This is a story that, a little less than six weeks ago, would have had a very different flavour. Back in mid-April, we didn’t know that South Africa’s security cluster was either unable or unwilling to root out the criminal syndicates that have been plunging our economy into freefall by looting Eskom blind.

But thanks to recent parliamentary hearings into corruption and sabotage at Eskom, we now know that State Capture during the Zuma administration and the political interference of the current administration have rendered the South African Police Service (SAPS), the Hawks and the State Security Agency about as ineffective as a neighbourhood watch with links to the local mafia.

In mid-April, we didn’t know that even when the security cluster wanted to do its work – like, say, when the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) wanted to extradite the Gupta brothers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – there would be suggestions of strange international “friendships” standing in its way.

But thanks to the appropriation of one of our public airports by the president of the UAE, we now know that there was probably a lot more going on behind the scenes than any of us could have guessed.

And speaking again of “friendships”, we didn’t know back then how close to the Russia of President Vladimir Putin we had actually become.

But thanks to the bombshell statement of US ambassador Reuben Brigety on 11 May, we now know that our second-largest trading partner believes (at least on the face of it) that we have been supplying weapons to Putin for use in his criminal invasion of a recognised sovereign state.

So, what does all of this have to do with our wildlife, our biodiversity, our precious natural resources? Quite a lot, it turns out.

In the halcyon days of late February 2023, long before any of the above had alerted us to the reality that we were living in a full-blown dystopia as opposed to a relatively mild governance hell, Julian Rademeyer of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (Gitoc) released a report titled Landscapes of Fear. It had been prepared for Enact, a project implemented by the Institute for Security Studies in partnership with Interpol and Gitoc.

In the report’s summary, Rademeyer noted that whereas the Kruger National Park had faced “a relentless onslaught of rhino poaching” during the previous decade, its greatest threat had lately become “internal corruption, itself a symptom of a breakdown in trust, staff cohesion and professionalism within the park”.

“Recent staff arrests following lengthy financial investigations and a renewed commitment to combat corruption are bearing fruit but will require political support, clear law enforcement strategies to address organised crime around the park and a long-term investment,” Rademeyer explained. “The park is severely affected by corrosive corruption and violent organised crime, particularly in Mpumalanga, where staff living in surrounding communities are vulnerable to deeply entrenched criminal syndicates.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: Kruger Park ensnared in corruption linked to criminal syndicates – report

Two things were uncomfortably apparent from Rademeyer’s prophetic investigation. First, though there was a measure of intent within elements of our law enforcement structures to address corruption, political will from the top appeared to be lacking.

Second, the entire province of Mpumalanga was rotten to the core, compromised by criminal syndicates whose reach extended into the police force, the NPA and sometimes even the courts.

For Daily Maverick, as far-sighted as Rademeyer’s work would prove, not all of it landed like a bolt out the blue. In the footnotes to the report, the name of David Dabede Mabuza – Mpumalanga’s former premier and, until February 2023, the deputy president of South Africa – appeared more than a dozen times.

The long-standing allegations of his penchant for “political assassinations”, which Mabuza had consistently denied, were once again brought to the fore.

What couldn’t be denied, of course, was the prima facie and substantive evidence in the criminal complaint that the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) had brought against Mabuza and another 14 suspects in early December 2022. Lodged under the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, the complaint pointed to a “pattern of racketeering activity” that linked the so-called land claims criminal enterprise to the Problem Animal Fund enterprise, with Mabuza as the alleged kingpin of both.

Read more in Daily Maverick: ‘Land scam kingpin’ – Deputy President David Mabuza named as top suspect in organised crime complaint

Since March 2021, Daily Maverick had dedicated a total of 14 deep-dive pieces to the case, all of them referring – in one way or another – to the abovementioned evidence. As had long been known, the evidence had come to light thanks to the work of whistle-blower and conservationist Fred Daniel, who was still fighting a civil action against Mabuza and the Mpumalanga government that had initially been lodged in July 2010.

It wasn’t any of these signs, though, that suggested we were too attached to our rose-tinted shades. Our most recent piece in the series, published in February 2023, dealt with an affidavit and a string of WhatsApp messages that implicated Dawie Joubert SC, senior counsel for the defence, in an alleged attempt to frame Daniel.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Dead Matter (Part One): How political corruption decimated Mpumalanga’s biodiversity

As the documents showed, Joubert may have colluded in the scheme with a senior member of the NPA in Mpumalanga as well as various current and former members of the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency.

But, more significant than that even, was the fact that Joubert and Mike Hellens SC –who, in the Daniel matter, acknowledged that he was acting for Mabuza in his personal capacity – were also the advocates for the Gupta brothers in the NPA’s unsuccessful attempt at extradition.

