The recommendation for criminal charges is particularly applicable to Mr Anoj Singh and Mr Koko, who by false pretences led Eskom, through the officials who processed the R659 million payment, to believe that the R659 million payment was in the nature of pre-payment for coal, as was the R1.68 billion pre-payment, later converted into a guarantee, when in truth and fact they knew that the prepayment and the guarantee were needed to enable the Guptas to complete and save the sale of share transaction.
I have often wondered what gives President Thabo Mbeki special access to the experience of racism — access those of us who lived under the apartheid regime all those dark years somehow seem never to have had. Race has such a privileged space in the president’s thinking that no ordinary personal experience has any autonomy. The irony of this apparent radicalism is that black experience is always explained in terms of white experience. In this over-racialised framework, HIV/AIDS does not have any autonomy — it is white people who see black people as “germ carriers”.
In the same way, corruption does not have any autonomy — it is a figment of white people’s imagination. Crime does not have any autonomy — it is white people fixated on black people as the “swart gevaar”.