Video of the suspended CEO of the Independent Development Trust (IDT), Tebogo Malaka, and a spokesperson, Phasha Makgolane, offering a journalist R60,000 in R200 bills from a shopping bag to persuade him to stop reporting their abuse of public money and trust have gone viral.
If you haven’t yet watched Daily Maverick reporter Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s brilliant destruction of these two thieving fools, do yourself a favour.
The IDT is funded by the state and reports to the minister of public works, currently Dean Macpherson of the DA. He has been trying to clean up the agency, recently replacing its board — to cries of racism from the peanut gallery.
Typical. The IDT is supposed to cofund social infrastructure such as schools. It pompously says it is “transforming the construction and property sectors”. Its strategy is “aligned to the government’s medium-term strategic framework”. Myburgh has been exposing corruption in the IDT for ages.
Malaka, who says on LinkedIn she brings to the IDT “a unique blend of public sector insight, operational acumen and an unwavering commitment to ethical governance” can be heard in Myburgh’s video saying she just wants his reporting on IDT tenders to go away.
They offer him the opportunity to help award tenders and take payments from the winners. After photographing the cash pile offered him he pushed it back and walked away. In any respectable democracy Malaka and Makgolane would have been in jail by the end of the day. Needless to say they were not.
But a shakedown so blatant reminds us how easy corruption is here. Money the state spends (our taxes) leaks into a thousand pockets long before — if ever — the poor and desperate get to see the hospitals, houses and jobs so cynically promised. And it is literally everywhere in government and much of it in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s own cabinet.
He will be “shocked” by the video. But his choices are clear, if limited — a pitiless crackdown on corruption with its attendant risks (including to Ramaphosa himself) within a degenerate ANC, or slow and modest infrastructural reforms that may or may not be in place by the time he has to leave office in 2029. Myburgh’s video will play a huge role in our political campaigning for the next few years.
Anyone expecting anything better from an organisation sprung from the racially pernicious belly of apartheid is naive. We are not alone; Donald Trump, the president of the US, the biggest and richest country on earth, daily abuses his office to enrich himself and his family.
But as always here, colour trumps reason. The response to Trump’s 30% tariff on SA exports to the US sees black and white on social media lining up to apportion blame. Black critics charge opposition groups lobbying the US to press for policy changes here with responsibility for the high tariffs. The largely white replies accuse the government of not doing enough to stop them.
Nothing could have stopped the 30% — other countries more strategically critical to the US have been worse hit. India now faces 50% tariffs, the Swiss, of all people, 39%. Disaster looms, but we just don’t know how yet. Trump believes he is making America richer, but for a nation whose global leadership rests on trust in its currency for international commerce, starting a trade war with the rest of the world is beyond insane.
SA is small and unimportant and largely broken by years of misrule. And unlike the Indians or the Swiss, we have no money and no defences left. People like Malaka have seen to that, but you will die long before anyone does anything to stop it.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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