ANC’s ‘systematic racketeering’ must be investigated, DA says

The DA has urged the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to charge the ANC for racketeering on the grounds that it allegedly established corrupt relationships with business in order to secure funds for itself.

It has asked new NPA boss Shamila Batohi to charge the ANC under the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (Poca), claiming that the ANC was guilty of “systematic and calculated fraud, racketeering, corruption, [and] looting of public money” over the last two decades.

DA leader Mmusi Maimane said at a media briefing Wednesday that an investigation into ANC funders would establish the links between those who benefited from state contracts and those who funded the party. An example is Bosasa, which has been implicated in wide-scale corruption and has benefited from billions of rand in state contracts. 

The Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) has agreed to investigate a DA complaint that the ANC received election money from Bosasa. The allegation is that Bosasa (now African Global Operations) set up ANC election “war rooms” at their Krugersdorp headquarters over the past three elections and funded the campaigns to the tune of R6m.

Maimane was confident that the ANC qualified as an “enterprise” as per the definition in Poca and that there was evidence that the ANC satisfied the requirements of “racketeering” and “unlawful activity” as defined in the act.

 “There exists a clear-cut criminal case for the ANC to answer to. The organisation must be fined heavily and individual members found guilty must be locked away behind bars,” he said.

Maimane said in his letter to Batohi that it was not sufficient to only hold individuals within the organisation responsible for criminal acts as these individual acts of wrongdoing were part of a larger, organised, systematised programme of criminality.

“Since the first revelations of mass-scale ANC corruption as far back as January 2001, when we learnt about the now infamous ‘arms deal’, the ANC as an organisation has for almost 20 years acted as a collective criminal syndicate operating to enrich itself, its members and its dirty business connections,” Maimane claimed.

“The express aim of the ANC’s national democratic revolution (NDR) — its governance blueprint — is to capture the state. The ANC is a racketeering syndicate whose primary reason for existence is to siphon off public funds to themselves and their connected cadres.

“The inconvenient truth is this: corruption is in the very DNA of the ANC. It was not simply a feature of Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family. It existed long before his presidency and has outlived his presidency. From the arms deal to power stations, from VBS and Bosasa, from Chancellor House to the SSA (State Security Agency) and to every ANC-run municipality in the country, the pattern is the same,” Maimane said.

ANC politicking was not in the interests of the citizens of the country but in the interests of the ANC as a racketeering organisation.

Maimane said the corruption infected all spheres of government with the city of Johannesburg alone facing corruption amounting to about R18bn. Projects were embarked upon not for their own intrinsic value but because they would result in funding or patronage for the ruling party.

He said that despite the overwhelming evidence of corruption at hand, including the litany of criminal cases opened by the DA, not one implicated person, official or organisation had been held accountable for the theft of public money.  This must be due to the fact until now, the criminal justice system itself had been captured. 

ensorl@businesslive.co.za