The case all of SA must hear
The late winter sunshine evaporates in the chill but red blooms flush up Fred Daniel’s cheeks and settle on his forehead. It is August 2019 and in 11 months his massive damages claim against the South African government was due to be heard in the North Gauteng High Court. From his perch on the edge of his seat Fred steals glances at the unlocked palisade gate at the end of the driveway from which his security gate motor was stolen overnight. He can’t risk breaches in his home security. He is a whistleblower against corruption and a plaintiff in a damages claim amounting to just over R1bn against politicians, government departments, agencies and their officials. He is exposing several rackets in Mpumalanga, where many people who stood their ground against corruption were poisoned or gunned down. The Daniel family’s location can’t be disclosed.
Fred has witnessed how corruption cripples service delivery, increases unemployment, exacerbates poverty and widens the huge disparity between rich and poor. These social ills fuel crime — SA has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world: around 58 people are murdered every day.
What scares him more than the dire crime rate is the target on his back, drawn by politicians seeking to protect themselves and their business partners from the legal consequences of their misdeeds. Fred blew the whistle on land grabs that sucked the life out of taxpayer-funded programmes aimed at poor rural citizens. He sought protection from the police, the National Prosecuting Authority, the Special Investigating Unit and the Zondo commission — to no avail.
“There is nothing scarier than a government coming after its citizens, using state resources and abusing their entrusted power,” he says.
The defendants in his damages claim include Deputy President David Dabede Mabuza, cited in his previous positions as Mpumalanga premier and member of the executive council (MEC) for agriculture and land affairs. In his book, aptly titled Eerie Assignment , veteran City Press reporter Sizwe sama Yende writes that as premier, Mabuza presided over “a state infiltrated by quasipoliticians who subverted laws and policies with the sole intent of getting unbridled power to enrich themselves from the well of government resources”.
Fred’s court action is based on his claim of corruption-related harassment — much of it already exposed in forensic reports, police investigations, the Carolina magistrate’s court, the North Gauteng High Court and the Land Claims Court in Randburg, Gauteng, and found to be credible. Corrupt politicians, government officials and their private-sector enablers drove him off his 39,000ha conservation and tourism project between Badplaas and Barberton in southern Mpumalanga. It is a site of global historical and scientific importance, packed with ecological and cultural treasures and filled with natural wonders. He claims that the land has been substantially damaged as a result of the corruption.
The Daniel family has faced several violent attacks over the past decade and a half; their nerves are frayed. Shaken by an assassination attempt in November 2018, Fred, Linda and their 10year-old son, Jesse, left their home six months later.
Although he lives by the axiom that failure is never an option, Fred had to throw in the towel.
“With the damages claim coming down on the fraudsters like a freight train, the harassment escalated and I was advised by forensic and medical experts to get out of the firing line,” he says. “I could no longer gamble with my family’s lives and their future. I also realised that the massive effort I was putting into investing in Mpumalanga was a waste of time and getting me nowhere.”
Their new house is still a work in progress but they have renovated it substantially. Fred and Linda are hard at work in the garden; it’s their decompression and de-stressing zone. He is eagerly awaiting the spring rains that will nurture the grass seed he scattered in the brown patches of soil. She planted flowers and rose bushes and is planning a vegetable garden that she hopes will be as prolific as the one at their Mpumalanga home.
With the click of a remote button, lights illuminate their garden at night.
“It’s so effective that you can read a newspaper outside,” Fred says.
Motion sensors and hidden cameras in the garden record movement. The family tends to keep indoors after dark, locked behind formidable doors. A yappy small dog sleeps on Jesse’s bed and a pack of large dogs roam the property.
Thick burglar bars stripe all the windows. The family sleep behind self-locking thick steel doors. In the main bedroom a tall, steel gun-safe is within reaching distance of the bed. Fred unlocks it and hauls out a semi-automatic shotgun (he has a valid licence) and a bullet harness filled with shells. He reaches into the safe again and brings out a box of 500 bullets.
“I have enough to start a war,” he says with a faint smile on his lips. “There’s a real risk that I will be permanently censored, either through protracted attempts by the government to delay justice, or by assassination. With either outcome, my story will be buried. I can’t withhold this truth, it’s too ghastly to allow that to happen. The truth, and my reputation, cannot be permanently smeared or covered up.”
Over the past 15 years Fred has won 22 court cases against politicians, government officials, businessmen and journalists — all associated with his damages action.
The North Gauteng High Court has granted him a trial; this is the first time the issues will be ventilated through testimony. The only result of his past legal victories was an escalation in the violence and harassment.
“It wasn’t the corruption that drove me out of the province, although its effects were corrosive. It was the relentless retaliation that hurt my business and my family and the absence of government protection. It was unleashed to protect vested interests and their illgotten gains so as to prevent a light from shining on them.”
His damages claim stems from events that followed his exposure of land scams by politicians, government officials and businessmen. He is claiming compensation for the intimidation and violence that he faced, the damage to his assets and infrastructure and the loss of his and his partner’s investments and profits. He alleges in his court papers that the scam was orchestrated by Mabuza in cahoots with the provincial land claims commissioner and businessmen.
