STATE CAPTURE
25 AUGUST 2017 – 05:53 BRYAN ROSTRON
A foreign family has bought SA. They run it as a private concern, not unlike some giant spaza shop, and are subject to few regulations. If questioned about irregularities, they can simply buy off most officials. So, when ANC MPs, faced with a secret ballot in the recent no-confidence motion, frothed about threats of “regime change”, they were closing their eyes, and ears, to the fact that regime change has already been engineered without any vote at all.
The Guptas have taken over. They instruct the president which ministers to hire or fire and suborn bureaucrats to award them colossal loans and fishy tenders. Thus shrill ANC claims of white monopoly or foreign agent-inspired plans for regime change were pitifully threadbare – until the DA swiftly gifted the hapless government hacks a glittering gift.
In the parallel universe now inhabited by many ANC MPs, calling for the dissolution of Parliament merely fuelled the “regime change” narrative. The DA has never grasped Napoleon’s shrewd advice: “When your enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt.”
Another opposition omission is the failure to focus on the grotesque fact that the Guptas are confirmed racists. The lapse in not highlighting this allows the white monopoly capital canard to circulate widely.
Indeed, the disturbing psychological distortion wrought by the Guptas is as harmful as the moral and financial corruption they have so cynically disseminated. Post-apartheid, how do leading ANC politicians and black administrators process the sad paradox of accepting bribes and instructions from men with racially prejudiced views?
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After the notorious 2013 Sun City wedding, it was disclosed that the Guptas had insisted on being served by white staff and demanded that any black personnel attending to their guests be made to wash beforehand. The clan quickly swatted away such claims “with contempt”. But as leaked e-mails now prove, those allegations were true. The Guptas’ “contempt”, it seems, is reserved for black Africans. Knowing this, what level of emotional abasement must their cheerleaders undergo? And what mental contortions must ministers or officials perform when, at the click of Gupta fingers, they troop to the family’s Saxonwold compound?
There are, of course, large differences between the Gupta spaza shop model and those run in townships. The latter, though often also owned by foreigners, tend to be cheaper than their South African rivals, chiefly because their primary aim, unlike the Guptas’, is not to fleece the public. Yet many of those foreign spaza shop owners must wait years for their applications for refugee status, residence or naturalisation to be considered. Meanwhile, they suffer xenophobic and even deadly assaults. In shameful contrast, most of the Guptas are now effortlessly South African citizens, “naturalised” after the then home affairs minister Malusi Gigaba, overruled his most senior official.
Given the evidence of their colour prejudice, it’s not hard to guess at the scorn the Guptas must feel for our pliant president or the biddable ministers and bureaucrats they have illicitly coddled and bankrolled. Do the Guptas respect their ever-obliging mineral resources minister, Mosebenzi Zwane, who in his recent update of the Mining Charter included a distinctive “Gupta clause” that defines Indians naturalised after 1994 as “black” and so prime candidates for black economic empowerment?
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Respect is unlikely. The uneasy tie between briber and bribed usually conceals a curled lip of disdain on both sides. So what, I wonder, might the Guptas really say in private about President Jacob Zuma’s son Duduzane, the “hired help”, chiefly useful to prise open state coffers and whom they have transformed into a rand billionaire?
Above all, the dramas of recent weeks have revealed a peculiarly South African aberration: a series of bizarre contradictions performed right across the board, from ANC MPs to the DA to the South African Communist Party (SACP). The DA immediately unravelled any gains made in the no-confidence vote by calling for Parliament to be dissolved, thus at once achieving the remarkable tactical distinction of again reuniting ANC MPs while dividing the DA from other opposition parties. The SACP, on the other hand, professed that its members would vote for Zuma while continuing to call for his resignation, demonstrating a famous definition of the Marxist dialectic: “The art and technique of always landing on your feet.”
Among the most disturbing of these absurdities is the response of ANC Women’s League president Bathabile Dlamini, who defended the filmed assault on a woman by a male deputy minister. There are worse culprits among her senior colleagues, Dlamini said, insisting that demands for his resignation are “a political tool”. Perhaps such illogical reflexes, self-deluding as much as self-defeating, are some sort of perverse legacy of apartheid?
Consequently, slogans such as “national democratic revolution” have become a mockery. Published evidence shows the Guptas, with assistance from their lieutenant, Jacob Zuma, run a parallel state. The report by church leaders earlier in 2017, with devastating detail compiled by academics, concluded that the Gupta-Zuma axis has engineered “a silent coup”. Yet there is not a single charge against them or their cronies. Instead, police and prosecutors have tried to frame those who oppose them.
Meanwhile, the thousands of leaked e-mails from the Guptas and their hirelings reveal there is barely an area of public life this family has not colonised. These e-mails even reveal that the CVs of potential ministers are submitted to them. Correspondence from the former finance minister and his deputy, who had blocked their nefarious schemes, landed illegally in their in-tray. The Guptas or their employees also write the speeches for some senior leaders of the ANC and, predictably, Duduzane Zuma.
As far as we know, they don’t yet control the army or navy. The Guptas do have sway over our air force though, as in 2013, they landed a commercial jet at the country’s supposedly most secure air force base: a seditious act with no consequences for the family.
More sinister, they appear to enjoy the services of our state security agencies. The leaked e-mails reveal that vocal critics of Gupta knavery were spied on and covertly photographed, while the family possesses details about their adversaries normally only available to relevant ministries.
Victims of this criminality include the CEOs of banks that closed Gupta accounts after proof emerged of vast illegal exports of currency. Now journalists who expose this family’s venality are threatened and attacked by Gupta-sponsored thugs.
The final indignity of that lavish 2013 Sun City wedding is that we now know it was paid for with looted public funds. In short, the Guptas have bought an entire country – with cash pillaged from the nation’s coffers.
These carpetbaggers have even bought Duduzane Zuma a pricey villa in Dubai, widely believed to be the presidential plan B, so that if all goes wrong, the Zuma clan can flee the country in comfort.
Rostron is a journalist and author.
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2017-08-25-sas-coup-has-already-taken-place-at-the-hands-of-racist-gupta-family/