Back in May 1992 the late, great journalist and author Shaun Johnson wrote a column about what apartheid leaders and their apparatchiks were up to in the dying days of apartheid.
“If you stand on a street corner in Pretoria late at night, I am sure you can hear the sounds of shredders shredding. Of assets being stripped. Of pockets being stuffed,” he wrote.
Johnson, a great South African, should be here now to witness a new yet similar kind of frenzy. This time, it’s the liberators of our country, the ANC and its allies and its leagues, who are stuffing their pockets and stripping our assets. Like hyenas, like kleptocrats before the masses rise and resist, the party’s leaders in places big and small are filling their boots with poor taxpayers’ money.
There is no clearer sign that the ANC’s leaders are now frenziedly looting — ahead of a guaranteed loss at the polls in Gauteng — than the first two paragraphs of the Sunday Times’s front-page report this week. It was succinct and devastating: “A tollgate cashier, a receptionist and a person with a grade 11 have been appointed to the board of the Joburg Property Company (JPC), an entity that oversees the city’s 30,700-odd properties, worth about R8.7bn.
“These are some of the city appointees said to be personally and politically connected to Joburg’s mayoral committee member for economic development, Nomoya Mnisi. Some belong to her ANC branch in Soweto, while others are members of her party zone in the west of Joburg.”
Eight weeks ago, ActionSA laid criminal complaints against Mnisi after it emerged that this ANC youth leaguer and MMC had allegedly ordered the acting CFO of the JPC, Sipho Mzobe, to pay for an ANC Youth League event in Sandton. The event cost nearly R900,000. Mzobe refused to comply with the order, bless him.
The appointments to the JPC show that the party does not even care that it will be caught with its hand so deep in the cookie jar
Mnisi’s actions are not isolated. Last week Gauteng’s economic development MEC, Tasneem Motara, appointed the well-known Gupta stooge David Des van Rooyen to the board of the Gauteng Enterprise Propeller (GEP), a government entity. Van Rooyen was given two advisers he did not know from a bar of soap by the Guptas on his first day as finance minister. He is heavily implicated in the Zondo commission report.
Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi chaired the meeting that approved the appointment of Van Rooyen and Papa Leshabane, another individual heavily implicated in state capture corruption by the Zondo commission, to the board of the Gauteng Tourism Authority. Van Rooyen will help manage the more than R400m in loans issued to SMEs by the GEP.
The scandals detailed here have drawn no comment from the ANC’s top structures. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who in December 2015 threatened to resign as deputy president after then president Jacob Zuma’s appointment of Van Rooyen as finance minister, has said nothing about the appointment of the same Van Rooyen to a critical body of his “new dawn” administration. The ANC’s leaders in Gauteng and in Joburg have not been asked to suspend Mnisi over the very serious allegations against her. It’s business as usual.
These are the dying days of the ANC in Gauteng. All serious polls indicate that the party will suffer a bloody nose in the 2024 elections. So, the comrades are now no longer merely corrupt by fiddling here and there with tenders. As Mnisi’s actions show, they are brazenly looting. We are in the stages that Johnson wrote about back in 1992: minutes of meetings and all records of malfeasance are being shredded, and board appointments are being made exclusively to ensure that government entities can transfer money to individuals who will pass it on to corrupt leaders as quickly as possible.
The appointments to the JPC show that the party does not even care that it will be caught with its hand so deep in the cookie jar. They are looting in broad daylight because they believe that none of us will do anything about it.
That is not true. The job for all South Africans now is to agitate as much as they possibly can to ensure that the institutions of accountability survive this lot and that, after next year’s elections, tenders are investigated, dodgy appointments are probed, and crooked politicians are brought to trial. They must not get away with it.
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