The epigraph to Micah Reddy and Pauli van Wyk’s excellent book about Julius Malema’s climb from zero to hero, and his rapid descent from hero to hypocrite, is from the man himself. “People must be prosecuted without fear or favour … Anywhere where there is criminality, there must be accountability.”
The genius of Malema: Money. Power. Patronage. is to contrast Malema’s self-avowed status as a man of and for the people with impeccably researched, meticulous evidence of his venality. Many, many examples in the book show how he and his fellow leaders in the EFF pay only lip service to democratic ideals.
Take LTE Consulting, the company at the heart of the corrupt Giyani water project in rural Limpopo. The initial tender unlawfully awarded to LTE for this project was R91m, but this ballooned to R2.2bn within a month. This is a pattern that the book shows happens over and over in South Africa, where already corrupt tenders for millions of rand are manipulated even further by corrupt insiders. LTE would make unexplained (but entirely explicable) payments to Santaclara Trading, a front company set up by Malema at the time of the launch of the EFF. Santaclara, the authors show, was an extension of Malema’s own finances, “a slush fund used for his personal benefit, and to a lesser extent to fund his political activities”. Another “slush fund” they identify is Mahuna Investments, later renamed Rosario.
The skill with which Reddy and Van Wyk weave the mass of evidence demanded by investigative journalism into a compelling, readable narrative is impressive. Here is Malema spending money with a slush fund credit card: “When Malema left for Seshego and Polokwane to celebrate Christmas and New Year in his hometown, the card went with him. Between 23 and 28 December 2017, Mahuna paid R13,529.52 for goods bought at Pick n Pay, Truworths, Edgars and Spitz in Polokwane.”
Time and again, Reddy and Van Wyk present the breathtaking hypocrisy in the gap between Malema’s ideological statements and his actual actions
Time and again, Reddy and Van Wyk present the breathtaking hypocrisy in the gap between Malema’s ideological statements and his actual actions. “On June 1 2018, the card went shopping at H&M in Sandton. All seemed to have been forgiven after EFF members, spurred on by their leaders, had months earlier trashed H&M stores over a controversial advertisement.”
In October 2018, Malema travelled to the Rwandan capital of Kigali. “The Santaclara credit card went with him, paying for hotel meals, alcohol and a restaurant. Just before Malema jetted off to Rwanda, the card was used for R40,000 worth of purchases at high-end fashion stores in Sandton.” Why was Malema in Kigali? To attend the Pan-African Parliament convened under the theme “Winning the fight against corruption: A sustainable path to Africa’s transformation”.
The hypocrisy never ends. There’s what the authors describe as “an intriguing allusion to revolutionary history in the names of Malema’s two slush funds”.
After visiting Cuba to pay his respects to Fidel Castro, Malema named Santaclara after the town in Cuba that is home to Che Guevara’s mausoleum. His Rosario Investments — formerly Mahuna — is named after the town where Guevara was born. The authors address this in a restrained way. “Naming companies used to fund a life of extravagance and greed in honour of a famously selfless and ascetic revolutionary was a strange paradox, and a fitting testament to Malema’s contradictory politics.” I would put it differently. Malema thinks that South Africans are idiots, and he is taking every EFF voter for a fool.
This book isn’t just a one-trick pony. While there are some fascinating investigations into many corrupt individuals and companies, and startling revelations about the myriad ways that corruption plays out, it’s also a nuanced analysis and interpretation of how political currents flow in South Africa. It is a wonderful, extraordinarily readable account of one hypocritical politician, but it’s also about the general rot that permeates our governmental institutions and civil service.
As the introduction puts it: “This book, then, is not so much about [Malema] as his interlinked political and financial network ... It shows how Malema has leveraged his growing political power and influence to accumulate resources and build patronage networks, which he has then used to consolidate his political stronghold. We hope to tell a broader story about the relationship between money and politics in post-apartheid South Africa — about the stealthy and insidious ways in which money courses through the political world; its corrosive effects on politics more generally; and how supposedly radical politicians have exploited popular grievances about poverty and deprivation to accumulate money and power.”
In a recent column for News24 Pierre de Vos wrote about the pivotal role that corruption and clientelism play in internal ANC politics, and how this means that no ANC politician can even try to root out corruption in their own party. He argued that the ANC generally outsources accountability of its members to the criminal justice system.
I would also suggest the business of uncovering corruption, and building an evidence base, is largely outsourced to journalists. And we’re running out of investigative journalists.
You won’t be surprised to know that Malema and his consiglieri denounce the revelations in the book as being anti-black, and the ravings of racist journalists. You can read elsewhere about the horrific abuse Malema has unleashed on Van Wyk on social media.
If you were wondering what it means to be an investigative journalist, this extract from the book captures it. When Daily Maverick reported that Floyd Shivambu had received R10m from the VBS scandal in his personal account, and the EFF R1.3m, Shivambu denied this and challenged Daily Maverick to “bring the proof”. Reddy and Van Wyk take up the tale.
“The EFF’s vigorous denials, counter-accusations and targeting of journalists, officials and others ultimately backfired. Journalists succeeded in ‘bringing the proof’, as Shivambu demanded. Our data — including bank statements and documents, contracts, WhatsApp messages and the official forensic reports on VBS — show that Matodzi [Tshifhiwa Matodzi, chair of VBS at the time] and his accomplices moved VBS money to three captive entities: Vele Investments, Malibongwe Petroleum and Robvet … These three accounts unlawfully channelled VBS cash to Sgameka Projects, which served as a slush fund for Shivambu, Malema and the EFF.”
With traditional news organisations, the kinds that have resources, dying out, will corrupt politicians and businesspeople even need to worry about being exposed anymore?
It takes a special kind of journalist to be able to operate under conditions of intimidation and threatened violence. But one of the things that we should worry about is that it takes a special kind of journalist to do this work at all. With traditional news organisations, the kinds that have resources, dying out, will corrupt politicians and businesspeople even need to worry about being exposed anymore?
Many people ask the question, sneeringly in some cases: do we really expect a news creator or news influencer to produce the sort of investigative journalism that a highly trained, highly committed and resourced newsroom does? That’s the wrong question. What we should be asking is: how can we help with setting up the economic and empirical structures of the new news producers so that they are able to break big investigative stories? How do we make sure that the next generation of news journalists, who are already with us, are able to replicate the results of legacy media, and in some ways — access to a different, younger audience, for example — better them?
One thing is for sure. Malema: Money. Power. Patronage. serves as a blueprint for the way investigative journalists, by dint of application, talent and doggedness, can change the world for the better. The hope, I guess, is that the book’s exhaustive case will be picked up by official channels. Probably a foolish hope, you’ll say, given that (and I quote De Vos again) the ANC has not even disciplined, let alone expelled, the more than 90 ANC leaders implicated in wrongdoing by the Zondo commission.
But hope is the thing. While we have journalists such as Reddy and Van Wyk, and the many others they acknowledge as indispensable contributors to the story they tell, we still have hope. Our country is fractured and captured in many ways, but there are still people out there fighting the good fight.
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