Private sector economic crime

Corporate corruption of
South African politics and
economics
‘Accumulation by dispossession’ as a structural
process, beyond ‘state capture’
- By Patrick Bond

Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg, Department

of Sociology, where he is Director of the Centre for Social Change. From 2020-21 he
was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a
Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand
School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and
was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He lectured from 1997-2004 at the Wits
School of Governance. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented
lectures at more than 100 others.

South Africa’s ranking in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception

Index suggests the government is not as corrupt as public opinion suggests. In
this article PATRICK BOND emphasises the need for a deeper, more nuanced
understanding of the problem and turns his attention to what he sees as the
more pervasive threat posed by corporate corruption, underpinned as it is by its
long history of colonial exploitation and dispossession.

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I
Introduction: Narratives and silences
n South Africa, the typical analysis of corruption is limited to blaming individual
political leaders or managers of state departments and parastatal corporations.
Secondarily, citizens regularly complain about petty forms of graft by lower-level
bureaucrats. How serious are such forms of graft? How might we understand the
problem in deeper terms, in relation to South Africa’s economic history? And how do
not only state-society, but state-market-society forms of corruption operate? Indeed, how
far does so-called ‘state capture’ extend beyond the usual suspects: syndicates such as
the Gupta brothers who operated from 2008-17, or the Watson brothers’ Bosasa state-
outsourcing operation through the 2000s-2010s, or the Shaik brothers who, via late-1990s
Arms Deals operations involving a French firm prone to bribery, first implicated Jacob
Zuma as corrupt, to the extent he was fired as Thabo Mbeki’s Deputy President in 2005?

Corruption Perception Index ranking of South Africa, 1996-2023 (least corrupt out of
180 states)

Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/corruption-rank

It transpires that the South African state is relatively mediocre in the best-known
Corruption Perception Index ranking of 180 countries’ administrations (including
politicians), compiled by Berlin-based Transparency International (TI). The TI (2024)
Index measures “bribery; diversion of public funds; officials using their public office for
private gain without facing consequences; ability of governments to contain corruption
in the public sector; excessive red tape in the public sector which may increase
opportunities for corruption; nepotistic appointments in the civil service; laws ensuring
that public officials must disclose their finances and potential conflicts of interest; legal
protection for people who report cases of bribery and corruption; state capture by
narrow vested interests; access to information on public affairs/government activities.”

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 Private sector economic crime

South Africa’s 2023 ranking is 83rd least corrupt or

97th most corrupt.
In SA, the
South African governance is by this measure typical analysis
far cleaner than is typically acknowledged by
society. In 2023, polling by TI (2024) recorded of corruption
64% of the population “who thought corruption
increased in the previous 12 months,” with 18% of is limited
public service users acknowledging they “paid a
bribe in the previous 12 months.” This degree of
to blaming
state graft is certainly worse than in the mid-1990s,
when just after apartheid ended South Africa’s
individual
rank was 23rd least corrupt. The sharp 2021-23 political leaders
degradation in rankings from 69th to 83rd least
corrupt state probably reflected not only high- or managers
profile Covid-19 procurement fraud, but current
president Cyril Ramaphosa’s own recent scandal of state
in which US dollars were illicitly hidden in a
couch at one of his residences.
departments
But this article contends that if TI is correct,
the South African state suffers a relatively
and parastatals.
minor level of such corruption, compared to the
corporate economy’s far deeper and more pervasive strain of capitalist “accumulation
by dispossession”. That term, signifying outright theft (instead of “accumulation
by exploitation” through capital-labour relations at the point of production in the
workplace), was coined by David Harvey (2003), based on a revival of the work of the
first Marxist political economist writing about South Africa, Rosa Luxemburg. In 1913,
her Accumulation of Capital included the observation that imperialism reflected capitalism
periodically suffering overproduction crises, requiring expansion to new territories
(what many term ‘globalisation’), and in that process, increasing contact with the non-
capitalist spheres of the world.
Luxemburg drew extensively on secondary sources: writings about how South
Africa’s earliest corporations were plying their trade, suffused with their desire and
capacity to carry out systemic theft, dating to the Portuguese, Dutch and British
colonialists. Capital’s interactions with non-capitalist society and nature is the
appropriate way to frame the worst tendencies of corporate graft, as described in the
next section. To illustrate those interactions, at least four factors that are missing from
mainstream economists’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurements reveal aspects
of accumulation by dispossession: migrant labour systems that amplify the importance
of unpaid labour by women (who typically live in distant ex-Bantustans or even the
wider Southern African region, in contrast to social reproduction within urban areas
where super-exploitative relations are more difficult to sustain), and three aspects of
environmental degradation: local pollution, global-scale greenhouse gas emissions and
uncompensated depletion of non-renewable wealth (Bond, 2021).

