Gangster State

was shocked by the premier’s brazenness. ‘Ace met with me and told
me that the old man [Zuma] was behind the Vrede houses,’ he claimed.
‘He told me Zuma needed money and that we therefore needed to get
the project going.’
This source explained how the ‘corrupt scheme’, as he called it, was
put together. ‘From the outset the Vrede project was a means to take
money out of the national Department of Human Settlements,’ he told
me in 2018. ‘To avoid governance issues, the Free State province was
identified as a safe haven to facilitate this. An amount was transferred
to the province from which transactions would be made. This included
a “thank-you fee” to Zuma.’ This was the first time I heard the phrase
‘thank-you fee’ in connection with the Vrede RDP project, but it
wouldn’t be the last.
Current and former FSHS insiders became suspicious when
companies from KwaZulu-Natal, and not the Free State, were
contracted for the project. The department appointed Tekeweni Civils,
an outfit from Durban, as the main contractor, with Narsai’s VNA
acting as its consultant. Tekeweni and VNA then subcontracted Khaya
Readykit, seeing as government wanted the houses to be built using
ABT methods. All of this was done without a tender process. ‘The
contract was awarded by our department, but it was on a directive from
the national Department of Human Settlements. We started to refer to it
as Zuma’s houses,’ one FSHS insider told me. The letter from the
anonymous Khaya Readykit director seemingly also confirmed the
president’s involvement in the Vrede housing project. Zuma ‘arranged’
the project, this person claimed.^13 Yet another FSHS source alleged
that after a meeting between Zuma and Magashule in 2013 ,
department officials were informed that the province would invest in a