In the four presentations during my visit to SA this month, I referenced one of Ernest Hemingway’s most famous quotes. It comes from his book The Sun Also Rises where one character asks another how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” came the answer, “Gradually – then suddenly.”
Transformative events tend to happen that way. Long before the meltdown of 2008, Warren Buffett fretted publicly about the danger of what he called Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction. There was also ample advance warning before the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000. The Zimbabwean economic disaster, too, was decades in the making. As was the ending of Apartheid.
From the way I’m reading it, the Zuptoid plundering of South Africa’s national resources is also rapidly approaching its “suddenly” point. Evidence is everywhere from Eskom to SAA, the SABC to the latest Gupta midnight flit. It was pushed a little closer yesterday by a highly creative attack from crowdfunded activist group OUTA.
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Having been a schoolboy chum of OUTA’s founder Wayne Duvenage gives me access to the back story of this remarkable organisation. Wayne’s road to civil duty followed an unusual route. It began when, as then MD of Avis, he took a close interest after eTolls were introduced in Gauteng.
Pretty soon his digging exposed some very ugly behind-the-scenes corruption. That pushed him into activism when in 2012, he set up shop as the Organisation Against e-Toll Abuse, occupying a small office in Randburg’s tallest building.
After helping to bury e-Tolls, Duvenage realised what he had encountered was the mere tip of a cesspit of corruption. So last year he expanded OUTA’s horizons, retaining the acronym, but changing its name and mandate to the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse.
OUTA achieved full independence when it moved to crowdsourced public sponsorship with tens of thousands of citizens paying an average of R110 a month to pay the running costs of a 35-person operation which now occupies the whole floor of that same office tower.
Knowing Wayne from childhood, this didn’t surprise me. Neither does the way he has applied his business brain to an NGO whose power continues to grow. Like, for instance, the decision to appoint six highly qualified lawyers to avoid what was becoming crippling after litigation fees. OUTA’s fully-engaged staff, properly remunerated and spurred on by their activist zeal, now has 25 projects in various stages of completion.
The one unveiled yesterday, however, could have the greatest impact. Taking advice by former finmin Pravin Gordhan to “join the dots”, Duvenage’s team pulled together the tsunami of recent corruption disclosures to explain, in everyday language, the links between corrupted politicians and their crony capitalist handlers.
The 175 page docket with 250 pages of annexures released yesterday is destined for the criminal court with president Jacob Zuma the number one accused. But before that the completed jigsaw puzzle has been to parliament for distribution to MPs ahead of the no confidence vote.
This shrewd move serves two critical purposes – after the “suddenly” stage arrives, MPs will not be able to claim they were unaware of the facts, so they will know that failure to act now will destroy their careers; but if they don’t and Zuma survives the proposed impeachment, OUTA will be able to convince the courts to rule on the evidence as all other options will have been exhausted.
Brazilian investigators are three years into their investigations into the corruption scandal called Operation Car Wash. Yesterday, Brazil’s finance minister was jailed for 12 years and the sitting president was criminally charged. With the attack by a flotilla of NGOs like OUTA gaining momentum, South Africa’s turn is coming. We’re almost at the end of the “gradually” stage.