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 Yet today, the private sector is usually mentioned as “corrupt” in narrow ways, for
example according to Kenneth Brown, who was Treasury’s leading procurement officer
until 2017, the average state contract entails illegitimate price mark-ups of 35-40%
(Mkokeli, 2016). In addition, consciousness has recently been raised about white South
Africa’s propensity to corporate financial fraud thanks to the March 2024 firearm suicide
of Markus Jooste, the Stellenbosch-based chief executive who caused Steinhoff’s collapse
(Wiener, 2024). Two other white tycoons appeared to have died through assisted suicides
– Brett Kebble in 2005 and Gavin Watson in 2019 – after corruption charges became
unavoidable. Jooste’s death occurred on the eve of long-overdue state prosecution for
looting an international retail network, thanks to graft costing more than $15 billion.
When discovered in late 2017, the firm’s crash stunned stock markets and resulted in
liquidation six years later. Another bankruptcy that resulted from accounting fraud
was KwaZulu-Natal sugar and real estate firm Tongaat Hulett. In 2019, chief executive
Peter Staude and a half-dozen other officials – nearly all white – were exposed, and two
subsequent revelations of graft included two dubious firms attempting a business rescue.
In February 2023, there was also the high-profile ‘grey listing’ of South Africa by
the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a network associated with the main
Western imperialist powers’ policing of the global economy (especially in the wake of the
2001 airplane hijacking that spurred greater scrutiny of radical Islamic financial circuits).
The FATF (2023) revealed the systemic character of banking-sector crime in South Africa,
as did, simultaneously, the Al Jazeera (2023) ‘Gold Mafia’ report (mainly about Zimbabwe
but also implicating major Johannesburg banks whose staff facilitated the graft, namely
Absa, Standard Bank and Sasfin).
Society’s suspicions about international finance were again confirmed during
South Africa’s high-profile 2023-24 prosecution of local and foreign banks for currency
manipulation (a decade late) (Wasserman, 2023). It was a rare moment for judicial action
(Competition Tribunal, 2023), no matter the Competition Commission’s apparently
flawed inclusion of too many banks, as pointed out by Judge Dennis Davis (2024) in a
case still to be heard at the Constitutional Court (Bond, 2024a).
Tellingly, financial regulators from both Treasury and the Reserve Bank – the latter
owned by the very banks engaged in prolific illegal acts – had not only denied currency
manipulation (Phakathi, 2019) but also ignored FATF warnings dating from 2019 until
late in 2022, when three new laws were hurriedly passed and regulatory procedures
tightened – but to no avail, as the grey listing was still imposed. And after all, Treasury’s
Financial Intelligence Centre had estimated in 2019 annual costs of illicit financial flows
to the economy already ranged from 3% to 7% of GDP (Planting, 2019).
In an even broader context, beyond these high-profile cases, consider what is termed
private sector “economic crime and fraud” – i.e. corporate corruption – by international
consultancy PwC (2020), sponsor of a biannual survey during the 2010s. This category of
capital accumulation, typically facilitated by governments turning a blind eye (or indeed
even codifying systemic underpayment for natural resource extraction and pollution, is
still too rarely mentioned in popular accounts of state capture. Corruption Watch (CW),
for example, regularly ignores systemic exploitation and super-exploitation of labour

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 Private sector economic crime

