Gangster State

witness number 136 in the state’s list of witnesses for the matter.^6
During a meeting with him in 2018 , Narsai told me he had been
dragged into the Arms Deal probe as a result of VNA’s involvement
with the Development Africa Trust, set up by Vivian Reddy, the
businessman we met in the previous chapter. In his judgment in the
Schabir Shaik trial, Judge Hilary Squires found that money from
French arms supplier Thales was flushed through Reddy’s trust and
ultimately used to help pay for the first upgrades to Zuma’s Nkandla
homestead in the early 2000 s.^7
But Narsai was adamant that his company had nothing to do with
Zuma’s Arms Deal shenanigans or the Nkandla upgrades. He told me
that VNA had worked alongside Reddy’s trust on King Goodwill
Zwelithini’s palace, and that the Scorpions investigators had
mistakenly identified VNA as a role-player in Zuma’s Arms Deal
payments. The Scorpions had been ‘off the mark’, Narsai told me.
More than a decade later, however, VNA did become involved with
Zuma and a construction project near Nkandla. Between 2010 and
2012 , Narsai seems to have delivered in his role as a ‘contracts agent’
for Khaya Readykit. The company clinched contracts to build thirty
early childhood development (ECD) centres for the KwaZulu-Natal
provincial government.^8 But it would turn out to be a cursed deal for
Khaya Readykit.
In an anonymous letter to a community newspaper in 2017 , one of the
company’s directors later explained what happened. ‘We were being
set up by the KZN [KwaZulu-Natal] contracts agent [Narsai] who
directed that the healthy profit [from the ECD centre contracts] be
spent delivering free houses to ANC beneficiaries around KZN
including eventually 15 of them at Nkandla,’ this person alleged.^9 A