JAUNDICED EYE

It’s apposite that the publication of former African National Congress stalwart Mathews Phosa’s political memoir has coincided with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s pleadings this week before the Constitutional Court in the Phala Phala matter. Together the two events neatly encapsulate the arc of ANC corruption and impunity. 

Both involve the ANC’s secret and likely illegal movement of large amounts of foreign cash. In Phosa’s case, Libyan money was used to fund the party over many years, including a very large once-off contribution to its 2009 election campaign. In Ramaphosa’s matter, it has been speculated that the US$ paid by a shady Sudanese businessman in unreceipted cash to the president’s Phala Phala game farm, then stolen from the sofa where it had been hidden, was to buy support for CR at the ANC’s 2022 elective conference. 

In his book Witness to Power, Phosa reveals that during his term of office as ANC treasurer-general, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi made a “substantial” secret donation to the party’s 2009 election campaign. The ANC, including Phosa, previously always dismissed such claims as vile Western propaganda, much as they have dismissed similar allegations of massive Iranian funding for their 2024 campaign, as well as to fund its anti-Israeli fervour.

Phosa now admits that the ANC’s repeated denials “at the highest level” that they had financial support from Gaddafi were lies. “The truth is that the ANC did, under successive treasurers-general, receive donations from Gaddafi. I, for one, played a role in securing some of that money.” 

The ANC’s “the dog ate my homework” response to the revelations came from its spokesperson, Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri, who said: “We are not aware of any money being donated by Gaddafi to the ANC for its 2009 election campaign. There has been a long passage of time since then and the current generation of leaders were not in office at that time.”

This, too, is a lie. Many ANC ministers and officer-bearers from the Thabo Mbeki/Jacob Zuma administration are still around and, rather depressingly, a number of them are still active in public affairs, including Ramaphosa himself, who was secretary-general of the party from 1991 to 1996. 

Phosa is frank about the ANC’s willingness to auction influence for ready cash, although he predictably minimises his own culpability in the process. He describes going with Zuma to meet the Gupta brothers since “it was no secret that the party was facing some serious financial challenges and needed substantial support if we were to change our fortunes ahead of the 2009 general election”. 

When the Guptas offered to pay for Zuma to travel globally anywhere necessary to solicit funds, Phosa became “uncomfortable”. If in the wake of the Schabir Shaik influence buying scandals it emerged that the ANC was “being flown around the world for free, it would only add to the ANC’s and Zuma’s sorrows. I firmly told them as much.” 

However, Phosa’s reluctance had more to do with being caught than any major ethical considerations. At the Guptas’ suggestion, Phosa opened an account for the ANC in Dubai, through which funds sourced by the Guptas from overseas donors would be channelled. This is patently a stratagem to avoid normal banking oversight but it doesn’t seem to worry Phosa in the slightest. One must ask — there has been zero media curiosity about the issue — did the SA Reserve Bank approve the account and record inward transfers? Were any Dubai flows properly accounted for and audited? Does the account still exist? 

The Guptas proposed that money extracted by them on behalf of the party be split equally between the ANC, the Guptas, and Zuma, which Phosa says he refused to agree to. He also refused to sign a form authorising his removal as a signatory to the Dubai account. “To this day, I do not know whether any money accrued in that account and, if it did, how it was disbursed … I decided not to burden my fellow members of the Top Six [of the ANC] with the details of my dealing with the Guptas, as I dismissed it as a load of rubbish and a waste of time.” 

What an extraordinary statement by the treasurer-general of the governing party, with all the stern fiduciary obligations that come with high public office. Moreover, this is from a man who is also an officer of the court, registered with the Legal Practice Council as a practising attorney, and serves on the boards of several major companies and organisations, including ABSA and the University of South Africa.

After all, Phosa had not only been solicited to commit a crime but the crime, involving potentially many millions of rands, could well have been ongoing. Not even when the corrupt relationship between the Guptas and Zuma, as well as a large gang of crooked ANC politicians, was exposed and became the subject of an exhaustive judicial inquiry, did Phosa step forward to say, “Hey guys, I don’t want to burden you, but...”.

As if that weren’t bad enough, it gets wonderfully worse. A year later, in 2010, despite knowing from firsthand experience that the Guptas were crooks, Phosa tries to shake loose some more money from them. 

“At the ANC’s third National General Council meeting in Durban, I ran into Tony Gupta. I asked him when I could expect a contribution from the Guptas to the ANC’s coffers. ‘But we have already made a contribution,’ he replied. “We gave Baba [Zuma] R20-million!” I was shocked and told him I was unaware of the donation. It was not reflected anywhere in the statements of account of my office as treasurer-general of the ANC. I had no idea if he was telling the truth, but it made me extremely uneasy.”

Extremely uneasy? Clearly not extremely uneasy enough to do something which at that very early stage could have nipped the R1-trillion ANC state looting spree in the bud. I guess he didn’t want to “burden” his fellow members of the Top Six with something that was probably just “a load of rubbish and a waste of time”. And extremely lucrative for the many in the elite who were involved in the looting. 

This is all rather sad stuff. I’ve always thought of Phosa as one of the more nuanced, interesting returned exiles in the ANC galaxy. His schooling was in Afrikaans and he considers the language that Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi is at present trying to eradicate to be his “other” mother tongue. His poetry collection in Afrikaans — published under the title Deur die Oog van ’n Naald (Through the Eye of a Needle) — was well received.

Phosa was close to Nelson Mandela but clashed with Thabo Mbeki. He was also the well-meaning but somewhat ineffectual first premier of Mpumalanga, which became notorious for its high levels of corruption, although to the best of my knowledge he was never personally implicated.

This ambiguous political history in some ways shadows that of Ramaphosa, whom he twice stood against — the first time for the vice-presidency of the party in 2012 and the second, in 2017, for the presidency of the country — and lost. Both men publicly proclaim a commitment to transparency, accountability and rooting out corruption. Yet both men are perfectly comfortable with corruption that benefits the ANC and its elite, as long as no one is caught and embarrasses the party. They are facilitators, not doers.

Take the murky doings around Phala Phala. In just under a fortnight, Ramaphosa’s legal team will try to convince the Constitutional Court that an inquiry panel, led by a former Chief Justice of that very same court, was wrong to find that there was a credible case for presidential impeachment the National Assembly to consider. The judicial panel had been set up in response to strange events at Phala Phala.

One must wonder why Ramaphosa is so afraid of a National Assembly investigation to dispel the suspicions that stubbornly hang about him like a bad smell. The Public Protector, the Reserve Bank, the Revenue Service, and the National Prosecuting Authority have all with varying degrees of plausibility insisted that there is insufficient evidence to criminally charge anyone with anything in regard to Phala Phala. So how could a transparent, public airing in Parliament possibly damage the president? 

But perhaps more preferable — I see Phosa there in the back row vigorously nodding his head — not to burden busy parliamentarians with something which is obviously just another time-wasting load of junk. 

* Witness to Power by Mathews Phosa is published by Penguin.

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