PETER BRUCE: What’s sweeter than a Scorpion sting?

The days are dark. No South African could have spent more than five minutes watching former Bosasa COO (or bagman) Angelo Agrizzi testifying at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture and not figure out how much trouble we are in.

The Bosasa evidence proves, if any more proof were needed, what a grotesque leader Jacob Zuma was. He was lazy and predatory in exile and he never changed and when it was his turn to eat, boy did he ever. It is going to be an absolute pleasure watching this guy go to jail.

Of course, it may take a while. But he’s just 76 and there’s plenty of time for a fair trial. What Bosasa, or Agrizzi, does is to fill in the missing middle, between the Shaiks and Thales and the arms deal, and the Guptas. There was smart young Gavin Watson slipping the old man R300,000 a month to ensure he got his contracts at Correctional Services.

Did the SA Revenue Service (Sars) know that, I wonder. A few years ago I got a call from a once very senior official at Sars saying that from 2009 to 2012 Zuma was tax compliant. They had even picked up the R100,000 monthly payments Jacques Pauw identified as R1m in his fabulous book, The President’s Keepers. Three times they made Zuma pay tax on the Roy Moodley money and even when he slipped into a bank one day himself and pulled R100,000 from his friend Roy, Sars spotted it and took its share. It all stopped about three months into his presidency.

The person whose job it was to do that was probably Ivan Pillay, which is why Zuma hated him so much. But did Pillay know about the Bosasa payments? I presume Sars will be quick to check. Sars can do pretty much whatever it wants with you tax-wise. Sars will know the ex-president’s bank accounts and God help any commercial bank that hides information from them.

In fact I’ve been wondering why the banks have not begun to close Bosasa accounts the way they did Gupta accounts when it became clear the Guptas were thieves. It doesn’t seem fair. The Agrizzi evidence is every bit as big a story (though the amounts of money are smaller) as the dump of Gupta e-mails were back in 2016 and the Watson behaviour is every bit as damaging for the country.

A bottle of the best champagne to the first bank to write the Watsons a gentle letter telling them they have a month to close their account.

But we must not be too distracted by the Zondo commission, however colourful it may become (and we really haven’t seen anything yet). The danger with Zondo it that while it is going on, state capture is still going on. The Zuptas and fellow travellers like the Watsons will not go quietly. There’s a fight-back of huge proportions going on against President Cyril Ramaphosa.

People criticise Ramaphosa for not doing “enough” but you have to understand the minefield he is in. And have a little faith. Last week Mark Swilling, distinguished professor of sustainable development in the School of Public Leadership at Stellenbosch University, wrote a solemn warning to us all.

The state capturers have not gone away, he warned. Here, you read it. He scared the wits out of me. 

But for all the dangers, Swilling does himself a mild disservice by not considering how we might counter the bad guys. This war is not over yet by a long shot. Ramaphosa is not going to be removed from office without an almighty fight, if at all. And I really am not sure why Swilling is so confident that political lunatics like Hlaudi Motsoeneng are somehow going to draw votes away from the ANC.

It takes roughly 55,000 votes to secure a seat in parliament in our system and Zuma, whether he likes it or not, is going to have to campaign for the ANC in his home province for this election. Sure, he is trying to misbehave and unsettle Ramaphosa and he has 183,000 followers on Twitter to whom he feeds the odd suggestion of insurrection. But that’s still fewer followers than, say, Stephen Grootes. He’s history, but I guess we are going to have to see it to believe it. Sure, state capture goes much further than Zuma. Our three levels of government are thoroughly corrupt and there are literally thousands of people on the take.

But just wait, people. Things are about to get interesting. You’ll have noticed that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has decided not to prosecute Duduzane Zuma right now. And there’s the Ultra Zupta and ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule saying the party won’t be commenting on anything that happens at the Zondo Commission until it has delivered its report (in the year 2057 he hopes). There a new narrative abroad that all these commissions are merely a way of delaying justice. Yes, people really say that.

