2014 , the companies collectively earned a paltry R 800 000. After that,
they did not receive a single cent from the department ever again.
The data correlates with anecdotal evidence that Magashule abused
his power as premier to financially reward politically connected
contractors who stayed loyal to him, while punishing those who
somehow betrayed him. ‘If Ace felt that you had stabbed him in the
back, he made sure that you never again got contracts from whichever
department you had been working with,’ said a former close associate
of Magashule.
Mokhesi said it was ‘not true’ that he and the FSHS had used the
court application to target Magashule’s political foes.
Another major beneficiary of low-cost housing contracts in the
Magashule era is soccer-club owner turned construction mogul Mike
Mokoena, whose company Tshwara Thebe Construction, or TTC,
received contracts from the FSHS worth R 310 million between 2012
and 2018. While TTC was one of the 106 respondents in the
department’s court application, it was not sued to return some of its
earnings.
Mokoena is best known as the owner and chairman of the Free State
Stars, a professional soccer team based in Bethlehem in the eastern
Free State. His career as a tenderpreneur appears to have taken off in
2002 , when a collection of companies he co-owned with various family
members clinched tenders from the provincial departments of social
welfare and education to deliver food parcels, textbooks and
stationery.^11
Mokoena has no qualms about being labelled a tenderpreneur. ‘My
life is to tender,’ he told the Sunday Times in 2010. ‘I apply for tenders,