LETTER: ANC’s ‘premier league’ ruined provinces

I should like to congratulate David Lewis for his analysis of the “Zupta” phenomenon, the first real attempt we’ve seen to understand how this phenomenon worked as a system (“Reviewing how state capture happened provides red flags for the future”, July 18).

I have one suggested addition. The “premier league”, apart from being a franchised offshoot of the Zuma-Gupta nexus, seems also to have had structural implications for the provinces they ruled.

The premiers became such all-powerful bosses within their fiefdoms that — certainly in Ace Magashule’s case in the Free State — he was able to dictate who would become mayors in that province’s towns and cities.

This almost certainly extended to his taking a tithe from their corrupt municipal operations. I imagine that something similar applied in the other premier league provinces — Mpumalanga, the North West and KwaZulu-Natal.

It is worth noting that none of the Free State towns ever gets clean audits, that all these towns are in a very poor state, and all are losing population as people and businesses flee from these probably dying towns.

Bloemfontein could well be the first metro to collapse. I do not think it an exaggeration to attribute this gradual extinguishing of urban life to Magashule’s long, authoritarian and corrupt reign.

RW Johnson
Via email

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