Two books that tell the unsettling tale of South Africa's descent

Mike Hutchings/Reuters

South Africa has produced two must-read thrillers in the past week. They are non-fiction, yet are as gripping and readable as any page-turner.

Veteran investigative journalist Jacques Pauw’s “The President’s Keepers” has, within a week, become a global best seller. It has had the advantage of the best available marketing push by South Africa’s State Security Agency, under the illusion that they were going to stop the book. The State Security Agency sent a cease and desist letter to a defiant Pauw and his publisher, claiming the exposé is in violation of the Intelligence Services Act.

Less well-known, but as important to those who want to understand what is happening in the country, is consultant and activist Crispian Olver’s enticingly-titled “How to Steal a City”.

Take some courage

I recommend you read them together. It will take some courage, as they are a most unsettling combination, but worth it.

Cover Jacques Pauw’s latest book.

Pauw’s book takes you on his journey to uncover the nature of Jacob Zuma’s presidency and its impact on South Africa, a trip that begins in the small Western Cape town of Riebeek-Kasteel and goes, via Moscow, to the Tshwane coffee bars where he meets his sources. Much of what emerges has been reported in bits and pieces elsewhere, but he weaves it together with great storytelling skill, and adds some important new revelations.

It is the most comprehensive picture of the rot at the heart of the Zuma presidency and the toll it has taken on important state institutions. Once he has worked through the tax collector, the South African Revenue Service, the National Prosecuting Authority, and the police, one is left gasping for air at the scale and depth of the destruction.

I don’t think it is necessary to weigh up the accuracy of his much-detailed and well-documented story, except to say that Pauw is a veteran muckraker whose credentials for getting sources to talk, putting his hands on the evidence, weaving all this into readable horror-stories, and withstanding the attacks of those who would stop him, are well established. So much so that the onus is on his detractors to disprove what he is saying. Even if half of it is true, it is chilling.

Oil for the ANC’s political machinery

Olver’s book might be even more important. It’s an insider’s view of how corruption has become the oil that keeps the ruling African National Congress’s political machinery working. Olver was sent in by ANC leaders to help clean up the metropolitan Nelson Mandela Bay region on the country’s east coast and pave the way for local politician and national football boss Danny Jordaan’s 2016 mayoral election campaign. At the same time, Olver was commissioned by then Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan to clear out the rot in the city structure.

Cover of Crispian Olver’s book.

Olver’s story of how he identified and drove out the worst culprits in the city’s corruption, is heartening. He shows that it can be done when you have the political will, and Olver’s toughness. But he also describes how every cent raised to fund Jordaan’s campaign was exchanged for a job or a tender.

The ANC political engine runs on the fuel of transactional politics; without the offerings of jobs and tenders, the machine grinds to a halt. His tale provides rare insight into how the party funding system works as a driver of corruption.

Olver himself starts off as a knight in shining armour, but finds himself increasingly compromised as time passes, until he loses his political backing and flees the region.

Both these writers showed great courage. Pauw left the peace and quiet of running a country restaurant in Riebeek-Kasteel, knowing that this book would bring him the kinds of threats and harassment he experienced in the 1980s when he exposed the dark heart of apartheid’s police hit squads. Olver had to have a bodyguard at his side, so tough was the fight to regain control of the party and city.

Pauw’s book is a triumph of investigative reporting, but also contains a worrying critique of some of its practitioners. Pauw details at least three instances when his fellow reporters have allowed themselves to become part of the partisan mudslinging aimed at driving the good people out of state institutions, and protecting the venal. It is striking that some of the same names come up in all three instances, and all are centred around the local Sunday Times.

While South Africans can celebrate the important role investigative reporters have played in exposing state capture, they should be reminded that some have facilitated it, wittingly or unwittingly.

Anton Harber, Caxton Professor of Journalism, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa shows why collaboration is key to tackling global crime networks

South African President Jacob Zuma. Mounting allegations of corruption at home are having international repercussions.
Reuters/Mark Schiefelbein

Lord Peter Hain tabled a series of allegations in the UK’s House of Lords relating to the possible role of British banks in alleged money laundering and illicit financial transactions centred around South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family. The Conversation Africa’s Charles Leonard asked him to explain why he took the step. Hain, who was a vocal anti-apartheid activist, was born in South Africa but grew up in the UK. He is a visiting adjunct professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Business School.

