An epoch ended on Boxing Day 2021, a Sunday, with the death of the beloved Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the age of 90.
The new era began a week later, on 2 January 2022, when alleged arsonist Zandile Christmas Mafe set fire to Parliament in the early hours of the morning. Fanned by a strong wind, the flames destroyed three chambers, 21 committee rooms and 473 offices, all of which will cost more than R2-billion to restore and refurbish.
Tutu was part of a generation of activists and struggle leaders, along with Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu, who now all belong to the angels and the ages.
The fierce blaze came to symbolise the heat of 2022 for the ANC and a scorched-earth policy that brewed all year long as factions fought a dirty, bitter and bloody battle for power and control. The year ended with a nail-biting ANC elective conference at Nasrec and a second-term victory for President Cyril Ramaphosa.
His rival, former health minister Zweli Mkhize, resigned in 2021 after revelations emerged that more than R1-million had allegedly been skimmed off the Department of Health’s R150-million Digital Vibes contract during the 2020 Covid pandemic.
And so the 12-month Tour de Farce came to a close.
On 14 December, mere days before more than 4,000 delegates were due to vote for new ANC leadership, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter resigned, having lost his political support.
Gwede Mantashe, the man who tipped De Ruyter over the edge by claiming that the Eskom boss was “agitating to overthrow the state”, is now the re-elected ANC chair.
By December, load shedding had become a way of life as power cuts shredded an already fragile economy.
Before the Nasrec vote, it was announced that members of the South African National Defence Force were being sent to protect the energy provider from saboteurs, thieves and criminals – from within and on the outside.
The hum of generators across the country has become a new sort of “national anthem”, replacing the burglar alarm and the hadeda.
Eskom’s failure affected cellphone operators and forced network provider MTN, for example, to burn 400,000 litres of fuel a month to keep its towers running for emergency backup.
The food sector was affected, as was industry at all levels.
South Africa was on stage 6 as ANC delegates fulfilled their leadership choice, one that will determine the country’s destiny and trajectory in 2023.
Zondo – the political meteorite
On 4 January, two days after the Parliament fire, Chief Justice Raymond Zondo handed Ramaphosa the 856-page first instalment of the findings of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture.
It was a political meteorite.
The age of accountability finally dawned and, as the year stretched out, the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and its Investigating Directorate (ID) began rounding up suspects. In March, Ramaphosa appointed advocate Andrea Johnson to head the ID.
High-profile arrests that followed include former Transnet and Eskom CEO Brian Molefe, former Transnet and Eskom CFO Anoj Singh, Eric Wood of Trillian, former minister of mineral resources Mosebenzi Zwane and Eskom’s former acting CEO, Matshela Koko.
Read on Daily Maverick: Here you go: The final State Capture report recommendations – at last
In September, Johnson announced that the ID had frozen assets worth R5-billion as part of its drive to remove the “profit from crime”.
As expected, the findings of the Zondo Commission – after four years of astonishing testimony and evidence – were pretty grim. Greed, corruption and the subversion of democracy on a grand scale had been exposed.
The Guptas were there, as well as their defunct New Age newspaper that had hoovered up government funds, and so too Dudu Myeni, the delinquent director who destroyed South African Airways. The capture, too, of the South African Revenue Service was confirmed.
Powerful officials had been named and implicated and were bound to be girding their loins for the political fight of a lifetime. Jobs and livelihoods would be lost; money illegally amassed would have to be recovered or paid back. Already shattered reputations would plummet to below zero in the eyes of wary citizens.
In February, the second part of the report dropped, dealing with fraud in the public sector, including at Denel and Transnet.
Stoking the embers
Back to 3 January, when several mysterious fires that were started across the country after the blaze that had engulfed Parliament continued to make headlines.
Smoke billowing from the Bellville Magistrates’ Court alerted authorities to arson, while a day later the Vereeniging Post Office was hit by an equally puzzling blaze.
Also on 4 January, a 28-year-old man was arrested trying to board a plane at Bram Fisher Airport in the Free State with a home-made hand grenade in his luggage that looked remarkably like a Kinder Joy egg with a detonator.
Only 96 hours into 2022 and South Africans were already paddling around in sporadic darkness, attempting to pin the tail on a donkey of a year.
By December, Zandile Mafe had still not made his way through the courts. This even after advocate Dali Mpofu had rushed to defend him and Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe had declared the accused perfectly sane. As a suspect, Mafe now finds himself in legal limbo, alone in a cell in Pollsmoor, refusing to come out.
Impeachments are us
Speaking of Mpofu, the legal veteran featured frequently in the news and on our screens as he hopped between courtrooms and the suspended Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s historic Section 194 impeachment inquiry, which kicked off with a bang in July.
