Institutionalised state corruption has morphed into a phenomenon entitled state capture in South Africa. State capture is the repurposing of the country's institutions towards private individual interests. In the process public interest is jettisoned in favour of private material gain for select connected individuals in the private and public sector. The issue of state capture dominated public debate about the future of governance in South Africa after the former Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela's report titled State of Capture was released in late 2016. This document highlights how the Zuma-Gupta patronage network used state companies to enrich themselves. While some believe state capture to be a fairly new phenomenon, many analyst argue that it had been part of the dealings of the ruling party for years. It could be argued that it started post-1994, after the state adopted a variety of policies to re-allocate resources across a broad sector. This included incentives for black industries and Black Economic Empowerment strategies. This radical economic empowerment meant controlling the height of the economy instead of creating black-owned small and medium-size enterprises. With that in mind, this article seeks to provide critical reflections of state capture in South Africa.
Conspiracy: here two or more relatively autonomous parties mutually agree to cooperate in secret to achieve a shared goal.Collusion: this refers to the way a relatively more powerful racketeer uses various 'coercive feelings' to ensure that one or more 'junior' parties agree to actively collude in ways that are often denied by the story that the racketeer tells, and the enrolled person chooses to believe.Coercion: this refers to the way a racketeer uses various direct and indirect threats to coerce a reluctant party to actively participate in a particular racket.Complicity: this racket is similar to coercion, but the aim is not active enrolment in the racket, but rather passive compliance of someone who knows what is going on but is enrolled to say and do nothing.Con: this refers to complex rackets where the racketeer sells a story to enrol others on false pretenses that the enrolled person fully believes. This chapter contextualises these rackets within an understanding of the interaction between economic policies, the dynamics of the polity and South Africa's challenging economic context. The core proposition is that the black political elite that gained control of the state after 1994 used political power to create the economic conditions
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