Zuma, Guptas and the tale of a Lesotho coup

ON THE weekend it was reported that special forces entered Lesotho just before Saturday’s pre-dawn raid on the house of Prime Minister Tom Thabane and whisked him across the border to safety.

South African troops, based in Phalaborwa, Limpopo, moved into Lesotho on Friday afternoon, accompanied by a group of diplomats, the Sunday Times reported.

“I have not taken a penny from the Guptas. I am not corrupt. Check with all the banks the world over… I have not received any money from them,” he told The Star.

He also defended the Guptas as “solid businesspeople” with a good track record in both business and in assisting the ANC “since the days of Mandela while he was still in prison”.

Here the prime minister was wrong.

The Guptas arrived in South Africa in 1993, well after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

Since then they have gone on to become extremely wealthy, with a penchant for treating South African government property, including the airbase at Waterkloof, as their private property.

The Zuma family and the Guptas are now closely interlinked, as reported by the BBC last year.

Bongi Ngema-Zuma, one of the president’s wives, works for the Guptas.

Duduzile Zuma, his daughter, was a director at Sahara Computers.

Duduzane Zuma, a son, is a director in some Gupta-owned companies.

The ties between Zuma and Prime Minister Tom Thabane are strong; the Guptas are the string that binds them together.

From the safety of South Africa Thabane has repeatedly insisted that he is still in charge – and will soon return to take control.

Thabane, along with Lesotho’s deputy prime minister, have held two lots of meetings with Zuma in Pretoria in his capacity as chair of the SADC troika – one on Saturday and one on Monday.

Also present were two other SADC representatives – Zimbabwe and Namibia.

So the big question has been, will Zuma order South African soldiers into Lesotho once more to return Thabane to power?

The official line has been that South Africa is “not immediately sending troops to Lesotho”.

Late yesterday it was reported that South Africa and other regional governments will facilitate Thabane’s return to Lesotho, restoring him to power after he was ousted in a coup on Saturday.

Martin Plaut is the former Africa editor of the BBC World Service News and has been reporting on the continent for more than 20 years. He co-authored Who Rules South Africa? together with Paul Holden, which looked into corruption and systems of patronage in South Africa and which was first launched at a Dispatch Dialogue in East London exactly two years ago