[UPDATE: You can download and read the full report, Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa is being stolen, here.]

Last night, an “extraordinary report into state capture” was released at the Donald Gordon auditorium at Wits University’s School of Governance, reports City Press.

In attendance were “prominent actors in the war on state looting”:

[F]ormer deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas, to whom the Gupta brothers famously offered R600 000 in cash and an additional R600 million if he accepted the finance minister position and “worked” with them; former acting South African Revenue Service commissioner Ivan Pillay, sacked a short while after telling President Jacob Zuma his tax affairs were to be investigated; Neeshan Balton, the head of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation who led the charge against Zuma at the struggle icon’s many memorial services; Bishop Ziphozihle Siwa of the SA Council of Churches, which released the findings of their own Unburdening Panel last week; and, predictably, Sipho Pityana, the force behind SaveSA and the voice of a nascent citizen’s movement Zuma is finding difficult to ignore.

They and many others who had packed into the auditorium were in attendance to hear the release of the report titled: Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa is being stolen.

The report details the “extraordinary story of the establishment of a parallel shadow state alongside South Africa’s constitutional democracy,” which is a “deliberate political project of Zuma and his cronies to loot the state and state-owned companies to enrich themselves and their acolytes under the guise of radical economic transformation”.

We could all see that coming, although none of us really wanted to believe it.

Authored by academics from the universities of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Witwatersrand, and Johannesburg, the report found that the ANC can no longer claim to be the centre of power.

Here’s more:

“This report suggests South Africa has experienced a silent coup that has removed the ANC from its place as the primary force for transformation in society … Resistance and capture is what South African politics is about today,” the report opens.

The report also found that there is a “political project at work to repurpose state institutions to suit a constellation of rent-seeking networks that have been constructed and now span the symbiotic relationship between the constitutional and shadow state. This is akin to a silent coup.”

The report shows how the Constitutional state, for which citizens voted, is being eroded and subverted through a concerted campaign which has involved breaking down institutions such as Sars, the Hawks – which has simply not investigated cases of corruption against protagonists in the state capture project – and state-owned companies that have redirected their “procurement spend” to favour the Gupta-Zuma network of brokers.

In addition, it states that Cabinet has been “hollowed out” and replaced with a series of “kitchen cabinets” of Zuma in which power rests, not in the executive or in Luthuli House.

And there you have it.

Written in eight weeks, the report comes as ANC veterans and outspoken Zuma opponents plan to call for him to step down at this weekend’s meeting.

Of course, it has been too clear for too long that the faction of the ANC led by JZ has lost its moral compass.

All we can hope now is that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma doesn’t take the top spot when Zuma gets booted.

Take the time to read the rest of what the City Press had to say here.

[source:city-press&businesslive]