(i.e. meaning that the wage that is paid to workers

is below their social cost of reproduction, especially
This category
in migrant labour systems reliant upon women’s [corporate
unpaid caregiving). CW never remarks upon
the uncompensated depletion of non-renewable corruption]
resources (especially minerals) or wanton pollution
and greenhouse gas emissions. of capital
Instead, CW’s (2022:1-2) “ [a]nalysis of
Corruption Trends” merely reports that from its
accumulation …
consumer complaints line, “in the private sector
the most commonly found corruption types
is still too rarely
are fraud (56%) and maladministration (25%), mentioned
which relates more to compliance,” and that
“[c]orruption straddles the public and private in popular
sectors and in the period under review, 62% and
25% of corruption cases are attributed to each accounts of
respectively” – as if the broader system of South
African capitalism’s relations with the non-
state capture.
capitalist spheres is otherwise unobjectionable, not
worthy of systemic treatment. Likewise a new project in mid-2024, “State Capture and
Beyond,” was launched by the Legal Resources Centre and Human Rights Media Trust,
without mention of corporate and financial crimes or even of inadequate state regulation
(NewzroomAfrika, 2024).
Part of the problem is that nearly all incidents of private-sector corruption are
typically understood as stemming from greedy individuals and small-scale syndicates,
not as a systematic problem – accumulation by dispossession – that appears to have
become much worse during the era of neoliberalism (given that other stages of South
African capitalism included much stronger regulatory apparatuses and a different ethos,
e.g. Afrikaners’ 1930s-80s Volskapitalisme).
Of course, there are many other micro incidents of dispossession that receive news
coverage. For example, as the 2023 Africa Organised Crime Index pointed out, South Africa
“has seen increased instances of kidnap for ransom and extortion that has halted billion-
dollar construction projects. Moreover, in 2022, South Africa experienced a record number
of mass shootings, all attributed to protection rackets in the liquor and nightlife industries”
(Enact, 2023: 61; Dolly, 2019). The “construction mafia” has reportedly shaken down
building firms in more than 180 projects (Irish-Qhobosheane, 2022).
But in search of broader analysis, there are only rare exceptions, e.g. when Hennie
van Vuuren and Michael Marchant (2023:201) argue (based mainly on critique of
military-oriented capitalists) that “[u]ntil grand corruption is understood as continuity,
there is little hope of tackling it. In the form of state capture, the economic crime that
today confronts the country primarily results from failure to dismantle the criminal
networks that profited from apartheid. Not only have actors in these networks continued
to profit, but they have undermined any attempts to hold them to account.” In the same

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volume, editors Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Peter Vale (2023: 8) correctly blame “the
continuity of a strain of capitalism that characterised apartheid”. So too do Sizwe Mpofu-
Walsh (2023) and Ryan Brunette (2023) seek to identify segues not breaks between
apartheid-era and post-apartheid capitalism. But these writers do not develop the idea in
the direction it might logically proceed: the theory pioneered by Luxemburg and Harold
Wolpe (1972) to describe the “articulations” of two modes of production, the capitalist
and pre-capitalist, especially with the historical sensitivity that Ben Magubane (2001)
brings to the race-class debate, so that capital accumulation by dispossession is better
understood – and then better combatted (as discussed in the conclusion).

Strains of South African capitalist accumulation by dispossession

To reiterate, there is a widespread belief in society that South African private-sector
economic activity is generally clean, and corruption is essentially state-centered, which
often contributes to pressure for outsourcing, corporatisation, commercialisation and
privatisation, especially as the state retreats from areas such as service provision and
infrastructure (Ruiters & Bond, 2023). Yet dating to the earliest epoch of profit as the
incentive structure for the South African economy, the opposite has been more true.
In Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg included a chapter in which she explored the
way South African mining houses utilised the power that capitalist enterprise wielded
against pre-capitalist relations, and how multifaceted resistance emerged. As Luxemburg
(1913) concluded, “[n]on-capitalist relations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more
strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such relations, and although this non-capitalist
milieu is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds at the cost of this medium
nevertheless, by eating it up.” That era’s anti-imperialist political economists and social
commentators were already documenting super-exploitation, including Sol Plaatje,
Olive Schreiner and John Hobson. But Luxemburg’s theorisation – applying Marx’s
understanding of capitalist crisis (based on overproduction tendencies) to the first era
of corporate-dominated but colonial-managed globalisation – provided indicators of the
articulation of the two modes of production. These have illuminated micro-economic,
social and environmental features of extreme uneven development, where race, gender
and socio-ecological power relations are all abused for the sake of earning super-profits
(Bond, 2021). Likewise, Samir Amin’s long career did much the same, especially in
his scathing assessments of how South African racial capitalism evolved from his first
analysis in 1972 (when he termed South Africa ‘imperialist’), through and beyond
1994 (Bond, 2023b). In his autobiography, published posthumously, Amin (2019, 178)
charged the post-apartheid government with amplifying these tendencies: “Nothing has
changed. South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is
by the Anglo-American mining monopolies.”
Shortly after Wolpe’s (unacknowledged) rediscovery of Luxemburg’s capitalist/
non-capitalist surplus drain as the articulation of modes of production, the term
racial capitalism emerged, in the same spirit but aimed at replacing the South African
Communist Party’s two-stagist framing known as “colonialism of a special type” (first
end racism, and then later end capitalism). Studying multinational corporations during

