Johannesburg – Like many patriotic South Africans, I long for the day when former president Jacob Zuma’s notorious friends, the Guptas, are finally brought back to the country to account for their actions during those recent years when they ran a parallel government from their cushy Saxonwold compound.
I yearn for the day when the three Gupta brothers, together with the many collaborators they left behind before they fled, stand before the justices of the high court to explain how they managed to devise such an elaborate scheme that would see us robbed of billions of rand on a scale not seen in this country since the advent of democracy.
How I pray that South Africans will one day witness Atul, Ajay and Rajesh Gupta explain how they managed to hijack all our key state institutions before turning them into their family cash cow.
The grand-scale looting of South Africa’s resources by the Guptas before they fled, first to India (their country of birth) and later to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has left a country in deep pain.
With the assistance of many people who were entrusted with the responsibility of looking after the affairs of our country, the Guptas raided key South African institutions as they left them near-total collapse.
During this frenzy of looting, the Guptas ensured that no stone was left unturned.
They became a super executive authority.
They took over the responsibility of making cabinet appointments as they frequently summoned ministers to their Saxonwold compound where they would issue instructions.
The elected government only existed in name.
It effectively became a puppet of the Guptas. Many of Zuma’s cabinet ministers grovelled before the Gupta brothers and were simply used as cannon fodder in a ferocious battle to usurp the country’s financial resources.
Thanks to the heads-up by Norma Mngoma, we now know that the Guptas even had a cash dispensing machine – similar to an ATM – installed for their cash-seeking puppets.
The Guptas left in their wake a collapsed Eskom, which was once one of the thriving national economic assets.
They captured the running of the public broadcaster and ensured that unskilled and uncouth individuals were placed in leadership positions. The Guptas made a clean sweep.
Transnet, Denel, SAA and even the Government Communications and Information System did not escape the Gupta invasion.
Those who dared expose this great heist were hounded out of the government as the state-capture project ran amok.
How strange that this wide-scale pillaging of our resources was to be arrogantly categorised as radical economic transformation by its enablers.
It never was. It was, on the contrary, a project of radical economic dispossession of South Africa’s people.
This is why renewed efforts to have the Guptas extradited from the UAE, following the ratification of an extradition treaty, become significant.
The Guptas extradition will provide closure to a country still reeling in pain.
It is now up to the UAE to avoid further delays to have these notorious three musketeers brought back to SA so that they can face the consequences of this great betrayal of the South African democratic project.
Failure to extradite them will amount to complicity to this shameful betrayal by the UAE.
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