THEMBA MASEKO CURSES GUPTAS
‘Atul snarled, so I told him to f*** off’
AJAY: I will speak to your superiors and tell them to replace you with someone who will co-operate
I thought if … the party was not willing to act, this country was in for a very rough ride
Defying president Jacob Zuma came easily to Themba Maseko. Equally easy was using profanities to tell Ajay Gupta and his brother to get lost.
After all, the ANC’s deepest values had been ingrained in him from an early age. Maseko was a kid who dodged bullets during the Soweto uprisings in 1976. He went on to be a leading student activist and one of the youngest MPs of the Nelson Mandela era. He had met ANC luminaries such as OR Tambo while the ANC leader was exiled in London.
“I must say, I was overwhelmed by the meeting because I was meeting my hero, my idol of many years … it was probably the most monumental, memorable meeting I have ever had with any ANC leader,” he says.
Maseko also worked under Tambo’s protégé, Thabo Mbeki, when the diminutive, pipe-smoking intellectual was SA’s president.
He was the chief government spokesman and CEO of the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) during the Mbeki years, but when Zuma took over his position became untenable.
Maseko’s crime: he refused to allocate R600m from the GCIS advertising budget to Gupta media outlets. He fell foul of Zuma and was fired as CEO of GCIS and redeployed.
Maseko recalls learning through the news that he had been kicked out and replaced by Jimmy Manyi.
This week Maseko released his memoir, For My Country: Why I Blew the Whistle on Zuma and the Guptas. The book is a journey through his life as a public servant and his early years under apartheid in Soweto, and ultimately what led to him blowing the whistle on Zuma and the Guptas when many chose to keep quiet.
“During the 1976 uprising I wouldn’t even describe myself as an activist … I was just a kid who had just been exposed to the darker side of apartheid. And I’m being told, as a 12-year-old, that you’re not going to be taught in English; you will be taught maths in Afrikaans. If the state had its way, they would have even insisted that my Zulu language must be taught in Afrikaans,” says Maseko during an interview in Rosebank, Johannesburg.
“The book is also about telling young people what it meant for my generation to be involved in the struggle … and why what the Guptas did during the state capture period was something that was an antithesis to our philosophy or vision of transforming our society.”
Writing the book forced him to deal with many scars from his past, including abuse at the hands of the apartheid system and police torture. He lost close friends and fellow activists, and escaped several attempts on his life.
But writing it was “very therapeutic” — “I call it my third baby,” he says. “My experience with Zuma and the Guptas … at least it’s something that I’d spoken about quite a lot. But my other experiences in the struggle were things that I had locked up in my memory for more than 30 years.
“Writing my story gave me a chance to sit down and reflect on my life and experiences. Why I’m still alive today is a miracle. And it’s something that I wanted to reflect on through this book.”
His life was turned upside down when he got a call from Zuma, leaning on him to help the Guptas, ahead of a meeting with Ajay Gupta, the eldest of the three brothers. In the book he details an acrimonious phone exchange a few months after he first met Ajay in Saxonwold.
“CALLER: Good evening, Mr Maseko. This is Ajay speaking.
ME: Good evening, Ajay.
AJAY: I hear from my people that you are being difficult.
ME: Ajay, that’s not true. I tried to explain to your person that I was on the road and that he should call me on Monday to set up a meeting and …
AJAY: It is very important that we meet you urgently because the matter we want to discuss can’t wait. ME: Hold on, Ajay, I don’t have a problem meeting you but …
AJAY: No, no, no, this can’t wait! In fact, we can’t wait for Monday. Let’s meet tomorrow at my house. ME: Listen Ajay, as I told your person, I’m on my way to Sun City and there is no way I can meet you tomorrow.
AJAY: Listen to me carefully, OK … I am telling you that the meeting will take place tomorrow morning. ME: Now you listen to me, Ajay. You can’t give me an instruction to meet you tomorrow because I don’t work for you. Who do you think you are?