In the House of Lords you said the illicit transactions were “part of a flagrant robbery of South African taxpayers”. What do you mean by this?

As I explained in my speech, the Guptas, a family from India that relocated to South African have, with the connivance of the South African Presidency, been getting government contracts and allegedly thereby robbing taxpayers of billions.

On regular visits to South Africa – most recently last month – I have been stunned by the systemic transnational financial network facilitated by the Guptas and the presidential family, the Zumas. If there had been more proactive and genuine cooperation between the multi-jurisdictional law enforcement agencies – and within and between the banks, which have been moving money for the alleged Gupta/Zuma laundering network – the devastation wrought on South Africa could have been significantly reduced. And perhaps, the financial institutions involved would have been better able to mitigate their exposure.

So does it point to South Africans benefiting from the illicit transactions?

I had delivered by hand to Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, printouts of transactions, and named a British bank concerned. I asked that he again refers these to the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, the National Crime Agency and the Financial Conduct Authority for investigation.

This information allegedly shows illegal transfers of funds from South Africa made by the Gupta family over the last few years from their South African accounts to accounts held in Dubai and Hong Kong. Many of the transactions are legitimate. But many certainly are not.

The illicit transactions were flagged internally in the bank concerned as suspicious. But I am reliably informed that the bank was told by the UK headquarters to ignore it. That is an iniquitous breach of legal banking practice in the UK, which I trust ministers would never countenance. It is also an incitement to money laundering. This has self-evidently occurred in this case, sanctioned by a British bank, as part of the flagrant robbery of South African taxpayers. They have lost millions of pounds and many billions of their local currency, the rand.

Was there a specific event that triggered your request to the Chancellor?

I was asked by senior African National Congress figures and stalwarts to do this. My relationships with them go back more than half a century when we stood shoulder to shoulder fighting apartheid.

As before, my latest information has been supplied by South African whistle-blowers deep inside the system who are disgusted by the corruption at the heart of the state.

What do you hope to achieve?

There are disturbing questions around the complicity – witting or unwitting – of UK global financial institutions in the Gupta/Zuma transnational network. There are also disturbing questions about these institutions’ wilful blindness to the reality that the laundering process often necessitates financial systems with lax regulation and controls. Unless we urgently find ways to leverage our respective capabilities to coordinate and influence action between the law enforcement and banking sectors we cannot win this battle. This coordination needs to happen domestically here in the UK as well as globally.

Unless we use the opportunity to crack down meaningfully, those who want to break the law will always be one step ahead. We must therefore get the international authorities to close down any money laundering networks.

As someone who fought against apartheid, how do you feel about having to take up a campaign against the country’s democratically elected government?

Having been active along with my brave parents in the anti-apartheid struggle it’s painful for me to witness corruption within a monopoly capital elite around Zuma’s family and their close associates the Gupta brothers.

But we should look closer to home, here in the UK. The complicity of our financial institutions in this, as well as the responsibility of law enforcers and regulators in all the concerned jurisdictions, should make government ministers and parliamentarians hang their heads in shame. Just as they were complicit in sustaining apartheid, so today they are complicit in sustaining the corrupt power elite in South Africa which is now betraying the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle.

Winning the war against financial crime will require coordination, influence, action and accountability between multi-jurisdictional law enforcement agencies. The success of criminal networks also relies on the action or inaction – and cooperation or non-cooperation – of the relevant law enforcement authorities.

Peter Hain, Visiting Adjunct Professor at Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

REMOVE THE MAFIAS AND THEIR BOSS ENSCONCED IN THE UNION BUILDING AND NOT THE BOOK.

MEDIA STATEMENT 
05/11/2017

REMOVE THE MAFIAS AND THEIR BOSS ENSCONCED IN THE UNION BUILDING AND NOT THE BOOK.

The Congress of the People (COPE) condemns in the strongest terms the actions and behaviour by SARS to intimidate Jacques Pauw and the publishers of ‘The President’s Keepers’ and the right-wing apartheid-style and fascist threat of the State Security Agency (SSA) to stop the distribution of the book, and the exposure of what is clearly the uncomfortable truth.

The book is clearly in the public interest and of great public importance given the evidence and confirmation presented of the most gross and treasonous abuse of power by Jacob Zuma and his bandits.