Deputy judge president of the North Gauteng High Court Aubrey Ledwaba set down a special trial from July 27 to August 28 2020 to hear Fred and his business partner’s R1bn claim. Advocates representing the defendants insisted on a lengthy trial. Until recently, politicians defended themselves at corruption trials on a luxurious scale — Mabuza has been represented by the priciest senior advocates and state and private attorneys, all paid from the public purse. But it is no longer guaranteed that the state will pay the millions of rands that politicians squander as they attempt to sidestep legal accountability for their actions. In December 2018 Ledwaba ruled that former president Jacob Zuma could no longer receive state funding for the advocates and lawyers defending him at his corruption trial.
Advocate André Ferreira SC, who represents many of the defendants, also acts for Mabuza in his personal capacity. The deputy president has a busy schedule and his availability will have an impact on the trial date, Ferreira has warned. Is this an example of the common strategy among ANC politicians facing corruption allegations, to use every tactic possible to delay their day in court? State attorney Nelson Govender says Mabuza applied for state funding for his personal attorney, Ian Small-Smith, and to appoint advocate Mike Hellens SC, who has often appeared for Zuma. SmallSmith says he is not the attorney on record for Fred’s damages claim and has not been paid by either Mabuza or the state.
From a distance, Fred appears to be an archetypal white farmer.
The law requires all South Africans to blow the whistle on corruption. [But ] it does take courage to stand up against political corruption
At his home office his daily uniform is shorts with a golf shirt tucked in at the hips. His thighs are as wide as a rugby player’s. His takkies are dusty and nondescript. But he’s no longer striding the plains and kloofs of his game reserve in Mpumalanga. Fred is stuck at a desk poring over thousands of pages of legal and business documents.
He is fluently bilingual; he can discuss science, conservation, religion, politics and much more in English and Afrikaans — with an endearing lisp. He is an avid reader of City Press and the Mail & Guardian but he is no lefty.
Fred was fiercely committed to SA after democracy arrived in 1994 until his efforts to build a spectacular teaching environment in a nature reserve were spurned.
The damages claim brought by Fred in 2010 is ripe for hearing. The tide has turned in the struggle against corruption. The Zondo commission of inquiry into allegations of state capture has unmasked reckless mismanagement of the state, allowing for its capture and looting by rapacious businessmen.
Marianne Merten reported in the Daily Maverick that the cost of state capture hovered around R1.5-trillion during the second term of the Zuma administration.
“That’s just short of the R1.8-trillion budget for 2019,” she wrote. “Put differently: state capture wiped out a third of SA’s R4.9-trillion gross domestic product or effectively annihilated four months of all labour and productivity of all South Africans, from hawkers selling sweets outside schools to boardroom jockeys.”
Listening to witnesses at his inquiry, deputy judge president Raymond Zondo shakes his head and says repeatedly: “We can’t go on like this. We have to ensure this never happens again.”
He sighs heavily and often, especially when he adjourns for composure breaks when weeping former public servants relate how they attempted to put the brakes on corruption and were hounded out of the government.
Fred was booked off from work for six months until the end of December 2019 by Nelspruit psychiatrist Dr LT Brauteseth, who wrote a report that will be submitted to the high court. It concluded that Fred was experiencing high levels of stress, with “recurrent, unwanted and distressing memories of the multiple traumatic events of the preceding 10 years; recurrent flashbacks and reliving past traumas; upsetting dreams and nightmares; severe emotional distress; and situational panic attacks and physical reactions to intrusive recollections of traumatic events”.
Dr Brauteseth diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed anti-anxiety medicines and recommended that Fred leave Mpumalanga.
When the family moved, Fred packed every record of his business and legal battles into boxes. At their new home, he had the roof lifted by builders to create a “war room” upstairs. A conference table that seats 10 people dominates the space. In the middle of the table is a wooden stand with a gold plaque inscribed “Nkomazi Wilderness”. A pair of rhino horns studded with coarse brown and grey hair is on a stand. It was from the first rhino Fred introduced to his game reserve. The rhino fell down a ditch and twisted its colon. A vet performed emergency surgery but it died a few days later.
The war room’s walls are lined with bookshelves, and there are piles of heavy hardcover books scattered around. The shelves contain the best of the library he built on his reserve, crammed with titles by the world’s top scientists and environmentalists. Stacks of cabinets in Fred’s office, which leads off the war room, are filled with lever arch files, all neatly labelled, detailing the construction of his business and its spiteful destruction.
“Remaining silent about corruption or environmental degradation is not an option,” Fred says.
“The law requires all South African citizens to blow the whistle on corruption and to take care of the environment. It does, however, take courage to stand up against political corruption as there are serious risks to career, reputation and even personal safety for doing so. But if you love your country this is not a good enough reason to avert your eyes, keep your mouth shut and suffer no consequences.
“Despite the politicians, civil servants, conservation officials and big polluters knowing exactly the damage they were causing, they chose to chase profits. They have blood on their hands.”