Nkandla would look like a “picnic” compared with what he had up his toga, warned Mpofu as proceedings dragged on into September and Mkhwebane almost made it back into the hot seat during a brief legal lacuna.
In March 2021, an independent panel had found that Mkhwebane had a case to answer with regard to counts of misconduct and incompetence. It was the first step in the drawn-out – and at times farcical – process. Mpofu even managed to fold Beyoncé into evidence at one point.
The process will hopefully end in a vote in the National Assembly early in 2023, when a two-thirds majority vote will either confirm or reject Mkhwebane’s impeachment – the first of its kind in the history of South Africa.
While Mkhwebane still faces her impeachment vote, Ramaphosa dodged one just before the ANC’s elective conference, and Hlophe was finally suspended on 14 December. This came more than six months after the Judicial Services Commission (JSC) confirmed a tribunal finding that Hlophe was guilty of impeachable conduct and recommended that he be suspended.
2022 saw a continued onslaught on the South African judiciary and Constitution, but both have again managed to stand firm once in the centre of the storm.
In January, Minister of Tourism Lindiwe Sisulu was the first to lead the pack, publicly insulting judges and the Constitution. She repeated the attacks in June. She was cheered on by the now defeated “RET” faction in the ANC.
Sisulu as well as Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma defied the party on Ramaphosa’s parliamentary impeachment vote. Whereas Sisulu just didn’t pitch, Dlamini Zuma voted “yes” to accepting the Section 89 independent panel report.
In May, former president Jacob Zuma headed into the last long lap of his Stalingrad strategy, this time seeking to have seasoned prosecutor Advocate Billy Downer recused from the arms deal matter that had finally got under way.
When he lost in the courts, Zuma turned to a private prosecution not only of Downer, but also of News24 journalist Karyn Maughan for allegedly leaking his confidential medical reports. For this, Zuma was gifted the security deposit by diamond dealer Louis Liebenberg, who is being investigated by the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation.
And just before Nasrec was due to kick off, Zuma took the law to cartoonish heights by instituting a spontaneous and illegal private prosecution of Cyril Ramaphosa. It was as cheap and desperate a trick as the accused former president’s late entry into Nasrec while Ramaphosa was making his speech.
With the early exit in October 2021 of retired Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, Ramaphosa appointed Raymond Zondo in his place in February.
Earlier, after interviews had taken place, two outgoing JSC members, Mpofu and EFF leader Julius Malema, wrote to Ramaphosa recommending and endorsing the president of the Supreme Court of Appeal, Judge Mandisa Maya, as chief justice. But Ramaphosa ignored the recommendation and appointed Zondo instead.
Maya was appointed deputy chief justice two months later, in July.
Mogoeng, on the other hand, taking early advantage of changes to the Electoral Act that would allow for direct election of a presidential candidate, announced he had received another calling – this time to serve as a political candidate in 2024.
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Electoral Act – a game-changer
In 2020, the Constitutional Court had ordered Parliament to amend the Electoral Act to enable individual candidates to run for elected office without joining a political party.
In October 2022, Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs approved the Electoral Act Amendment Bill to be sent to the National Assembly for debate.
By December, Parliament sought from the Constitutional Court an urgent extension to the 10 December deadline to allow further consultation and substantial amendments made by the National Council of Provinces.
Civil society and organisations such as Defend Our Democracy and the Independent Candidate Association have vowed to continue challenging the bill, which is flawed in its current iteration. If Ramaphosa signs it into law as is, it will be challenged in the courts.
Any delay will affect the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s preparations for the much-anticipated 2024 elections, which could see the governing party’s support dip below 50%.
SAPS in the firing line
The Zondo Commission report was undoubtedly the game-changer of the year, setting off a series of events that resulted in the governing party, the 110-year-old ANC, beginning to decompose in full public view.
The commission had surfaced the bodies in the lake, and fingerprints and other evidence were all over the place. The clean-up was going to have to be massive and would take some time.
In February, the national police commissioner, General Khehla Sitole, left the top job “by mutual agreement”. This came after he was found by the courts to have placed the interests of the ANC ahead of those of the country. Sitole had obstructed an Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) investigation into the 2017 “Nasrec grabber scandal”.
In an attempt to keep the job, Sitole had directly implicated then police minister and now newly elected ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula in a sworn affidavit.
Sitole swore it was Mbalula who personally called him in December 2017 to sort out the grabber, which turned out to be an attempt to shake R45-million out of the Crime Intelligence secret fund under the pretext of needing to buy a listening device, when in fact the money went to “buy votes” for an ANC faction.
Zondo, SAPS, McBride and the anatomy of the capture of South Africa’s law enforcement cluster
Ramaphosa replaced Sitole in April with Lieutenant General Sehlahle Fannie Masemola. In December, a new head of the rudderless Crime Intelligence, Lieutenant General Dumisani Khumalo, was appointed.
