In January 2019, Bosasa executive Richard Le Roux testified at the state capture commission that the politically connected company had funded security upgrades at the homes of some ANC leaders.
One of the alleged beneficiaries was Gwede Mantashe, ANC secretary-general at the time. Le Roux had estimated that the upgrades to Mantashe’s properties cost in the region of R300,000.
Mantashe disputed the cost at the time. Two months later, another Bosasa executive, Angelo Agrizzi, testified that Mantashe’s security upgrades had cost about R600,000. Later that year, President Cyril Ramaphosa, who had run his campaign on an anti-corruption ticket, appointed Mantashe as our mineral resources minister.
Fast-forward to last Friday, Mantashe told the commission he did not know that Bosasa had paid for the upgrades. What he knew was that because of an attempted burglary at his Boksburg home, the ANC saw it best that security be beefed up at the property.
While cameras were being installed in his home, a family friend, Papa Leshabane, who happened to be working for Bosasa at the time, came through and offered to install better cameras at the Boksburg home and subsequently at two other Mantashe properties in the Eastern Cape.
Even if Mantashe’s version is factually correct, it is no less disturbing. The minister wants us to accept that his home security was beefed up through the pure generosity of a friend who happened to be working for a company that does lucrative business with the government, with no expectation of any favours at a time he was arguably the most influential leader of the governing party.
Even more astonishing is the expectation on his part that the nation must accept his undue benefit at face value because, as he told the commission, he is not amenable to bribes. Mantashe’s undue benefit from Bosasa is indicative of a deep seated psyche of entitlement among ANC leaders, which forms an enabling foundation of the ruling party’s culture of corruption.
Equally, his appointment to cabinet even in the face of his inexplicable benefit from a corrupt company is indicative of the hypocrisy of Ramaphosa’s anti-corruption message at best. At worst it demonstrates how the ANC is unable to deal with corruption because at its core it views the value of integrity as an inconvenience, even an irritation, rather than the basis from which to define acceptable behaviour.
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