Political Party Funding Act will mark the end of looting state coffers

As Acting Chief Justice Raymond Zondo this week released his third report on state capture – a phenomenon marked by the hollowing out of key state organs and the emptying of the public purse by the politically connected – the spotlight has momentarily returned to SA domestic affairs.

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, we have been glued to our television sets, concerned about the implications of the Russian invasion, geopolitics and the safety of African students still trapped in the troubled eastern European country.

Zondo has now focused attention on our poor governance – billions of public money lost through questionable tenders awarded to Bosasa and kickbacks paid to senior officials, with ANC bigwigs such as former president Jacob Zuma, ANC chair Gwede Mantashe, NEC member Nomvula Mokonyane and several others, being implicated.

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No one has summed up things as well as Congress of the People national spokesperson Dennis Bloem, who served as chair of the parliamentary portfolio committee on correctional services – a department which became a cash cow for Bosasa.

“We have said all the time that it was not only Jacob Zuma who was involved in the state capture and corruption project – almost all senior leaders were involved.

“That is why Zuma was protected and defended by the former ANC secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, and the party former deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa. The Zondo report on Bosasa is very damning on the ANC as a political party which benefitted from corrupt money from Bosasa. We believe that the ANC must also be charged with corruption and money laundering – and they must pay back all the money that they received through corrupt means.”

It was expected that the release of Zondo’s latest report would trigger another fightback from those implicated – now in a defensive mode, with the Jacob Zuma Foundation rubbishing it as being “not worth the paper it is written on”.

The foundation has made laughable and spurious allegations that Zuma was never afforded an opportunity to defend himself. This, as we remember a bizarre posture by Zuma at the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture – appearing briefly but refusing to answer questions.

After he testified for two and a half days, before declining to answer questions and objecting to a manner he said amounted to cross-examination, Zuma said he would no longer participate in the inquiry proceedings.

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This led to the Constitutional Court ordering him to obey all summonses and appear before the inquiry, which he failed to do – and he was sentenced to two years in prison.

Now, his foundation wants us to believe that he got a raw deal. What utter nonsense. With the Political Party Funding Act now signed into law, there is no longer a place to hide for companies like Bosasa, which directly funded parties and influential individuals, to be awarded tenders in return.

The era of the freedom to loot and plunder state coffers with impunity has to come to an end.