Is this what peak state capture looks like?
In this tumultuous week in South Africa, everything really did trace back to the Gupta family. The threats to their wealth lay directly behind events that played out in three different courts, at the funeral of Ahmed Kathrada, in meetings of the ANC leadership and among leaders of the ruling alliance, and across every newspaper’s front page. And that’s just those we know about.
Efforts to protect the family’s wealth can be clearly seen behind the court approach by Gupta-linked company Vardospan, which has developed a sudden and very urgent appetite to own a bank just as the last banking channels available to the Guptas are shut down.
The fight against Gupta influence is just as evident in Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s “failed” bid to put before a court evidence that the Financial Intelligence Centre had flagged billions of rands worth of Gupta transactions as suspicious – placing that information in the public domain nonetheless.
Likewise, Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema made his point when he personally walked into the Constitutional Court on Thursday to file papers in a bid to force Parliament to hold President Jacob Zuma to account for the Nkandla matter. The legal action may be about Nkandla, but Malema’s comments that Parliament had been “captured” by the Guptas told us everything we needed to know about the timing.