State capture network's silent coup revealed

Days before a crucial meeting of the ANC’s national executive committee, where President Jacob Zuma is again to be asked to resign, a large group of university academics has released research revealing that SA has undergone ‘a silent coup’ and is in the grip of a Mafia-style network intent on looting the state, notes a Business Day report. The academics are at the universities of Johannesburg, Wits, Pretoria and Stellenbosch and collaborated under the auspices of the State Capacity Research Project (SCRP). The academics said the coup was the work of a systematic political project responsible for the establishment of a shadow state, which has involved: the sacking of the ‘good cops’ from the police and intelligence services; the hollowing out of the Cabinet and its replacement by shadow structures; and the redirection of procurement spend by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to a network of Zuma-Gupta brokers. It had repurposed state institutions with Zuma as its patron and his close friends, the Gupta family, as controller through a pact with a network of crony business people. ‘There is a division of labour in this process, where you have a different set of individuals playing unique roles directed at furthering the systematic criminalising of the state,’ said the University of Johannesburg’s Professor Mzukisi Qobo. Finance Minister, Malusi Gigaba’s appointment to Public Enterprises in 2010 had opened the gateways of access to funds for the network in state-owned institutions, says the report. Gigaba was accused of systematically reconfiguring the boards of SOEs to ensure compliance with the scheme. ‘Throughout his tenure until 2014 as Minister of Public Enterprises, Gigaba was engaged in the restructuring of SOE boards. This, however, was only the first step in the repurposing of the SOEs. The second was to exploit the loophole in the Public Finance Management Act that made it possible to use the procurement procedures of SOEs to benefit selected contractors who had been sanctioned by the Gupta network,’ reads the report.