The thin line between the corrupters and the corrupted
If we are to take him at his word, former VBS Mutual Bank chair Tshifhiwa Matodzi started out meaning well. At 18 years of age, as a first-year BCom student at the then Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit (RAU), now the University of Johannesburg, he was concerned about what he saw as the deterioration of his hometown’s bank.
Growing up in Thohoyandou, in the then Northern Transvaal specifically the then Venda bantustan Matodzi had come to regard VBS with pride. Not only was it a locally-owned institution but it had become central to the region’s economic health.
His parents owned a general trading store in Thohoyandou and, presumably, banked with the same institution. They did, Matodzi says, help him open his account at the bank when his small business of selling paper bags, while still a high school pupil, started making a handsome profit.
But like many other Bantustan-era institutions in various parts of the country, VBS was already showing signs of being under strain by 1995 the year in which Matodzi moved to Johannesburg as a RAU student.
“Every time I went back to Venda during term holidays, I would notice that the previously long queues at VBS were growing smaller. To me, this was evidence of VBS deterioration.
“This observation stirred in me a keen interest as to how best to restore VBS to what one may call its former glory,” Matodzi writes in the opening of his sworn affidavit that goes on to reveal how he and his associates, some of them high-profile politicians, brought the bank to its knees through theft and corruption.
While still doing his studies, Matodzi writes, he would discuss his concerns with fellow students from the region. They would, one presumes, talk about how they could use their skills and knowledge to turn VBS into one of the most successful financial institutions in the then newly unified and democratic South Africa.
Judging by his career path, Matodzi was probably among the best-placed people to do so. After obtaining his honours degree in accounting he joined KPMG.
After qualifying as a chartered accountant, he moved to the then high-flying and black-owned accounting and consultancy firm Nkonki Sizwe Ntsaaluba and then later Ernst & Young. This was not one of your stereotypical “deployed cadres” whose only currency was connections to the ruling political elite.
He then quit to satisfy his ambition to become an entrepreneur. Judging by what he says, his entrepreneurial venture Brilliant Telecommunications was a roaring success.
But when he finally joined VBS the institution he dreamt of saving uncontrollable greed set in. He was to be at the centre of what was to be infamously described as the country’s “greatest bank heist”, that left him and a group of his friends and colleagues fabulously rich and, sadly, thousands of VBS depositors many of them pensioners without a cent of their hard-earning savings.
He is now going to jail for 15 years. He should be grateful. The state had sought a sentence of more than 400 years. But due to his pleading guilty and agreeing to co-operate in the prosecution of his associates, he received a much-reduced sentence.
In return, the public got to know first-hand from one of the people involved how unscrupulous people in business, politics and even traditional leadership conspired to steal from the bank and help each other to conceal their crimes.
Perhaps to some the VBS scandal is small change in the bigger scheme of South African corruption that we have seen but not to those whose dreams and aspirations the rampant theft has destroyed.
Of greatest significance, however, especially if we take into account what Matodzi has to say in his affidavit, is that it demonstrates why the electorate is finding it difficult to trust politicians across the spectrum.
Matodzi’s claims against the leaders of the EFF, the
ANC and even the South African Communist Party that has for over 100 years been railing against the culture of corruption that is embedded in the South African capitalist system are yet to be tested in court.
But who among us can confidently say they know that our politicians and political parties do not publicly condemn financial institutions and other organisations for whatever wrongdoing only so that this kind of pressure would make such a business or organisation “donate” hush money to their coffers?
It has been reported that one of the parties said they will not act on Matodzi’s claim as he is a convicted criminal.
However, many of us are looking at Matodzi and those political parties and leaders and finding it difficult to tell the difference.