Not going to happen. This coming Friday a new boss enters the NPA. Her name is Shamila Batohi and she has already spoken in Homeric terms about what lies before her: “We in the NPA have important work to do,” she said, talking to NPA staff after her appointment last month, according to Daily Maverick, “which includes devoting our efforts to holding accountable those who have corrupted our institutions, who have betrayed the public good and the values of our Constitution for private gain, especially those in the most privileged positions of government and corporate power.”

So she doesn’t sound so afraid. And she was once sent to anger management classes to resolve a staffing dispute.

And here’s the thing. Batohi has already spoken about asking the president to help her establish a Scorpions-type unit inside the NPA that can chase down the corrupt and the corrupters on its own, without have to wait for a useless police force to open a docket, not lose it, investigate and charge. When Zuma scrapped the Scorpions after coming into office in 2009 it was to prevent just this. He wanted the police to investigate and the NPA to prosecute. The Scorpions had been a fearsome prosecution-led investigative unit, combining police and the NPA. Zuma broke it.

But he left some useful embers burning. Not so smart JZ! The NPA Act clearly makes it possible for Ramaphosa to enable Batohi to establish a special investigating unit inside the NPA, for Ramaphosa to appoint a special investigating director to head it, and for the brief to that person to be as wide as possible. The act also allows Batohi to second almost anyone she likes from the public or private sector to staff it.

I had to read the act so you’ll have to put up with me bragging a bit. Section 7 deals with the appointments of what they call an investigating director, the equivalent of a special counsel in the US like Robert Mueller, the former FBI director now investigating Donald Trump’s ties with the Russians.

It says, for instance: “The president may, by proclamation in the gazette, establish one or more investigating directorates in the office of the national director, in respect of such offences or criminal or unlawful activities as set out in the proclamation.

“The head of an investigating directorate shall be an investigating director, and shall perform the powers, duties and functions of the investigating directorate concerned subject to the control and directions of the national director.

“The head of an investigating directorate shall be assisted in the exercise of his or her powers and the performance of his or her functions by:

“(i) Any person or body requested by the head of an investigating directorate in writing to do so, shall from time to time, after consultation with the head of an investigating directorate, furnish him or her with a list of the names of persons, in the employ or under the control of that person or body, who are fit and available to assist the head of that investigating directorate ...

“(ii) Such a person or body shall, at the request of, and after consultation with, the head of the investigating directorate concerned, designate a person or persons mentioned in the list concerned so as to assist the head of the investigating directorate.”

If you’re a bad guy, it gets much worse. These people don’t need the police. The NPA Act continues:

“If the investigating director, at any time during the conducting of an investigation, is of the opinion that evidence has been disclosed of the commission of an offence which is not being investigated by the investigating directorate concerned, he or she must without delay inform the national commissioner of the SA Police Service of the particulars of such matter.

“The investigating director may, if he or she decides to conduct an investigation, at any time prior to or during the conducting of the investigation, designate any person referred to in section 7 (4) (a) or, in the case of an investigation requested by the head of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation in terms of section 17D (3) of the SA Police Service Act, 1995 (Act 68 of 1995), any member of the prosecuting authority or a member of that directorate, to conduct the investigation, or any part thereof, on his or her behalf and to report to him or her.

“A person so designated shall for the purpose of the investigation concerned have the same powers as those which the investigating director has in terms of this section and section 29 of this act, and the instructions issued by the Treasury under section 39 of the Exchequer Act, 1975 (Act 66 of 1975), in respect of commissions of inquiry shall apply with the necessary changes in respect of such a person.”

In other words under current legislation Batohi, with the wave of a Ramaphosa hand, can do what the hell she wants. I think she’s going to get that hand wave and Ramaphosa will do it knowing that once there are special investigators dealing with the Guptas, the Watsons and general public and private sector corruption he will not be able to stop it. Nor will he want to. The law, once it starts grinding, tends not to stop.

Also, there’s nothing my inexpert eye can see in the act that says an investigating director has to be on the staff of the NPA, which opens the field for some pretty smart lawyers to do national service.

I still have a little faith, obviously. From Friday the SA ball game changes dramatically. One or two high-profile arrests is all it will take for the queue of people wanting to give state’s evidence to stretch around the block.