Naspers saga shows greedy capitalism is ripe for reform

When you own more than 50% of a company you’re in charge. You’re responsible and you’re accountable. Reading Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk’s weasel explanation for Naspers’s subsidiary, the pay-TV group MultiChoice, conniving with the Gupta family, you get the feeling that for Naspers, ownership simply implies you get most of the profits and that’s where it ends. Naspers and MultiChoice are the latest establishment companies to get caught up in state capture in South Africa, along with auditors KPMG, software giant SAP and management consultants McKinsey. It seems they paid the Gupta media businesses R25-million once off, then R50-million and possibly then even R150-million a year, to broadcast on the DStv platform we all know and love.

They did that to protect their monopoly in encrypted TV, assuming, correctly as it turned out, that the Guptas had the political clout to circumvent official ANC policy, which was that our migration to a digital signal from the analogue one we have now should entrench encryption.

With the help of a pliant communications minister, Faith Muthambi, under the watchful eye of Mzwanele Manyi, the Naspers/Gupta conspiracy succeeded. President Jacob Zuma’s administration decided instead to press ahead with a non-encrypted signal.

Just what Naspers wanted. Its monopoly would remain intact. As the scandal leaked

(it was exposed by Naspers journalists) and details of the payments to the Guptas sharpened, public anger has sharpened too. What the Naspers payments had done was to give state capture the cover of bogus TV and print media.

Asked about the issue, Van Dijk told Moneyweb on Tuesday that, no, it had nothing to do with Naspers. You had to speak to MultiChoice. “The MultiChoice board is the appropriate entity to address [the payments] and we as a group need to verify and be absolutely sure that they’ve been appropriately addressed. We run more than 100 businesses and . . . we can’t go and investigate each single issue that has an appropriate governance structure to deal with them,” he said.

Er, actually, Bob, when you own a company you can do whatever the hell you want to do with it. You sit on the MultiChoice board yourself. Is it all too confusing for you? Answer the damn questions.

“We think the issues are serious,” said Bob. “There is no question about that. We fully acknowledge that and they need to be properly addressed.” Why are they serious? They’re serious because Naspers has helped enable state capture in all its disgusting glory. Stuff South Africa.

And it’s personal. The people who picketed outside my house, screamed at me that I was a land thief and painted “Land or Death” on my garage door in June at the behest of the Guptas, have untrammelled access to the Gupta media platforms financed by Van Dijk. On Friday MultiChoice, with Van Dijk having miraculously transformed himself into a different person, announced it would investigate the payments. No doubt it will find it was all innocent. Just business.

And where, in all of this, is Van Dijk’s boss, Naspers chairman Koos Bekker? Mainly, Bekker is out of here. He spends much of his time abroad, immersed in personal projects in Europe. State capture at home wouldn’t trouble him much. Stuff South Africa.

Speaking at the Naspers centenary a few years ago, Esmaré Weideman, CEO of the Naspers print news business, Media24, said: “We acknowledge complicity in a morally indefensible political regime.” She was talking about apartheid. That centenary took place a few years after the deal with the Guptas had been done and now someone at the company is going to have to apologise all over again soon for having backed another “morally indefensible political regime”, this time the Zupta one. What is wrong with these people? Can’t they tell right from wrong?

What is clear from the unfolding story of state capture and the looting it has unleashed is that South African capitalism — Victorian, greedy beyond belief and increasingly isolated from society — is ripe for deep reform. It is something none of the political parties talk about. They all feed from business handouts.

But if we want to live in a country where business is regarded as an essential good and where people appreciate the benefits of competition and will want to protect free enterprise and not destroy it, then something must be done.

We need a new consensus on how we create wealth. Without it we will lose our future and our home.