What SARS and SSA ought to be doing is to launch an urgent investigation into the breathtaking and brazen criminality which the book exposes and not to harass and intimidate those who act in the best interests of the nation. By now they should be launching searches and seizures at the premises of the tax dodgers, smugglers, crooks and criminals including raiding the Nkandla bunker as well as the Union Building which is used to ensconce the Mafia boss. Their shameless conduct serves to prove that their purpose of law enforcement without fear or favour has long left them and is replaced by stampede to save the Mafia boss. They will fail because they attempt to swim against the forceful tide of the mass rejection of Jacob Zuma's evils.

COPE calls upon all South Africans to stand up for the truth; in solidarity with Pauw, his Publishers and the distributors; for the democratic right to a free press; and against the actions of Zuma’s government and the ANC. During the dying days of the authoritarian apartheid regime they attempted to do the same but they were defeated. Let's act together again to defeat the forces of darkness.

Issued by: Pakes Dikgetsi

COPE National Chairperson

Johannesburg's inner city: the Dubai of southern Africa, but all below the radar

Johannesburg has become a regional retail hub with cross border shopping activity running into billions.
Mark Lewis

Over the last 20 years Johannesburg has become an intense wholesale and retail centre for local hawkers and for traders from all over sub-Saharan Africa. Billions of rand worth of fast fashion is sold annually in the traditional central business district and in 20 large Chinese shopping malls west of the inner city.

It is a vast, booming, low-end globalised trade that has transformed space and pioneered a retail phenomenon in the inner city for the sale of cheap clothing, shoes, household wares and accessories. Informal estimates based on bus passenger numbers and spending reported in the survey suggest that cross border shoppers are spending over R10 billion each year in Johannesburg’s CBD.

A new study into cross-border shopping in the inner city maps the shops and the goods sold. Researchers did detailed interviews with 300 retailers and 400 cross border shoppers as well as hotel managers and bus operators that service the flow of shoppers who travel to Johannesburg from countries including Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zambia.

The survey gave the first concrete insights into a vast trading web that operates in the cash economy and below the radar of formalised planning regulation. Yet it is an economy yielding four times the annual turnover of an average regional sized shopping mall.

The extent of the trade isn’t really known. And the scale of cross border shopping is widely disputed in City offices and among property investors. But the survey shows that the city of Johannesburg should acknowledge that its inner city has developed into the shopping hub of sub-Saharan Africa. Some retailers have dubbed it the Dubai of South Africa. That ambition – that it be a global retail centre – should be embraced in economic strategy and in physical plans to upgrade the area.

Hive of unreported activity

The research focuses on 53 city blocks within the Johannesburg CBD anchored by more than 3000 shops. These are streets that bustle with street traders, ground level shopping alleys and high rise shopping centres. The shopping zone is close to rail, bus and taxi infrastructure. It is also served by cross border bus depots and hotels.

The shopping hub is intense with throngs of pedestrians and determined shoppers crowding the streets on any given day. Buildings that have outlived their usefulness as office space and medical suites have been appropriated and converted at a rapid rate – primarily by migrant Ethiopian traders - to shopping centres hosting thousands of cupboard sized shops.

This activity has developed over two decades. It started as a quiet encroachment of space in the mid-1990s when Ethiopian survivalist entrepreneurs, who had fled their country to seek political asylum in South Africa, rented space in almost empty office towers. The space grew first incrementally and then in rapid bursts to become a burgeoning economic enclave created through the dramatic occupation and subdivision of space.

Based on the interviews, we calculated that the annual profit takings in the city blocks we surveyed amounts to close to R7 billion profit every year. But this is likely to be a major underestimate.

The sample survey indicates that about 70% of the shoppers contributing to these profits are cross border shoppers. Each shopper is spending an average of R14 364 on goods per shopping trip. In addition R3 497 is spent on other services including transport.

A large number of bus companies is linked to the trade. On one day 51 bus companies were operating from 19 sites. In that same week, a moderate shopping season of the year (mid August), 465 buses carrying up to 60 passengers - many of these being shoppers - left Johannesburg to neighbouring countries.

Johannesburg as a violent city

But retailers and shoppers face enormous risks. The dependence on cash poses a big risk in an area rife with crime and corruption and where law enforcement agencies appear to be complicit in illegal activities.

Over 60% of retailers interviewed said they had been physically attacked or assaulted. And 38% had regularly “gifted” police officers.

