STATE CAPTURE
Jacob Zuma’s personal colonisation funded by western actors
We have corporates willing to buy political access and ministers and officials all too willing to sell
It’s “a strange thing”, muses a peasant in Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook (1852), “when the old order passes and there’s no new one to take its place.” Ovsyanikov has witnessed the brutality and avarice of rich landowners and wonders: “Must I really die without really seeing any new system in action?” The peaceful transfer of power with our first democratic election in 1994 was hailed as a “miracle revolution”. But it wasn’t a revolution at all. I have only to glance out of my window to see three separate communities: a wealthy white cluster tucked snugly into this valley, a dilapidated “coloured village” overlooking the harbour, and the raggedy black shantytown growing in size and squalor as shacks creep up the mountainside. Perhaps this is merely a deceptive interregnum: like the liberal, bourgeois lull in Russia between the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. In the 19th century, the Russians had a term for westernised liberals wh...
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