“The ax has fallen.”

January 14, 2018 9:01 PM

The Brothers Who Bought South Africa
posted by the man of twists and turns (8 comments total)

"If you have a bag with you, you can have your cash right now."

Well, it is 5 cents extra if you don't bring your own bags.
posted by Marky at 10:50 PM on January 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

Great piece. Zuma is such a bastard, he has wrought damage in South Africa it will take decades to recover from.

I want to call out this line: . Blue chip companies including McKinsey, KPMG, and SAP have been embroiled in what’s fast becoming a global scandal.

We often think of corruption as something that happens "over there", typically perpetuated by swarthy strongmen. It's a convenient, racist, view that elides our part in corruption. Without western companies, western people and western banks, the rapacious pillaging of these countries couldn't occur on anywhere near the scale we see it.

The west is an active participant, facilitator and beneficiary of developing world corruption. Large and prestigious westerns companies knowingly do this,and will continue to do so as long as we remain apathetic to it.
posted by smoke at 1:23 AM on January 15, 2018 [13 favorites]

If you're interested in reading about the mechanics of corruption like this, I highly recommend The Looting Machine - it's a fantastic, if depressing, read.
posted by smoke at 1:28 AM on January 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

I guess we should prepare for a new wave of state captures as the bitcoin billionaires realize money = power. Hate to bring this up at every occasion.
posted by Laotic at 4:31 AM on January 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

I have been humming and hawing over doing a Gupta/Zuma FPP for months but new stories keep on breaking and it is getting overwhelming.

That being said we are now (hopefully) on the tail end of a kleptocratic administration, the US is just getting started.
posted by PenDevil at 5:33 AM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also: The NPA goes after the Guptas, sets sights on assets worth about R1.6bn
posted by PenDevil at 6:50 AM on January 15, 2018

Wow, what a great article.

And the story itself - a nobody spice trader from Sahranpur sends his sons out to seek their fortune in Delhi, China, and Africa; the brother in South Africa starts selling shoes in 1993, then Windows PCs; and by 2010, he's sitting next to the South African president in a hotel suite in India as they receive investor supplicants. That is straight out of pulp fiction from the 80s.

The closing sentence, though:

South Africans are learning to their chagrin, even the most thoughtfully constructed institutions are ultimately only as principled as the people who run them.

That's a bit on the nose for the US (and maybe even UK?) readership, isn't it? (cf. our current US politics megathread.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:29 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

After a protracted few days of "negotiations", Zuma has resigned.
posted by PenDevil at 1:04 PM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]