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Angelo Agrizzi is currently being treated at a private Johannesburg hospital, and it’s reported that he is in a critically ill condition inside the intensive care unit.

Many will have little to no sympathy for his plight, given that he was central to the criminality that went on at Bosasa, and is alleged to have planned to jet off from South Africa before facing the music in court.

Agrizzi has also recently released a book – a “corruption memoir” titled Inside the Belly of the Beast – which blows the whistle on “almost two decades of bribery, politicking and corruption”.

That’s according to the Daily Maverick’s Melinda Ferguson, who recently visited Agrizzi in hospital to speak to him about his treatment over the past three or so weeks.

That time has been “a macabre dance between life and death for South Africa’s biggest whistle-blower”:

Before Agrizzi was denied bail by Magistrate Phillip Vorster on 14 October (on the grounds of being deemed a flight risk) and incarcerated at Johannesburg Central, aka Sun City, his kidneys had been working just fine…

Now kidney failure and the subsequent threat of total organ shutdown has necessitated daily dialysis.

He seems to be reading my thoughts.

“They tried to kill me. Twice.”

After being refused bail, Agrizzi was forced to walk up four flights of stairs (“nearly killed me…was really struggling to breathe”), and taken to a cell inside Sun City, where he later lost consciousness.

When he woke up, he was at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, with his legs shackled to the bed, which he had soiled.

Agrizzi went on to describe five days of hell:

“All I know is that my condition worsened. I do remember speaking to an intern doctor – Nazir I think – doing rounds, who must have alerted someone to have me transferred out of the hellhole. I have been told that once I arrived at the private clinic, six or seven nurses worked on me to revive me as I was basically dead. When I finally regained consciousness, one nurse showed me her hands which were black and blue from trying to revive me.”

Image: Melinda Ferguson

…For the next few days Agrizzi hovered, unconscious, between life and death. He was intubated, he was fed through a tube and plugged into a bank of life support machines.

According to Agrizzi’s lawyer, Mannie Witz, he remained chained to his hospital bed in the private hospital, with as many as nine armed guards keeping an eye on him.

His day in court may soon come, but as Ferguson points out, his treatment thus far has been harsher than others implicated in similar crimes:

It makes little sense to many South Africans why an important whistle-blower like Agrizzi, who is a vital witness to the corrupt relationship between Bosasa and certain political players, has been shackled and criminalised, while a large number of “Dudu Myenis” are allowed to walk free and are not brought before our judicial structures and prosecuted.

Instead, we are forced to watch former SAA chairperson Myeni refuse to answer questions on the grounds of not wanting to “incriminate” herself, and former SAA board member and SAA Technical (SAAT) chairperson Yakhe Kwinana talk about ‘fat cakes’.

[source:dailymav]