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 Private sector economic crime

the height of apartheid, Martin Legassick and

David Hemson (1976) introduced the idea of racial
South African
capitalism to argue for a one-stage revolution governance is
overthrowing both apartheid and capitalism
simultaneously. … far cleaner
In contrast, Magubane (2001) put the South
African history of evolving (not fixed) race-class than is typically
relations into historical perspective, as he explored
several waves of what is now called Foreign Direct
acknowledged
Investment (FDI). The era of slavery – and also
indigenous people’s social resistance – was initiated
by society.
in 1488 at the hands of Portuguese explorers
Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama, followed by the first durable FDI: the Dutch East
India Company’s Cape Town settler-colonialism in 1652 led by Jan van Riebeeck. His
objective was not the enslavement of indigenous people, but their extermination, so he
could squat the valuable agricultural-provisioning land for mercantile capitalists.
Diamonds were discovered in Kimberley in the 1870s and De Beers was consolidated
by Cecil John Rhodes, who required a different kind of race-class power: coerced migrant
labour. His racial capitalism was, hence, aimed at “civilising” the workers in inhuman
hostels using hut taxes, as novelist Anthony Trollope approvingly remarked (Magubane,
2001). In 1886, the world’s largest gold seam was found in what became Johannesburg,
and the world’s deepest digs were ultimately dominated by Ernest Oppenheimer’s
and New York banker JP Morgan’s Anglo-American Corporation. In 1890, meanwhile,
Rhodes’ British South Africa Company won City of London backing and further FDI
promises, to initiate “Cape to Cairo” sub-imperialism.
These diverse forms of accumulation by dispossession – between the capitalist and
the non-capitalist spheres of life – had thus progressed, although remaining firmly within
white power’s grip, first, over the black body (slavery followed by indentured labour and
migrant labour coercion); second, over land (settler colonialism); and third, over non-
renewable natural resources (often termed “extractivism”) and associated despoliation
of the air, water and soil. The 20th century witnessed transnational capital stitching these
strains of accumulation together as a systematic form of corporate plunder. Following the
British troops’ defeat of the Dutch-descendent Afrikaners in 1901 and the fusion of white
voter interests against black South Africa, formal national status was granted in 1910. With
the Land Act of 1913, extreme uneven geographical development was cemented along
racial lines, a process endorsed by European colonial powers and the US, who required
access to cheap gold, chrome and other metals and minerals.
The most succinct explanation drawing together class, race, gender and ecological
degradation associated with South African racial capitalism, comes from the Chamber
of Mines in this oft-quoted defence of super-exploitative migrant labour: “the mines are
able to obtain unskilled labour at a rate less than ordinarily paid in industry … otherwise
the subsidiary means of subsistence would disappear and the labourer would tend to
become a permanent resident upon the Witwatersrand, with increased requirements”

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(cited in Wolpe, 1972). From reliance upon coal-fired power, was a set of impressive
backward-forward linkages that distorted South Africa ever since, under the rubric of
“uneven and combined development” (Ashman, 2023; Baran, 2024).
While mining remained the central determinant of race-class relations, uneven
sectoral development emerged in the 1930s-40s, when black manufacturing workers
were hired to serve the booming import-substitution industrialisation process (resulting
from the decline of trade due to the global Depression and World War Two). But instead
of durable delinking from a chaotic global economy, the assimilation of South Africa as
one of US imperialism’s most reliable sub-imperial allies occurred in 1944 in the Bretton
Woods Agreement. (At the time, nearly half the world’s gold was to be found more
than a kilometre deep underneath Johannesburg and a similar amount was underneath
Fort Knox.) The two creditor states’ agreement on the $35/ounce peg (until the Nixon
Administration’s 1971 default) confirmed a system of US monetary hegemony that
remains to this day – in spite of ever more fruitless ‘de-dollarisation’ rhetoric from the
BRICS+ network (Battista, 2023).
A group of scholars at Johns Hopkins University associated with Giovanni Arrighi
identified various dialectical contradictions within the late 20th century system of
accumulation by dispossession that caused apartheid’s downfall (Arrighi et al., 2010).
But corporate profitability resumed with a new financially-liberated, neoliberal regime
of accumulation (Bond & Malikane, 2019), e.g. with the historic wealth of the country
disappearing to London and New York in 1999-2001 when Anglo American Corporation,
De Beers, Old Mutual, SA Breweries, Sasol, Mondi, Investec, Didata and other firms
established overseas stock market listings with Mandela-Mbeki’s permission (Bond, 2014).

