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Zuma’s Vrede ‘thank-you fee’

If one were to map the Gupta family’s state-capture exploits, the tiny
Free State town of Vrede would feature as a prominent point of
interest, along with Dubai, Saharanpur, Saxonwold, Sun City and their
former coal mines in Mpumalanga.
The Vrede dairy scandal is one of the most notorious examples of how
state resources were allegedly plundered by friends of Jacob Zuma and
his ally in the Free State, Ace Magashule. But Vrede also fell prey to
another, previously unknown scandal, one that appears to bear
Magashule’s and Zuma’s fingerprints. In this chapter, I reveal how
more than R 220 million in taxpayers’ money was earmarked for a
disaster-ridden housing development on the town’s outskirts. A band of
politically connected contractors were appointed to build 1 000 houses
for some of Vrede’s poorest inhabitants, yet five years after the project
began, less than 200 houses were finished. But of greater concern was
the fact that, while digging up information on this deal, I began to hear
rumours that one of the contractors had channelled a R 2 -million
‘thank-you fee’ to Zuma. At first, I didn’t make much of this, but
information I would later obtain made me pause.
The saga took place while the public and the media were focused on
the infamous dairy scandal playing out around the corner from the
housing project. As usual, some of the country’s most destitute citizens
paid the price for what appears to have been a toxic combination of
mismanagement, incompetence and possible corruption.
The saga begins in Jacob Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal,