The chickens are finally coming home to roost for many of those who profited from our dark days of state capture.
The Special Investigative Unit is currently conducting investigations into SAA, Denel, Transnet and the New Age newspaper.
Last week, the hammer fell for five former executives of state-owned enterprise Transnet, when they were arrested on several charges that include money laundering, fraud and corruption.
Among them is former CEO Siyabonga Gama, who will now stand accused alongside businessman Kuben Moodley, who was arrested last year and was allegedly paid R74 million for no apparent reason.
It’s a convoluted affair, involving double payments, cancelled contracts and eye-watering amounts of money being channelled through companies, one of them with links to the Guptas.
Much of the charges stem from the locomotive deal that went south very quickly, when it was discovered that the 1 064 trains weren’t going to fit on our train lines.
In this case alone, around R282m was wasted – that’s almost half of what’s needed to repair Eskom’s Medupi Power Station, that would help us out of our current load shedding hell. Which by the way, would’ve rendered those trains useless anyway.
So maybe we should be focussing our financial attention on getting the foundational infrastructure, like electricity, working first before investing in things that depend on those infrastructure to work.
But that’s a thought experiment for another day.
Right now it seems NPA boss Shamila Batohi is sticking to the word she gave us last month when she said major prosecutions were on the way for the rest of this year.
If we add the R255m involved in the “asbestos heist” that the ANC’s suspended Secretary-General is charged with, then we have all the money to repair Medupi.
In fact, if we add up all the monies highlighted in the Zondo Report to have disappeared in the various scandals over the years, we would be able to build a new Eskom from scratch, and have some change left for sweets.
Instead there are houses in the Free State that still have toxic asbestos roofs in 2022, while we have no trains and lots of load shedding, teetering our economy on the brink of collapse.
It’s hard to believe that all of this can be traced back to one family’s insatiable greed and how it was able to infect a susceptible president and his minions.
It’s taken a very long time, but our wheels of justice do appear to be turning. Rather painfully slowly, than not at all.
All we need now, is a R22m monumental flag to celebrate our unity and national pride. Oh wait…!