Guptagate.

Literally. I am not referring to the hashtag-ready portmanteau that encompasses the saga of a single family buying the president of a country, but the actual gate at the Guptas’ once-teeming Saxonwold residence. No longer does it creak open to welcome the high-born and the powerful. There are no henchmen lurking outside, wearing SkyNet earpieces crackling with orders from the Terminator; no blue light brigades swinging in for a curried lunch and some polite advice on how best to run a ministry; no technicians dropping by to fit the killer sharks with lasers. The Guptas are gone.

#BringBackTheGuptas.

I’m not fucking joking. Bring them back with immediate effect. South Africa is empty without them. They made perfect targets for our rage and impotence, while their Zapiro cartoon-friendly faces, all jowly and unshaven, became emblematic of something we decided to term “state capture”. (As if there was some kind of outside agency that “captured” South Africa, when the joint was long ago given away for a handful of beads and a lease on a Range Rover Sport.) The Guptas allowed us to download all our stupidity and complicity onto their Brillcreamed heads, and we thanked them by kicking them out?

Ah, but we all know that the Guptas are not really the Guptas – they’re a manifestation of something much larger and much nastier. They’re a symptom. How are we supposed to beat a terminal disease when we’ve eradicated its most obvious expression? South Africa without the Guptas is like cancer without the tumours, or emphysema without the bloody expectorations. At this rate, we’ll be heading out for sundowners on Clifton Beach when we should be mumbling our last rites into the lap of a Satanist priest, accompanied by the soundtrack of a flat-line bleep.

So once more, and this time with feeling: #BringBackTheGuptas.

* * *

We are told that South Africa’s first family fled last Friday with enough Louis Vuitton luggage for a lifetime, all of it stuffed into a private jet that roared off from Lanseria airport towards Dubai under a blanket of blinking stars. Which has resulted in a Wittgensteinian conundrum: the Guptas are not here, and yet they are still here. The Saxonwold gate may no longer open onto the usual frontier town hustle and bustle, and the bad guys themselves may be pimping it in the fake metropolis of Dubai, but never before has absence so clearly denoted presence. Yes, Atul and Varun Gupta resigned from their respective positions at Oakbay Resources and Energy, and yes, princeling Duduzane Zuma has vacated his own Oakbay sinecure. But this is nothing more than an elaborate banking scam.

Last week, citing something termed “association risk”, financial powerhouses ABSA, FNB and Sasfin Bank (soon to be joined by Nedbank) closed the vaults on Oakbay, shortly after the villains were dumped by the auditing company KPMG. Amazingly, there was no “association risk” when the Guptas landed an airplane full of wedding guests at Waterkloof Airforce Base, violating every last tenet of national sovereignty. But the years of billowing of black smoke finally led our watchful, forensically-minded bankers to a fire, largely because the family overplayed their hand in trying to anoint a pliant finance minister in the person of Desmond David Des “Dizzy” Van Rooyen. (Our deputy finance minister, Jonas Mcebisi, claims that they offered him the very same post.)

The banks, those upstanding exemplars of moral and financial rectitude, had clearly decided that enough was enough. Like crack dealers or casino junkies, the Guptas ATM privileges were revoked, which resulted in South African money becoming prohibitively expensive. Next up was a possible delisting of a part of the empire from the JSE. (Financial primer: you cannot steal a country without the complicity of a major international auditing company. KPMG – cozy with the Guptas for many mutually beneficial years—behaved like a hardened war horse, and only got spooked when a mine exploded under its hooves, blowing its legs, chest and muzzle off.)

Oakbay was thus faced with an existential threat that could have disappeared billions of rands worth of investments, to say nothing of thousands of average-Joe jobs. It was thus in the family’s best interests to perform their own disappearing act. Thanks to an act of David Copperfield-ish prestidigitation, Oakbay, of which the Guptas are still the dominant shareholders, could keep doing business under the steady hand of CEO Nazeem Howa, who somehow isn’t involved in “state capture” because this story makes no sense.

