firm and the then premier prevailed. One of my sources told me Open
Water’s chairman, Nkondo, married Rooksana Moola, a staffer in
Magashule’s administration, after the firm started working in the Free
State.
Pieterse insisted that this presented no problems whatsoever. ‘Mr.
Magashule’s administration was vast and she [Moola] did not work in
close proximity to Mr. Magashule, or even in his office, and therefore
the insinuation that they married as a consequence of Mr. Nkondo
being that close to Mr. Magashule is not only mischievous but devoid
of fact or truth.’
If there is anything to say about Nkondo, it is that his career as a
government spook was seemingly eventful. In 1997 , then Pan
Africanist Congress (PAC) politician Patricia de Lille included
Nkondo’s name on a list of former ANC underground operatives who
had allegedly acted as double agents for the old apartheid government.^9
The ANC denied the existence of such a list. His name also surfaced
during the 2003 Hefer Commission of Inquiry into allegations that NIA
spooks had spied on National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP)
Bulelani Ngcuka. Nkondo was portrayed as a functionary of the Zuma
camp in the highly politicised ‘spy wars’ of the early 2000 s.^10
After Open Water’s appointment by the FSHS, the SIU’s Free State
branch was apparently strong-armed out of the probe.
A source in the law-enforcement environment with insight into the
matter claimed that at one point the SIU was asked to stop its
investigation. ‘The SIU was told to stop working on the Free State
contracts,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know where that order came from, but it
must have been from a very senior political office.’
Another source, an SIU insider, said Open Water effectively blocked
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