Wednesday, November 2, 2016, was a remarkable day in several
ways.
It was the day on which the High Court ordered the
publication of the Public Protector’s Report on State Capture, after Jacob Zuma
had spent months and millions on dodging the bullet, by failing to respond to
questions by the Public Protector, the most important of those being in March 2016,
then by demanding that he be given the right to question witnesses and to put
his own version, then by appointing a new Public Protector, probably in the
hope that she would be more compliant to his demands for protection (a hope
which, to the consternation of most citizens, appears not to have been in vain),
and by launching a Court Action to interdict publication of the Report. The
Report has shown that Zuma’s concerns are well-founded, as it details
situations and facts that give rise to a view that Zuma, his son, the Minister
of Co-operative Government, the Minister of Public Enterprises and the Minister
of Mineral Resources have gone to extreme lengths to grant to the Gupta family
unusually favourable assistance in their efforts to build a fortune at the cost
of the citizens of South Africa. In their offer to Mcebisi Jonas, they are said
to have offered a cash down-payment of R600 000 to be followed by a
further R600 000 000 if he were to accept the post as Minister of
Finance, with the requirement that he extended the largesse to them granted by
Zuma. As an honorable man, one of the few in the senior ranks of the ANC, he
refused the offer and reported it to the public. It would not be surprising if
the same offer was made to Des van Rooyen, a man whose sole claim to fame at
the time was that his home had been torched by angry constituents in his
previous position, and who was appointed as Minister of Finance, holding the
position for four days and bringing a loss to the JSE estimated at over five
hundred billon Rands. The Report does not state what benefit the Minister of
Mines received to strong-arm Glencore into selling Tageta to the Guptas, but it
must have been considerable for him to have made a subsequent announcement that
the Cabinet had decided to investigate why the four major banks had withdrawn
their banking services to the Gupta group. That announcement was subsequently
declared to be incorrect, after it had brought a crash of banking shares. The
dealings of Eskom with the Guptas were also found to be suspicious, with the
Board of Eskom incorrectly constituted and possibly complicit in a scheme to
defraud the public. That seems to be reasonable in view of the fact that a
large penalty was imposed on Tageta under the ownership of Glencore, which was
withdrawn as soon as the Guptas gained ownership of the company, with Zuma’s
son tagging along to share the bonanza, and replaced by a pre-delivery payment
for sub-standard coal. There are, no doubt, many other transactions by Eskom
that will bear investigation, once the light of day reaches into the murky
dealings of that publicly-owned entity, including a shareholding taken up by
the ANC in the company that gained the contract to supply turbines (against the
strong recommendation of the Committee evaluating the various tenders), with a
$10 000 000 ‘finder’s commission being paid to the ANC.
November 2, 2016, was the day on which Vytjie Mentor, who
had been offered the position of Minister of Public Enterprises on the
condition that she induce South African Airways to abandon the lucrative India
route and so permit the Guptas to take it. Mentor entered her name in the Book
of Honourable South Africans alongside that of Mcebisi Jonas, by refusing the
offer and publicizing both it and the presence of Zuma in an adjoining room in
the Gupta mansion. She consolidated that entry by refusing to be interviewed by
SABC and ANN7, stating that they were the mouthpieces of Jacob Zuma and the
Guptas.
November 2, 2016, was also the day on which the National Prosecuting
Authority was to bring criminal charges of fraud and corruption against Pravin
Gordhan and two others, which charges were withdrawn two days earlier by the
NPA (illegally, as, once a criminal charge has been laid, only the Court has
the right to withdraw it). The planned public demonstrations in support of
Gordhan were converted to a march to the seat of Government and meetings in the
main cities to protest the abuse of power and the corruption of the democracy
that Nelson Mandela and many others worked so hard to achieve. Politicians
(including many senior ANC Party members), business leaders, churchmen
(including some who have been seen to be snuggling up to Zuma) and prominent citizens
spoke out against the corruption and outright criminality that has become the
hallmark of the ANC Government. The meetings made it plain that the public at
large are sick of the abuse of power and the destruction of the rights held by
citizens under the Constitution by Zuma and his ANC cronies. Several railed
against the galloping racism that has come back to South Africa since Mandela
stepped down, making it a State that qualifies in many respects under the
characteristics that marked the rise of Apartheid. They demanded a return to
the ideals of Nelson Mandela.
November 2, 2016, was also a day when the ‘Commander in
Chief’ of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema, a ‘man of the people’
and wearer of Breitling watches and designer suits, warned Whites, including
citizens and Police, not to be near Church Square because the march against
Zuma was one ‘of the people’, thereby stating squarely his Party’s position
that Whites are not a part of the people of South Africa. It was a remarkable
display of racism in a public speech by a man who has placed himself and his
Party firmly in the group that has been dominated by lunatics such as Adolph
Hitler, Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe. Malema has confirmed the position he has established
as a racist opportunist with no regard for the good of the country, a suitable
replacement for Jacob Zuma, if ever the citizens are so blinded by his empty
mass marketing that they permit him to assume that role.
November 2, 2016, was also the day on which Cyril Ramaphosa,
a man who has gained enormous wealth on the back of the racist ANC policies
masquerading under the banner of Black Economic Empowerment (and, apparently,
with little else to offer, if one is to judge by his abysmal lack of
performance as Deputy State President) made his entry in the Book of Modern
Racists. In response to a comment by a Democratic Alliance Member of the
Council of Provinces that he, Ramaphosa, was attempting to wash the blood of
the slaughtered miners at Marikana from his hands in preparation for making his
un for the Presidency, Ramaphosa stated that the speaker was a White, and, as a
White, he had supported the Apartheid Government that had killed thousands of
Blacks, as all Whites did. Apart from being in remarkably poor taste and deeply
offensive to a substantial portion of the electorate, that statement, coming
from a man who aspires to lead a nation that relies to a very large extent on
the economic contribution of the Whites, is factually incorrect. If it had been
made outside of the protection of Parliament, it would certainly justify a criminal
charge of hate speech. What Ramaphosa has ignored is the fact that a very large
minority of Whites voted consistently against the National Party, the founder
of Apartheid, in every election. That
vote was sufficient to prevent the National Party gaining a sufficient majority
to amend the Constitution. The same Whites voted to grant voting rights to
Blacks, as soon as the threat of a communist takeover was removed by the collapse
of the Soviet Union. He ignored the thousands of Whites who demonstrated
repeatedly against the Apartheid system, at risk of their lives. He ignored the
hundreds of White members of the Black Sash, women who stood mutely at the side
of the main roads in the cities in winter cold and summer rain, to protest the
inhumanity of Apartheid. A brief course in (real, not the ANC revised version
of) history would make it very clear to Ramaphosa that his comment was an
outright lie, a defamation of the thousands of people who helped to put his
dishonest Party into power, so that they could plunder the assets of the State
and of the citizens. He puts to shame the millions of honourable and decent
Blacks who have suffered poverty and degradation at the hands of the ANC
Government, as a result of the degrading of the education system, of the
economic mismanagement of the country, of the setting up of a system which has
enabled the favoured few, such as Ramaphosa and Zuma, to trample on the
Constitution of which he claims to be proud.
November 2, 2016, was a memorable day, in many ways. Let us
hope that it will be remembered as the day which started a resurgence of the
noble ideals of Nelson Mandela, and not the day that confirmed that South
Africa was destined to become just another failed African State.