What is Oakbay’s business? Lots of little things, like publishing a newspaper that isn’t meant to be read, and operating a television station that isn’t meant to be watched. Many people have become wealthy dealing with the Guptas, while Oakbay has benefitted from the largesse of the taxpayer-funded Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), among other helpful government institutions. Oakbay is plugged firmly into the ANC’s patronage network – it’s 100% bent, but legally bent, which is the species of bent that South Africa is designed to proliferate. After all, Oakbay’s most important contribution to the South African economy is serving as the vehicle through which the Zupta conglomerate has access to unbelievable wealth via discount coal plants or histrionically expensive nuclear procurement deals.

In other words – and this is not an exaggeration – Oakbay is a retirement plan for men and women who expect their pension to be the equivalent of several years of the country’s GDP.

So, no – the Guptas haven’t left. They can’t afford to leave. But even if they had left, they’d still be here. Because, as I’ve already mentioned, the Guptas aren’t the Guptas.

They just are.

* * *

The best reason to fire the current iteration of the African National Congress is less their unabated ball washing of Jacob Zuma, than it is their utter lack of imagination when it comes to reconfiguring South Africa’s post-apartheid economy. It has become fashionable for people whose radicalism extends to chilling in Braamfontein to refer to Nelson Mandela as a sell-out. But the selling out of the South African people is not the fault of one person. It was a process, and while it certainly began at the dawn of democracy, it extends to this very day. Face it: the steady rightward march from the Freedom Charter to the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) to the Growth, Employment and Redistribution plan (Gear) to the current useless National Development Plan (NDP) has left this place in a total mess.

Regardless of ideological bent, it should be fairly obvious that neoliberalism and its attendant shibboleths haven’t quite worked for South Africa. While the ANC have done their best to ensure that corruption seeps into the country’s entire political, financial and social super-structure, South Africa hasn’t failed because it’s corrupt – rather, the system was rigged to fail. Wealth has clung to the old white guard with remarkable truculence, a bunch of rich connected black folk now run interference for their rich white counterparts, and the trickle down theory, not unlike those 70 virgins awaiting suicide bombers in heaven, remains a question of theological ingenuity rather than sound economic theory.

Perhaps you recall a 2014 study published by Oxfam, which allows us some necessary perspective on what lies beyond the Gupta’s ever-yawning gates. Together, two richest people possess the wealth of the poorest 26.5 million citizens of this beleaguered backwater. As the recent Panama Paper leaks remind us, rich people don’t pay tax, and only 360 of South Africa’s flushest citizens pay their fair share. Inequality has not declined since apartheid, but increased. Over R350 billion has been scammed out of this country in illicit financial outflows, while our corporations hoard hundreds of billions more. And while you may have once been introduced to someone who works, with 40 percent real unemployment, that would make you a rarity in South Africa.

Ah, but none of these super-rich actually live in South Africa. Their money is just as jet set as they are, pinging around the world via shady law firms and impenetrable tax shelters. The Guptas became a hashtag because of how crassly they behaved, how closely they chose to pantomime Bollywood baddies in their appearance and behaviour. Is there an ethnic or racial bias at work here—do South Africans prefer rich white or black scumbags to rich Indian scumbags? Very probably. But the Guptas unseemly closeness with this country’s discredited president had anyway become an unbankable liability. And so, with the help of a short social media campaign courtesy of an opposition party, they ran away on a private jet to a city that is, if we are to believe that same opposition party, a dumping ground for stolen South African money.

The Guptas must not be allowed to sweat out the remainder of their days in a concrete oasis where pork is referred to as “white beef” and skyscrapers are built in order for skyscrapers to be built. They must return to their spiritual home, here at the bottom of Africa. Never mind trying them in a court of law—such punitive measures may not be beneath them, but it’s beneath us. For the duration of their decades in free Mzansi, the Guptas reminded us of who we are. They allowed us to be, to exist fully as expressions of our national selves. They were the most obvious manifestation—the most obvious symptom—of the disease that will end up killing us, a disease that, no matter how terrible, is at least is our disease.

One final time, and this time with feeling: #BringBackTheGupas.

Seriously. Bring them back right now. DM