Comparative contemporary state and corporate graft

For those following Buthelezi and Vale (2023:8), a concern for “the continuity of a
strain of capitalism that characterised apartheid” should lead to a richer assessment of
how corruption became so ubiquitous in South Africa. When it comes to state graft,
there are more detailed perspectives available than in TI’s first-cut surveying. The NGO
Corruption Risk (2023) complained, “[a] sound system of monitoring assets and conflict
of interest of public officials would have avoided a scandal like the 2022 theft of a large
amount of money hidden in the residence of President Cyril Ramaphosa” (Corruption
Risk, 2023). Ramaphosa’s most famous scandal, in 2012, was unveiled in the Farlam
Commission: the main role in Lonmin’s financial capital flight to Bermuda (Alternative
Information and Development Centre, 2014). Questions have often been raised about
his close connections to Glencore’s Ivan Glasenberg, given that the world’s largest
commodity trader was fined $1.5 billion in 2022 for corrupting African states (15% of the
company’s pretax profit the year before), which as Tim Cohen (2022) pointed out, “is,
in all honesty, a parking ticket” – and there was no investigation of Johannesburg-born
Glasenberg’s profitable role in South Africa.

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 Private sector economic crime

But Glencore is the tip of the iceberg. As noted above, during the 2010s the PwC
“economic crime and fraud” reports revealed that South Africa’s corporations were
considered worst in the world in general and – in the 2014 survey – also in the
categories of money laundering, bribery and corruption, procurement fraud, asset
misappropriation and cybercrime (Hosken, 2014). In the 2018 PwC survey, the runners-
up were Kenya, France and Russia. In 2020, Indian corporations were considered most
corrupt, and China tied for second with South Africa, closely followed by firms from
Kenya, the US and UK (PwC, 2020).

PwC index of economic crime and fraud, 2020 and 2018

Source: https://www.pwc.co.za/en/press-room/global-economic-crime-and-fraud-survey-2020.html

Issue 93 - NEW AGENDA | 41

 A more balanced accounting is even attempted by the World Bank, Natural Resource
Governance Institute and Brookings Institution (2024, citing Kaufmann et al., 2010). Their
“Control of Corruption” assessment “captures perceptions of the extent to which public
power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption,
as well as ‘capture’ of the state by elites and private interests”. From 1996-2022, South
Africa’s mean percentile rank fell from 76th to 45th with the most dramatic decline
occurring between 2021-22.

South Africa’s “Control of Corruption” ranking: percentile, 1996-2022

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CC.PER.RNK?locations=ZA

Help from Washington (!)

In spite of Washington and New York being two of the core managerial sites for
corporate-led Western imperialism, the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and
other anti-graft legislation have been deployed against South African corporations. US
officials have been far more aggressive than South African counterpart prosecutors in
cases such as Hitachi’s 2007 bribery of the ANC via its Chancellor House investment
wing, which was successfully prosecuted under the FCPA in 2015 (insofar as the Tokyo
firm paid a fine), and New York State’s mid-2010s attack on some of the world’s largest
banks for currency manipulation involving the Rand.
The Hitachi incident not only adversely affected Eskom’s Medupi and Kusile
coal-fired power plants – leaving the economy without sufficient energy and hence
destructive load-shedding for many years, as well as more than 50 megatonnes of
additional CO2 emissions (a tenth of the entire economy’s greenhouse gas pollution)
and thousands of deaths because former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter refused to install
pollution-reduction scrubbers on Eskom’s coal-fired power plants – but represented the
country’s single most damaging case of corporate corruption in simple monetary terms.
As de Ruyter (2023, 35) put it in his Truth to Power exposé, Medupi and Kusile “were
way over budget, they weren’t on schedule, and they performed well below their
specifications, thereby failing all three project management tests. The project to add new

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 Private sector economic crime

generation capacity was just a miserable failure.”

