Gangster State

bought his way to the top of the ANC’s Free State hierarchy. ‘That man
was not scared to produce money at ANC conferences,’ he told me
when we spoke about Magashule’s rise in the party’s ranks. ‘We saw
him with cash, and this made some delegates very uncomfortable. But
others were brought to conferences in buses that stopped at KFC or
Nando’s. Some of these delegates were also put up in nice hotels or
guesthouses, away from other party members. This was all done to buy
their support.’
Even some of Magashule’s closest former allies admitted that the
party’s democratic processes had been a farce. One of them made a
startling admission during an interview in mid- 2018. ‘I helped Ace to
swing conferences and branches for years,’ this former PEC member
and MEC told me. ‘We bought members. The capture started at the
branches and then spread to the regional conferences and finally the
provincial conferences. Everything mentioned during those court cases
was true.’
We will get to those legal proceedings in a bit, but first let us unpack
some of the financial transactions that seem to prove that Magashule
indeed squeezed cash out of contractors to book certain party members
into comfortable hotels and guesthouses during provincial conferences.
I spoke to a businessman whose firm secured contracts worth more
than R 50 million from the provincial government during Magashule’s
time as premier. In early 2012 , this person needed to meet with the
premier about his company’s work in the Free State. He told me that
Mamorena Mosala, the office manager at the ANC’s head office in
Bloemfontein, facilitated the meeting. Email exchanges between him
and Mosala seemingly confirm this. For the pleasure of meeting with
Magashule, the businessman was allegedly required to make a