8
‘Bring your people’
When Ace Magashule became Free State premier in 2009 , he almost
immediately began meddling in the affairs of the provincial
departments with the largest budgets. One of those was the Free State
Department of Human Settlements (FSHS), which is primarily tasked
with providing low-cost housing to the province’s poorest citizens.^1 The
FSHS became the site of such rampant looting by the Magashule
capture network that it deservedly takes up a comparatively large
portion of this book.
Let’s start with the province’s R 1 -billion Reconstruction and
Development Programme (RDP) scandal from around 2010. This
sordid saga is underpinned by a toxic combination of mismanagement
and corruption, and Magashule’s fingerprints are all over it.
Earlier media reports exposed the involvement of a few politically
connected individuals. But Magashule’s cronies escaped scrutiny and
his own role in engineering this financial disaster remained under
wraps, thanks to the department’s well-orchestrated management of the
scandal’s fallout, which included selective legal proceedings that
deliberately shielded Magashule’s friends and associates from exposure
and financial liability. Most alarmingly, it appears Magashule may have
directly participated in a wide-ranging cover-up to suppress the true
facts by roping in a private forensic firm owned by a former
government spy boss to ‘investigate’ the saga. This firm allegedly took
hold of key documents and evidence, and subsequently prevented the
Special Investigating Unit (SIU), which had also been tasked with