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Ubaba and the two lords of corruption

By kole Omotoso
24 December 2017   |   3:21 am
Wood fire dies, its ashes survive, Plantain’s assured its sucker will revive! uBaba goes the stench of depravity stays Thanks to Mabuza and the Magashules!!! It is happening at Nasrec in Johannesburg at the conference of the African National Congress, the governing party of South Africa. uBaba, the incredible Jacob Zuma is no longer the…

Wood fire dies, its ashes survive,
Plantain’s assured its sucker will revive!
uBaba goes the stench of depravity stays
Thanks to Mabuza and the Magashules!!!

It is happening at Nasrec in Johannesburg at the conference of the African National Congress, the governing party of South Africa. uBaba, the incredible Jacob Zuma is no longer the president of the African National Congress. He had wanted his ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma to succeed him for reasons we can easily guess.

Unlike Bill Clinton and Robert Mugabe whose wives wanted to rule after them, uBaba needed uMama to succeed him for family reasons. Unfortunately, the delegates chose Cyril Ramaphosa of the Mariana connection.

CR campaigned to win when he discovered that his boss, the president, our uBaba, favoured his ex-wife over everybody. In fact, it was only at that point that Cyril got nasty. He made known his view that uBaba did rape that girl who called him Uncle. And even more threatening about what would happen to the Gupta and state capture and corruption when he became the president of the African National Congress.

And now Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa is president of the African National Congress. His work, we are told, is cut out for him. uBaba must be recalled as president of the country, just as it was done to President Mbeki, who could not finish his term. uBaba has been enjoying the favour of the figure ten. He spent 10 years on Robben Island and now he is spending ten years as president of South Africa. Unless, of course, Cyril can, with the help of the National Executive Council (NEC) being put together right now, have uBaba recalled! But that recall might not be to retire and write a book on being in power, as uBaba purposes, but to something similar to the first 10 years.

Well, look on the composition of the top six and despair, all who dream of purging the African National Congress of corruption and depravity. There is Cyril Ramaphosa the would-be reformer at the top. Next to him as his deputy is David Mabuza who supported uBaba in 2007 and was well rewarded. The general secretary is Ace Magashule, premier of the Free State, whose son is in liege to the Guptas. The only female in the top six Jesse Duarte retains her position as Deputy general secretary and her loyalty to uBaba. Paul Mashatile is the treasurer general and a vocal opponent of the ways of uBaba. Gwede Mantashe, former Secretary General under whom COPE and EFF broke away, is chairman of the party. He is not in favour of the ways and wiles of uBaba.

David Mabuza is the premier of Mpumalanga, considered the most corrupt province in South Africa. The able journalist Sizwe Sama Yende has written a book about corruption in Mpumalanga. It is entitled Eerie Assignment: a journalist’s nightmare in Mpumalanga. It is 372 pages long and it is on sale throughout South Africa.

One day Mr. Yende was lucky to get the report detailing the goings on about a R230 million contract the Mpumalanga department of agriculture, rural development and land administration had awarded. David Mabuza was the equivalent of the commissioner in charge of the Ministry. The Farm Mechanisation Contract had good intentions. It was “to assist poor rural families with some form of farming machinery and implements to assure them of food security.” It was named the Masibuyele Emasimini (Let’s go back to the land (field) project.

The circumstances of the contract were suspicious. Therefore the Integrity Management Unit in the Ministry was asked to investigate. Its report, which was prevented from being made public, revealed that the contract had been awarded to friends and business partners of David Mabuza.

Mr. Yende secured a lunch date with Mabuza’s spokesman hoped to get some answers to some of his questions. Throughout the lunch the spokesperson avoided the issues and spoke generally about everything but.
At the end of the lunch the spokesperson paid for the lunch and they left the restaurant. Outside, the spokesman repeated what he had begun their conversation with in the restaurant. He asked the journalist to drop the story, don’t publish it. He then gave him a whole wad of hundred rand notes. Mr. Yende took the money and the spokesman left.

Mr. Yende went straight to the nearest police station where he lodged a case of bribery against the spokesman.

Mr. Mabuza denied that the spokesman was acting on his behalf. The spokesman lost his job as a result of the bribery case. While David Mabuza has never been convicted of any crime he is known as the cat with nine lives. He was poisoned in January 2016 and spent three months in hospital partly in Russia to which he took a ride in the private jet of the Guptas.

But the new Secretary General Ace Magashule is beholden to the Gupta brothers along with his two sons. Describing the relationship a journalist has written the following: “In a quid pro quo relationship, Magashule’s family facilitated access to government letterheads and other political favours in exchange for jobs, cash and trips.” For instance a request was put to Tony Gupta, the youngest of the three brothers, in 2014, for R120 airtime per person for 362 people, all members of the ANC in the Free State Province.

But the gem of it all is the 2013 Vrede Dairy Project of which Lord Peter Hain spoke in the House of Lords. That year the government of the Free State of which Ace Magashule is premier, gave an unknown company Estina (Pty) Ltd free agricultural land and promised it hundreds of millions in funding for three years without ant tender. The company belongs to the Gupta brothers. It was a free 99-year lease of 4,400 hectares farm outside Vrede. Mosebenzi Zwane, now National minister of mineral resources, was the commissioner for agriculture then and the land is in his hometown. The provincial government paid R84million to a Gupta offshore company based in Dubai. The promise of R114million per year for three years was to set up and operates farming operation and dairy to empower locals and boost provincial agriculture.

How does Cyril Ramaphosa propose to clean the African National Congress of corruption with such supporting comrades?
(bankole.omotoso@elizadeuniversity.edu.ng)

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