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       Prologue

      In mid-March 2017 Mark Swilling was travelling in business class to Johannesburg from Cape Town. He was in an aisle seat and Mcebisi Jonas, then the deputy minister of finance, was in the aisle seat on the opposite side. They had last worked together in the early 1990s when Jonas was active in the Eastern Cape, coordinating a forum focused on appropriate economic development strategies for that province.

      After exchanging the usual ‘comradely’ greetings, Jonas gave Mark his iPad and said, ‘Read this and tell me what you think.’ He had already by then refused a R600 million bribe offered to him by the Gupta brothers, a move, knowing him, that came as no surprise to Mark. Mark then read a paper that in subsequent months would be read again and again by the research team – the first comprehensive overview of what all South Africans would soon come to call ‘state capture’. This was the paper that Mark gave to Ivor Chipkin at their first meeting to discuss the assembly of a team that would eventually produce the Betrayal of the Promise report. Needless to say, it was a paper that needed to be kept totally confidential.

      Those who read this paper in those dark days of 2017 were all profoundly disturbed by it, and particularly frightened by the fact that it was written by a member of the Cabinet. Jonas candidly shared with Mark his deep pessimism about what was going on. He took down Mark’s phone number, promising to call him. A few days later Mark got a call from Jonas asking to meet at the Sustainability Institute at Stellenbosch University.

      Jonas arrived and the first thing Mark noticed was that he gave his phone to the driver before entering the building. The two hours that followed were among the most remarkable and surprising Mark had experienced since 1994. Jonas spoke about what he thought was going on. Mark desperately wanted to tape what he was saying, or take notes, but he had no idea why Jonas was there and what he needed done. Mark just absorbed what he could, describing the experience to Ivor a few days later as the sum of all fears.

      When Jonas finished briefing him, Mark asked why he had come to see him. Jonas wanted to know what the academics were doing about the situation. He said, ‘Our concern is that the narrative is about corruption – that creates the wrong impression. South Africa needs to understand that this is a systemic problem – it is a political project to capture the state. The narrative needs to change.’ He wanted to make it clear that this was not just a criminal enterprise. It was a political project.

      Mark then suggested setting up a group of academics who could pull together all the information and publish a report that, to use Pravin Gordhan’s now famous phrase uttered at a press conference when he and Jonas were eventually fired two weeks later, ‘joined the dots’. Jonas’s immediate reaction seemed negative: ‘We don’t have the funds for that.’ After Mark said the academics would raise the funds, Jonas agreed. Subsequently they would meet almost weekly, and a network of people within and outside the state was built up who provided the key information that was used in the report and in this book.

      Mark’s first move after this initial meeting with Jonas was to contact Ivor, talking via the Signal app, and Ivor’s immediate response was ‘I’m in’. But he had independently established links with former National Treasury and South African Revenue Service (SARS) officials, and he warned Mark that this was dangerous work. What followed was a flurry of meetings with a number of prominent academics to invite them to join the group. Several of the academics contacted refused to participate, which reflected the atmosphere of the time. Those were dark days, when fear was used to fragment oppositional thinking and the Zuma-led power elite projected an image of supreme confidence, legitimised by the unwavering loyalty of the governing party, and by populist rhetoric like ‘white monopoly capital’ and ‘radical economic transformation’, language that was broadcast widely by the Gupta-financed campaign orchestrated by Bell Pottinger Private, a UK-based multinational public relations company.

      However, a core group of people who had never worked together gelled to co-write the report that was published two months later as Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa Is Being Stolen, calling itself the State Capacity Research Project. Mark and Ivor, as well as the other members of the research team, were all familiar with the complex political dynamics of the real world of everyday governance. Mark had cut his teeth doing solid political analysis as a young academic in the 1980s, analysing the apartheid state’s ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy during the first State of Emergency and its ‘winning-hearts-and-minds’ strategy during the second State of Emergency. Both Ivor and Mark had subsequently analysed the dynamics of transition to democracy and the complex process of building a developmental, capable state administration. Sikhulekile Duma, a participant in Mark’s master’s degree programme, had experience as a #FeesMustFall student leader, which brought in a perspective from the younger generation. All the other authors had hands-on experience of public sector governance, including economists Lumkile Mondi, who had worked at a senior level in SOEs, and Mzukisi Qobo, who had been a government official.

      While all the members of the research team had a general knowledge of the institutional meltdown taking place since Jacob Zuma had become president of South Africa, when Jonas spoke all were deeply shocked by the sheer audacity of the Zuma–Gupta networks and how they operated.

      We had to assemble a communications system reminiscent of the struggle years, when research aimed at supporting the mass democratic movement had to be protected from the security police. The strategy was not to try hide everything, because if you did, the gap between intense activity and absence of a work programme inevitably attracted attention. This meant hiding the ten per cent of our work that was really sensitive. Using Google Docs and apps like Signal to communicate, rather than WhatsApp, became key. During the 1980s, when the task was exposing counter-insurgency and the ‘winning-hearts-and-minds’ strategy, the greatest challenge was setting up secret meetings with sources in the system. These had to be face-to-face and fairly regular. Today it is not necessary to meet a source. Messaging sources via Signal and collaboration with them via Google Docs, using false email addresses, works extremely well. Cellphones were switched off and removed from

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