeks back — shortly before official documents emerged listing Mngqibisa as her “spouse”.
David Lewis, the head of CorruptionWatch, said this week that he couldn’t think of any major corruption scandal that hadn’t first emerged in the media. Why is it that a major scandal has to make the front pages first, before it treads ever so softly into a police docket?
Of course, usher in the Secrecy Bill, with its new rules to throttle the sort of whistleblowers who tipped off journalists in the first place, and well, far fewer people will be getting fired.