In March 2017 Professor Mark Swilling of Stellenbosch University was on a flight from Johannesburg from Cape Town. He was in an aisle seat and 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 the R600-million bribe offered to him by the Gupta brothers, a move, knowing Jonas, that came as no surprise to Mark. Mark then read a paper that in subsequent months would be read again and again by a research team Mark would assemble that would eventually produce the Betrayal of the Promise report. Needless to say, the paper Mark read on the plane that day 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. Because Jonas trusted Mark, he candidly shared with him 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 and Vicki Robinson arrived and the first thing Mark noticed was that they gave their phones to Jonas’s 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 record 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 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 Jonas and Gordhan’s now famous call made at the press conference when they were 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 a subsequent book.
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 (SCRP).
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.
The team 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.
There was a constant sense of danger. Offices from which the group worked were broken into, and nothing stolen. Some members of the research team noticed surveillance vehicles outside their residences, and some started to worry about the safety of their children. Ominous statements by then Minister of State Security David Mahlobo about foreign funding, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and regime change reinforced the sense of déjà vu, and a statement heard often was ‘it’s like the struggle years all over again’.
After the Cabinet reshuffle in late March 2017 resulted in the firing of Gordhan and Jonas, the group had to quickly reposition its work. Until this point, the strategy had been focused on the building up of a narrative that effectively defended the National Treasury against capture by strengthening the hand of a group of ministers who were starting to coordinate a campaign against the Zuma-led power elite. After the reshuffle, the strategy shifted to a focus on compiling a report for broad public consumption that would reinforce the convening of some sort of multi-stakeholder national dialogue, possibly leading to the formation of a popular front.
Remarkably, the group of academics who co-wrote the report quickly found common ground and made space in their schedules for getting the work done. The most significant moment in the process was the week the group all spent together at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition in Stellenbosch. While the research team worked on the components of the story, key people, including Jonas, came in for a day or two to make their contributions. By the end of the week the storyline had emerged, together with a work programme that defined who would write which chapter. Without this period of intense engagement and long hours of discussion it would not have been possible to reach the clarity needed to bring out a credible report by May 2017.
The launch of the report, at Wits University in Johannesburg, was covered on prime-time TV and extensively reported in the national press. All the co-authors were involved in radio and TV talk shows, and delivered keynote addresses at several important events.
Two days after the launch, the #GuptaLeaks material – an enormous quantity of anonymously released emails relating to interactions and transactions between individuals involved with the Gupta family – broke into the public domain. The Betrayal of the Promise group were offered access to this material prior to it being made public, but after convening urgently at a meeting at Cape Town International Airport, the group decided this was not our role as academics and refused the offer. The group felt it was too dangerous for to make use of the emails, and that in any case this was a job better done by journalists. Fortunately the #GuptaLeaks emails, when they did hit the public domain, confirmed the academic argument and analysis. These two events, together with the SACC’s presentation a week earlier (see next section), triggered a groundswell that effectively changed the public narrative from one of isolated instances of corruption into one about a systemic process of state capture coordinated by a power elite committed to an explicit political project. This became known as the silent coup.