Inevitably, then, by early May, the sordid truth was becoming too obvious to ignore.

During an eNCA interview with Annika Larsen on 9 May, Andrea Johnson, the head of the NPA’s Investigating Directorate, admitted that “one has to wonder why” the UAE authorities were not forthcoming with “timeous information” on the Gupta extradition request.

But despite our reading that this was more than likely a veiled reference to “political interference” at the highest levels, Johnson (at the time of publication) has not replied to Daily Maverick’s repeated requests for information on the status of Outa’s criminal complaint – which, to reiterate, was submitted to her department in early December 2022.

Read more in Daily Maverick: NPA’s ID head Andrea Johnson on the failed Gupta extradition — ‘We were blindsided when we got the response’

De Ruyter’s book

All of which leads us, seamlessly, to the private sector intelligence reports (funded by Business Leadership South Africa and commissioned by André de Ruyter) on the Mpumalanga crime cartels that have been gutting Eskom; and equally seamlessly, to the parliamentary hearings of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa).

On 9 May, the same day that Johnson’s interview with Larsen aired, Scopa grilled the senior commanders of the SAPS, Hawks and Special Investigating Unit in an attempt to determine who knew what about the intelligence reports, and exactly when.

As it turned out, not only did the members of the security cluster contradict each other on the answers – Hawks boss General Godfrey Lebeya claimed that the first he had heard of the reports was on 25 April 2023, while SAPS boss General Fannie Masemola admitted that he had known about them since June 2022 – but very little action had been taken on the contents.

The MPs, to their everlasting credit, wanted to know whether this was because senior members of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet had been implicated in the reports, as alleged by former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter, during his own interview with Larsen in late February 2023.

The commanders, for their part, denied any knowledge of the names of these senior politicians. This was somewhat disingenuous, because News24 had revealed the names just a few weeks before, skirting the legal issues by claiming that the reports were “a speckle of truth adorned by outlandish conspiracy theories, concocted intelligence and unsubstantiated allegations”.

Daily Maverick’s (unstated) view at the time was that the files did not seem “concocted”, though they were in need of an experienced editor. After taking possession of the monthly reports in December 2022, we soon noticed a pattern of racketeering activity that squared not only with what we had covered in the Daniel matter, but with what was repeated in the Outa criminal complaint too.

Given our view, and bearing in mind the inconvenient truth that intelligence had never counted as evidence, we remained legally constrained from naming the senior politicians – though the reader, of course, was (and is) free to draw inferences from the work of our colleagues.

What we could now say, however, was that the scourge of organised crime that bedevilled Mpumalanga – with its alleged kingpins in the topmost political spheres – appeared to extend across a range of economic sectors, with impacts that rippled into the realms of international geopolitics, global finance and worldwide ecosystem collapse.

A case in point, to return to the subject matter of this piece, was the $8.5-billion that De Ruyter had provisionally secured from Western development institutions for Eskom’s decarbonisation, otherwise known as the Just Energy Transition (JET).

Read more in Daily Maverick: A just transition is the only solution to South Africa’s energy crisis, says Andre de Ruyter

On page 280 of his book Truth to Power, which was released on 14 May, at the end of a week when the sordid truth was being forced down our throats, De Ruyter writes: “In a similar vein, when I asked a colleague who has brilliant insights complementing my blind spots, why I did not get support for my strategy to implement JET to address capacity shortfalls and clean up the environment, she chuckled at my naivety and said, ‘But André, you are not showing the comrades a way to eat!’”

The “only conclusion” he could draw from this, De Ruyter continues, was that “profit-sharing by criminal and corrupt elements has become so normalised that it is self-evident: it is no longer questioned, and it has to be incorporated in plans…

“In South Africa, corruption has become so overwhelmingly dominant that the system feeding the corrupt has begun to fail.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: André de Ruyter’s Truth to Power: The bombshell information uncovered by private intelligence

And so there it was, a truth so sordid that it had to be swallowed in small, palatable chunks. The failure of the system, to anyone who was paying attention, had become most glaring on the eastern Mpumalanga Highveld, where the polluted air from Eskom’s coal-fired power stations was claiming thousands of lives a year, where the watercourses were next-level toxic, where the soil was yielding carcinogenic scraps.

Meanwhile, as South Africa teetered on the brink of grid collapse, the cartel members were washing their hands in bottles of booze that cost upwards of R15,000 a pop, their supercars playing chicken with the potholes of Emalahleni’s neglected streets.

In all of this, it was no wonder that Putin’s Russia was fast becoming our favourite international friend. And like the contents of the Eskom intelligence reports, our President was claiming no knowledge of the US-led intelligence that contended we were supplying a war criminal with arms.

Our only hope, then, was that the truth would eventually out. Our only consolation? It always does. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R29.