Gangster State

plates beneath the perpetually divided ruling party were moving once
again. The ANC’s 2012 national conference lay in the not-too-distant
future, and Sexwale was already being associated with campaigns and
factions that sought to unseat Zuma and his allies.^17 ‘Sexwale wanted
Ace to fail. He wanted the Free State to pay back the money it couldn’t
spend to make Ace look weak and incapable,’ said a source with
insight into the Free State’s RDP debacle.
To avoid any embarrassment or political damage, the department had
to spend its money as quickly as it could. To this end, it developed an
expenditure recovery plan (ERP) to fast-track payments to a new batch
of contractors.^18 The ERP was, it seems, masterminded by
Magashule’s office and enforced by Zwane, but neither man would
ever be held accountable for the financial disaster that followed.
With the initiation of the ERP, the money sluices were now well and
truly open in the Free State. This sudden profligacy attracted all
manner of connected contractors, some of them closely linked to
Magashule. One was Rachelle Els, a businesswoman and, according to
several sources, a ‘close friend’ from his hometown. Most concerningly,
Els and Magashule were once business partners, or at least intended to
be. Company records list Magashule and Els as co-directors in an
entity called National Pride Trading 456 , which was established in
mid- 2007 , about two years before Magashule became premier. It has
since been deregistered. A subsequent chapter details the contracts
awarded to Els.
‘Ace literally ensured that people got allocated RDP projects,’ said one
former FSHS insider. ‘He would meet with someone like Rachelle Els
over the weekend, then on the following Monday we were told that we
needed to award 50 or 100 houses to Els’s company.’