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Mfesane Siboto
Dear former president Jacob Zuma. As a law graduate, I watched with marvel your eloquent and technically sound exposition of what a state is.
You are indeed correct, Msholozi. I am in agreement that a state is constituted of three branches of governance – the executive, the judiciary and Parliament.
Not once has anyone suggested that the latter two branches have been captured. How then can one argue that there is state capture? Laughable reasoning by your detractors, Nxams. Banomona laba, Msholozi (they are jealous, Msholozi).
They are jealous because you have been successful in radically transforming the lives of those that matter to you. You have led by example, my president. After all, you are the father of radical economic transformation. How are you expected to feed the village when you cannot feed your own household? Banomona laba.
They accused you of patronage. How could they miss the obvious strategy you were employing – build and enrich the core, and then expand outwardly. This is such a basic economic growth strategy. I must admit that I initially missed the strategy too. It all clicked when you insisted that you be kept on as state president to solidify our relations with Brics.
It was at this point that you were finally going to bring into effect your grand radical economic transformation strategy for the benefit of the nation, having empowered those close to you first – inward, outward strategy.
These howling clever blacks missed it. Instead, they aligned themselves with white monopoly capital to discredit the son of the soil, our father in radical economic transformation. They missed the brilliance of your chess acumen. The chess grandmaster plan. Because of their greed for power, they evicted you from office prematurely. How are we possibly better off as a country without you, Msholozi? Banomona laba.
I digress. Back to what state capture is. You will hear them suddenly say substance over form matters in understanding what state capture is. The fact that one branch is captured does not detract from the substantive argument that state institutions and personalities were used to advance certain interests without complying with the legal prescripts, so they argue. Whether it is referred to as state capture or executive capture should not matter, they will continue to argue.
Then why did they not just call it executive capture then? In not so long from now they will take you to court accusing you of state capture. You will masterfully raise the defense of state capture being a technically incorrect description of what they accuse you of.
They will then accuse you of a Stalingrad approach. Whose problem is it that they are not familiar with a basic concept of “state”?
Even if they were to suggest that the executive is captured, how many Cabinet ministers are there? Does that mean all ministers are captured? Can they just say what they mean for once?
They say deal with the substantive allegation instead of dancing around meaningless technicalities. How about they read a dictionary first? How are you expected to engage them on the complex intersectionality between the "charity begins at home" idiom and politics when they cannot even define "state"?
I retrospectively agree, we should have let you become a dictator so you would not have to deal with such basic minds. The real reason you could not achieve radical economic transformation in time was precisely because they had a ballooned appetite for taking you to court.
None of this would have happened had you been a dictator. They would not let you be a dictator, because banomona laba.
- Mfesane Siboto is an Advocate of the High Court in Johannesburg.
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