AJAY: No, you listen! I will not tolerate any nonsense from you because you don’t understand what’s going on. I will speak to your superiors and tell them to replace you with someone who will be willing to co-operate.
ME: You can go f*** yourself then. I don’t work for you!”
Maseko recalls: “So when I eventually agreed to meet with Ajay Gupta, just to understand what he was trying to get from me, I get a call from president Zuma who says help these Gupta brothers. He doesn’t say exactly what help I should give them.”
Maseko went ahead with a meeting at the family’s infamous compound in Saxonwold.
“When I get to a meeting with them they tell me that they want the whole government communication budget to be transferred into their new media company.
“And that’s when I realised that when Zuma said I must help the Gupta brothers, he was in a sense saying I must be part of this network of the informal, unofficial family that was giving instructions to government.”
The incident offended Maseko and his values to the core.
“I felt a sense of betrayal, because in my mind somebody who was in charge of the state should not be actively involved in acts of corruption … asking me to help the Guptas to siphon cash out of the state coffers was something that I found totally unacceptable.”
He felt helpless.
“And what was even more depressing for me was that, ordinarily, if something like that had happened, the person I should have gone to complain to was the president himself. But here was the person actually giving me some kind of advice or instruction to go and assist the family.”
Maseko shared his experience with the late Collins Chabane and other leaders in the ANC.
The reluctance of people within the ANC leadership structures to actually do anything about it at the time was even more shocking.
“I thought if something as unlawful, as corrupt, as this was happening, and the party was not willing to act, this country was in for a very rough ride.”
Maseko later spoke to the Sunday Times in what would be a key moment in lifting the lid on the extent of state capture.
He is one of the main witnesses with direct allegations against Zuma at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture.
Maseko describes the drama behind his dismissal. “I knew that something was going to happen to me because I defied Zuma … I was sitting in a cabinet meeting and during the tea break I check my phone, and I find tons of messages. A news channel was running with a story that in fact I had been fired.”
The events that followed had strong elements of farce as Chabane performed political gymnastics to help Maseko save his bacon.
He had told Maseko two days earlier that Zuma had given the instruction to fire him. Chabane, then minister in the presidency, was aware of a directorgeneral vacancy in the department of public service & administration, and simply told the cabinet that that very meeting was Maseko’s last as he would be moved into that gap.
Chabane hadn’t had the opportunity to speak to the relevant minister, Richard Baloyi, who wasn’t at the cabinet meeting.
“I had to call him first and tell him before I made the announcement to the public that I’m his new director-general. He was equally shocked because he had not been consulted.”
Needless to say, this created problems in the office and it was almost inevitable that Maseko quit the government soon afterwards, having agreed on a financial settlement owing to “unfair labour practice” and related strife.
His wife and children and his GCIS subordinates had all learnt through media leaks that he was no longer the country’s top spin doctor.
Likewise at his new job, “unfortunately the staff only heard on the news that, in fact, I was the new DG. And that laid the foundation for me not staying too long because the manner in which I was actually put in the department was improper.
“There was not even an opportunity for me to be introduced to the management team or the general staff. I just arrived, and I had to find my way to tell people that they are under the new DG.”
Leaving the public service was a difficult decision for Maseko, a law school graduate who had quit his role as an MP in the 1990s so he could serve SA in a technocratic capacity.
“I was always passionate about being a public servant, being of service to the nation,” he says.
At the end of his memoir Maseko reveals that he spent three years sharing his experience only with friends and family, especially his wife.
“When I finally decided to go public with my story, it was because I saw it as my responsibility to expose the lies that were being told by Zuma and his Gupta friends. I still thought of myself as a public servant who owed his loyalty to the constitution and to the citizens of South Africa whose freedom I had fought for.
“However, I must confess that I did not fully realise the impact that speaking out about state capture would have on me and my family.
“It came at a great cost, as I soon became a professional, political and social leper, shunned by friends and enemies alike.”
It’s been a tough journey, but at least now Maseko can go to sleep with a clear conscience every night.