Wouldn’t it be fun to see Jacob Zuma at the Madlanga Commission? They should bring him in and ask him why, when he was ANC president, the party opened its doors to a flood of unvetted and unscrupulous members during the “million membership” campaign?
Back then, if they met you in the street, tavern, or brothel, and you had R10, knew your full name and surname, boom… you were instantly a member.
It was a mass mobilisation campaign, yes, but not for democracy. It was a campaign to feed the egos of the ANC hierarchy, led by JZ himself. Principle? None. Patronage? Plenty. That’s how characters like Brown Mogotsi swelled the ranks.
I myself, unfortunately and unintentionally, interacted with some of these “comrades” at branch level. Thugs and career criminals who suddenly discovered revolutionary vocabulary. Cadre deployment, they called it, a system that became the perfect recruitment drive for future government employees. Today it’s impossible to tell who’s who in the SAPS, Department of Social Development, justice cluster, Transnet or Eskom.
Key institutions have become playgrounds for procurement hustlers, especially in supply chain departments. If the ANC was heading to a conference or branch general meeting, and the big men needed votes, the phone lines would light up. Suddenly, those “deployed” in cushy state or municipal jobs would start issuing requests for quotations like confetti, followed by purchase orders and contracts to loyal comrades.
That’s how the patronage system worked, and still does. It’s the same system that gives the Auditor-General sleepless nights. The numbers don’t lie: fruitless and wasteful expenditure often comes down to inflated contracts, 200%, sometimes 300% above actual value. The extra cash? It magically grows legs, disappears into black refuse bags and brown envelopes, only to reappear moments before ANC conferences.
Democracy made gangster
The loot is shared among loyalists, rivals and the politically indifferent, all to secure a voting bloc and rig outcomes. Democracy, but made gangster.
The rot didn’t stop there. Those “deployed” cadres were often pressured to prepay these crooked service providers for work that was never done, or done badly. I once witnessed a municipal department purchase hundreds of thousands of rand worth of stationery, packed in a container that was never used. Because consumables can’t easily be tracked, the same comrades simply reissued new orders for the same goods. The service provider didn’t even need to source anything new, they just cashed in and split the proceeds.
This is the ecosystem Jacob Zuma built, and the reason his cult following endures. During his reign, “entrepreneurship” didn’t mean you had to deliver; you just had to grease the right political slate. He gave everyone a chance to exploit the state, and when his followers sing his praises, this is what they long to revive.
Jacob Zuma was their Father Christmas, but instead of toys, he handed out contracts. And just like the bigots who romanticise apartheid, his supporters still yearn for his corrupt version of the “good times”. Under Zuma’s ANC, the youth were robbed of a prosperous future so that the greedy could eat. Competence was never his guiding principle, loyalty was.
And for the record: Brown Mogotsi and Edwin Sodi are small fish, mid-tier crooks at best. The real sharks were the Guptas. All we got from that saga was a Bollywood-style wedding at Sun City, Duduzane playing “Desperate Housewife of Dubai”, and Nkandla’s famous chicken run and “fire pool”.
At least the Gautengers from the Tembisa Hospital scandal had taste… they bought Lamborghinis. DM