In part, de Ruyter blames “ANC deployees close
‘South Africa’s
to the [Eskom] board” who informed Chancellor sub-imperialist
House that the initial discussions with the
successful bidder, Alstom, were not going well. role has been
It’s fair to assume that this information was then
also relayed, via Chancellor House, to top Hitachi reinforced, still
officials. At a meeting at O.R. Tambo International
Airport in September 2007, Klaus-Dieter Rennert,
dominated as it
a senior executive at Hitachi Power Europe, urged
Chancellor House chair Professor Taole Mokoena
is by the Anglo-
to apply pressure on Eskom to reopen the tender American mining
process. The chairperson of the Eskom board at that
stage was Mohammed Valli Moosa. monopolies.’ –
The Hitachi contracts were won after a
suspicious reconfiguration of the tender, which the Samir Amin
firm then failed to properly provide and install,
e.g. requiring 7,000 welding repairs. A News24 investigation based on US Securities and
Exchange Commission documents revealed in early 2023 that according to a Hitachi
memo, Mokoena “has good connections within Eskom. Dr Mokoena is personal friends
with Mr Valli Moosa (chairman) and Mr Tulane Gcabashe [sic] (CEO).” US prosecutors
concluded that, according to News24, Hitachi was introduced to Chancellor House “and
ultimately decided to work with them not for any technical expertise, labour force or
infrastructure, but for the influence wielded by the companies” (Cowan, 2023).
A smoking-gun memo was found by US authorities: according to a Hitachi executive
in a 2010 email, “[w]hen we adopted [Chancellor House] at the time of [Hitachi Power
Africa’s] establishment, we took ANC influence into consideration and still we believed
it was a right decision” (England, 2015). As Eskom chair from 2005-08, Moosa was a key
decision-maker. In 2015, Mail & Guardian reporters complained, “[f]or nearly a decade,
the South African branch of Japanese giant Hitachi lied, obfuscated and denied. And
other than a minor slap on the wrist for ANC stalwart Valli Moosa, neither Hitachi nor
the ANC or its funding front Chancellor House suffered any repercussions” (De Wet and
Mataboge, 2015).
South African society, environment and economy did suffer enormously, though, as
breakdowns at the early units were prolific. Yet even after Hitachi paid $19 million to
the US government as a fine in 2014, the 2018-22 Zondo Judicial Commission of Inquiry
into Allegations of State Capture, Chipkin and Swilling (2018), Buthelezi and Vale (2023)
and many other commentators forgot about this case, perhaps mistakenly assuming
the corruption problem really only became severe once Zuma took office. The missing
case of Hitachi and its facilitators – including Moosa, who in the early 2020s headed the
Presidential Climate Commission and Mokoena who in 2023 was named South Africa’s
Health Ombud – remains an appalling gap.

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Conclusion: Against corporate economic crime and plunder
The problems identified above are not only local in nature, but also reflect lack of will
in hot money centres and global corporate headquarters.
But local conditions are dire, given how readily ANC leaders led by Ramaphosa
have refused to follow Zondo Commission prosecution recommendations e.g. against
ANC chairperson Gwede Mantashe for petty corruption by the Watson family’s Bosasa
outsourcing firm. Zondo and others had at least partially documented corruption by not
only the Gupta brothers but also enablers of their and others’ graft in major accounting,
legal and consultancy firms (Thompson, 2020; Open Secrets, 2023; Thaker and Pillay,
2023). British Ambassador Robin Renwick’s (2018, 1) book How to Steal a Country is a
classic example of neglecting corporate-profiteering causality, asking all too innocently in
its third paragraph, “[h]ow is it that internationally reputable companies such as KPMG,
McKinsey, SAP and HSBC are so easily drawn into such a web of corruption?”
To be sure, civil society has often attacked corporate malfeasance (putting to death – by
bankruptcy – the likes of Bell Pottinger and Cash Paymaster Services). And major firms
are indeed occasionally capable of self-correcting. The clearest case was when software
supplier EOH – set up by Israeli entrepreneur Asher Bohbot in 1998 – was cut off by
Microsoft in 2019 due its by then blatant role in state capture, thus reducing the firm’s
share value by 99% from peak to trough (Gelb, 2023). (In 2021 EOH’s remnants included
new directors who sued Bohbot for R1.7 billion, but apparently had no success.)
There are both traditional South African white monopoly capital and Western
multinational corporations – both sometimes termed ‘WMC’ – which take advantage
of such procurement opportunities. But it is also important to acknowledge how, in
the spirit of Frantz Fanon’s (1961) Wretched of the Earth chapter on ‘Pitfalls of National
Consciousness,’ limits to black capitalist class formation in the post-apartheid economy
in turn create dependency on accumulation via the state. Together these corporate forces
prevent a productive capitalism from emerging given the initial ease of simply serving as
middle-man to accumulation by dispossession. NA93

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