My sense of mission never waned, but I felt a deep sense of loss and disorientation as it dawned on me that the rumours of a parallel state were not only true but had assumed a scale so audacious that South Africa’s state-building project had fallen headlong into the hands of business interests whose value system seemed directly opposed to that of the ANC that I knew. I thought of the years we had spent fighting for democracy; we lost our youth and we suffered at the hands of the apartheid state. Now we were faced with this – a mafia state that threatened to usurp everything we had fought for. In many ways, unlike apartheid, this felt like an invisible coup. I felt deeply disempowered. I felt like a puppet in a much bigger game that I could not comprehend. I turned down the bribe and navigated the months that followed in a state of incomprehension about the future of our country. I could trust only a handful of people. Everything that I had held as sacrosanct for 45 years was suddenly disintegrating. I began to examine my basic assumptions about what democracy meant in South Africa. Who were we as a nation? How did we reach this point? I read widely, I studied other countries that had faced similar crises and I sought the international experience of the likes of Daniel Kaufmann and Joel Hellman, experts on state capture. Conceptually this helped, but it also confirmed to me that there was no clear precedent to help us chart the way.
The Centre for Change was born out of an imperative to defeat state capture, but that was only the beginning.
In October 2015, the Gupta brothers - the architects of State Capture in South Africa - offered Mcebisi Jonas the position of minister of finance in exchange for R600-million. At the time he was deputy Minister of Finance.
The National Treasury, one of the last uncompromised state institutions, was standing in the way of the Gupta's complete capture of South Africa. The brothers had already destroyed the country's governance structures to such an extent that they, not the democratically elected elite, were controlling Cabinet appointments. The Gupta’s had bet that a cool half a billion rand would buy them the National Treasury.
But their scheme backfired. Jonas rejected their offer, went public and set into motion a historic, citizen-led rebellion that reversed the Gupta’s imminent undoing of South Africa's democracy.