Meanwhile, a crucial October judgment in the Western Cape High Court by Judge Daniel Thulare exposed the extent to which organised criminals had infiltrated the South African Police Service (SAPS).
Thulare was presiding over a gang matter and said evidence in the trial suggested that “the senior management of the SAPS in the province has been penetrated”. So much so, he said, that the 28s gang had access to meetings between the Western Cape provincial commissioner and senior managers through those in the police working with the underworld.
Meanwhile, a damning Ipid report singling out several SAPS members with regard to the neglect of their duties in the face of persistent warnings that Anti-Gang Unit detective Charl Kinnear’s life was in danger has been classified.
Kinnear was assassinated in September 2020 and his wife, Nicolette, has fought tirelessly to bring to book those who ignored her husband’s detailed reports and complaints to his superiors about colleagues who had been compromised.
Recent crime statistics in South Africa reveal a bloodbath of violence, with women and children remaining targets of deadly levels of gender-based violence. Kidnappings doubled nationally, with 4,028 recorded between July and end-September. This compares with 2,000 in the same period last year – an increase of 2,028 cases, or 101.4%.
Gauteng recorded the most kidnappings with 2,104, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 785 and the Western Cape with 248.
Scorched Earth
The release of the first part of the Zondo report galvanised what has become known loosely as the forces of the “RET” faction in the ANC as well as those who support it on the outside. It would be safe to assume that Zuma is the vortex around which these individuals congregate.
In June, a month before the much-anticipated fourth volume focusing on the State Security Agency (SSA) and its role in servicing the private and political needs of Zuma was about to drop, Arthur Fraser stepped into the ring.
“King Arthur”, as Dali Mpofu referred to him in passing, the former director-general of the SSA and later national commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, launched the Phala Phala torpedo at lunchtime on 2 June.
Fraser had long gone rogue, appearing to model himself on Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the Soviet-era chief of security who, after World War 2, orchestrated the takeover of state institutions in central and eastern Europe. Fraser has been directly implicated in the misappropriation of billions from the SSA’s secret account to fund a variety of Zuma’s projects.
The High-Level Review Panel into the SSA also exposed Fraser and then minister of security David Mahlobo’s dystopian South Africa “vision 2035”.
Suspended Public Protector Mkhwebane maintained close contact with Fraser throughout her tenure, her impeachment inquiry has heard, and her office swarmed with SSA operatives who had even planned to install IT systems for the independent Chapter 9 institution.
In January, Ramaphosa announced that he was disbanding the SSA as a government department and moving it into the Presidency, with Mondli Gungubele holding the portfolios of minister in the presidency for state security as well as communications. Zizi Kodwa was appointed Gungubele’s deputy.
Cape Town to the rescue
Back to January. Two months earlier, in November 2021, the then 34-year-old Geordin Hill-Lewis was sworn in as the mayor of Cape Town.
He had hardly moved into his fifth-floor office when the blaze incinerated Parliament. He would have been able to see the thick smoke from his window with its view of a newly renovated City Hall against the backdrop of Table Mountain.
One of the demands of Parliament’s alleged arsonist, Mafe, had been that Ramaphosa not deliver his State of the Nation Address (Sona). He also demanded the release of Polish immigrant Janusz Waluś, the man who murdered Chris Hani in April 1993, and Ramaphosa’s resignation.
As it turned out, Waluś was released on parole in early December, much to the chagrin of Hani’s family members and comrades. He had served 28 years for the murder that almost sparked a race war in South Africa.
As February approached and the extent of the damage of the fire in Parliament had been tallied, Western Cape Premier Alan Winde and Hill-Lewis offered the City Hall as an alternative venue.
Parliamentary communications officer Mava Lukani announced, “For the first time in South Africa’s democratic history, Cape Town Mayor, Mr Geordin Hill-Lewis, has handed over Cape Town’s City Hall to Parliament’s Presiding Officers so that the venue can serve as the parliamentary precinct for the 2022 State of the Nation Address.”
There was no room for irony. We were only two months in.
On 10 February, Ramaphosa delivered his Sona from the City Hall.
The father of the nation, Nelson Mandela, had stood on a balcony perched afront the selfsame Edwardian landmark on 11 February 1990. Some sort of circle had turned, but not quite fully.
If it felt as if the rest of the year flashed by as fast as former British prime minister Liz Truss’s 44-day incumbency, you would be right.
Environmental red flags
On 19 December, Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe, Shell and Impact Africa were granted leave to appeal a landmark ruling stopping seismic surveys off the Wild Coast. The Eastern Cape High Court granted the applicants leave to appeal the entire judgment of the Makhanda High Court.