For shoppers the risk is also extreme. A third of shoppers interviewed had been exposed to violent crime. They travel in groups and hide their money. They depend heavily on the security and storage facilities of hotels and bus depots for safety.

These levels of crime are a major break on Johannesburg’s ability to maximise the benefits of these shopping trips. Shoppers are spending an average of 2.5 days on each trip. But they spend comparatively little on accommodation and almost nothing on entertainment. And they are too fearful to spend more time in Johannesburg than their shopping requires.

Most said they didn’t use city restaurants, preferring to lock themselves in their hotel rooms in the early evening. And retailers said they would like extended shopping hours but they close shops around 5pm because of safety concerns.

Untapped potential

Cross border shoppers are international visitors to Johannesburg. Their visits increase the demand for services, products and good infrastructure – all of which attract jobs and investment in the inner city. They require and inspire new investment in buildings, maintenance, entertainment services, transportation services and accommodation establishments. They transform buildings and environments. And they attract and support new cultural enclaves and diversity.

Shoppers and retailers say they would like to increase their investment in shopping in the inner city, there are signs of renewed interest from property investors and a number of new shopping centres have been developed in recent years.

But this potential will go untapped unless the city changes its attitude and tackles the risks in the area. Crime – particularly crime committed by law enforcement officers – must be curbed. By recognising and celebrating this sub-Saharan African shopping hub Johannesburg can take full advantage of the benefits of being the region’s shopping hub. In turn that could lead to Johannesburg becoming the host of choice for shoppers and retailers in this international trade.

Dr. Tanya Zack, Visiting senior lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Stop killing farmers, demand protesters

“We spend millions of rands on security instead of growing food for the nation”

By Tariro Washinyira
30 October 2017

Demonstrators against farm murders gathered near Green Point Stadium. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Thousands of people, many of them farmers, drove in convoy to Cape Town on Monday, eventually gathering at the Green Point stadium, to protest against farm murders. For much of the morning and afternoon the N1 into Cape Town moved at a snail’s pace.

“I want these killings to stop. I do not want any woman to suffer the way I did … My children are heartbroken,” said Marlene Conradie, widow of murdered farmer Joubert Conradie of Uitkyk farm in Klapmuts.

“We are ordinary people who grow grapes, peaches and olives,” she said. Marlene and her two children, Hannes (15) and Jane (11), were marching in Monday’s protest, titled “Genoeg is genoeg, enough is enough”.

AfriForum says: “Since 1 January 2017, at least 341 farm attacks have been committed, during which at least 70 people have been murdered. This means that during 2017 so far, there has already been more farm murders than the total amount of farm murders during 2016.”

According to Africa Check “police’s statistics differ” from those previously supplied by AfriForum. There are also other figures given by the Transvaal Agricultural Union. There are reasons for the differences based on methodology and also the definition of famer and farm or rural smallholding. It is extremely difficult to verify or determine how many farm owners have been killed on farms and also what the statistics are for farm workers living on farms.

Marlene Conradie and her 15 year old son Hannes console each other. Marlene’s husband Joubert Conradie was murdered on their farm in Klapmuts last week.

The protesters wore black regalia and held placards with: “Stop killing farmers”, “In memory of murdered farmers” and “No farmer no food”. GroundUp saw just one person with a small old South African flag on their T-shirt.

A dairy farmer and wheat producer, Thys Swart Swellendam of Grootvadersbosch Landgoed, told GroundUp: “We provide jobs for many farm workers and for each farmer that is killed, it means job losses and farms are ruined, and the secondary industry as well, because we produce raw materials for factories and other industries.”

He said farm workers are also attacked sometimes and their families are in danger. “We spent millions of rands just on security. That keeps us busy instead of growing food for the nation. With drought in the Western Cape, it is difficult because besides buying stock for animals we must also spend on security. Police, who should be providing security, are not doing that. Farmers are dependent on themselves and their neighbours.”

Some are however critical of the farmers. Colette Solomon, Director of Women on Farms Project (WFP) told GroundUp: “Women on farms do not feel safe from the farmers. They experience verbal, physical, sexual abuse and intimidation. Their tenure and housing rights are frequently violated but when they report to the police, police don’t take action. As a result most of them do not report abuse.”

Protesters hold hands and pray. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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