Wild Coast communities and non-governmental organisations also sought leave to cross-appeal the Makhanda High Court’s decision not to consider whether Shell and Impact Africa required an environmental authorisation before starting their seismic survey.
In December 2021, Judge Gerald Bloem had granted an interdict stopping the multinational Shell from conducting a seismic survey unless and until environmental authorisation had been granted in compliance with the National Environmental Management Act of 1998.
The public interest matter had been brought to court by the Legal Resources Centre and Richard Spoor Attorneys on behalf of the Amadiba, Cwebe, Hobeni, Port St Johns and Kei Mouth communities, which argued that their generational defence of their land, the sea and their environment was protected by the Constitution.
Meanwhile, the environmental devastation in KwaZulu-Natal continued, with heavy floods in April, May and November claiming more than 400 lives as infrastructure collapsed or washed away.
The usually full Durban beaches have been blighted by sewage leaks and debris during the peak holiday season.
In the Eastern Cape, years of crippling drought were broken by floods in January. In Gauteng, heavy flooding in recent weeks revealed years of neglect, with 2,00o homes affected.
Similarly, thousands of people were affected by flooding in De Doorns in the Western Cape.
In August, Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke said the government’s response to the disasters in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape had been “ far too slow”.
In September, the wall of a mine slimes dam at Jagersfontein in the Free State burst, causing a devastating mudslide that killed at least three people and flooded low-lying houses and shelters.
The owner of the tailings dam, Jagersfontein Developments, said it had made R20-million available for relief operations, but the tragedy reflected the lack of enforcement of environmental regulations by mines as well as provincial and local governments.
Coalition governments
While EFF leader Julius Malema may have disbanded party structures in his home province, Limpopo, in January following an abysmal showing in the 2021 municipal elections, he and the party are hoping to play kingmakers in South Africa’s future as a coalition country.
The City of Joburg, with its water shortages, power outages, flooding and roads pockmarked with potholes, is one such example.
In September, a coalition government collapsed when DA mayor Mpho Phalatse was ousted after losing a no-confidence debate. The destabilisation began with the ANC, the PAC and the EFF voting out speaker Vasco da Gama.
There were hostilities between the DA and Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA, and though ANC mayor Dada Morero stepped into the office, it was a short-lived tenure as the courts reinstated Phalatse.
In Ekurhuleni, DA mayor Tania Campbell was ousted in October, but she was reinstated in November with the help of the EFF. This happened after talks between the EFF and the ANC had collapsed.
In September, a new multiparty coalition in Nelson Mandela Bay ousted ANC-led coalition mayor Eugene Johnson.
The coalition is led by DA executive mayor Retief Odendaal and consists of the African Christian Democratic Party, Freedom Front Plus, Abantu Integrity Movement, African Independent Congress, PAC and United Democratic Movement.
Meanwhile, the executive mayor of the DA-led six-party coalition government in Tshwane, Randall Williams, faced pressure from the EFF and ANC as talks between the two parties to dislodge the DA in metros continued.
The DA’s coalition partners in Tshwane are ActionSA, the Freedom Front Plus, African Christian Democratic Party, Inkatha Freedom Party and Congress of the People.
2023 – the real new dawn?
Our editor-in-chief, Branko Brkic, wrote at the start of 2022 that this would be the year in which the country’s democracy would be placed under severe pressure. And so it has come to pass.
“It will be the year of the decision about the direction the ANC will take, and the whole country with it. This time, one of the main choices on the menu will be South Africa as a failed state,” wrote Brkic.
“We’re not a strong economy with no debt hanging over our heads any more. We’re teetering on the edge of an abyss, a country in conflict with itself, after years of corruption, incompetence and a pandemic.”
In the end, ANC delegates at Nasrec 2022 opted to arrest the decay and try to fashion a party leadership that is capable of understanding and leading a modern, dynamic and diverse country.
Ramaphosa must have been wearing his lucky socks or underpants.
The year ahead will no doubt see a more emboldened Ramaphosa consolidating power and soon the thieves, the grifters, the thugs and the looters will begin to look over their shoulders.
Come 2024 and the national election, who knows what the ANC will look like?
South Africa, on the other hand, will be hopefully well down the road to restoring those institutions that keep citizens safe from whichever political party might end up in power, or sharing power, in the future.
In the meantime, the economy, energy, transport, education, health and housing all need urgent focus and attention. And with the President now free to make better Cabinet choices, perhaps a sense of urgency will follow.
What those who now find themselves outside the convenient ANC circle that knew the pin code to the ATM dispensing taxpayers’ money will make of their lives is anyone’s guess. Hopefully, many will spend time in orange overalls deprived of their freedom for plundering what belongs to the citizens. DM168
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.
