Gangster State

Matseke told me that the project was still not finished due to ‘various
challenges’. Even though Maono was appointed in 2017 , site handover
only took place in March 2018. Some of the challenges included a lack
of water at the site and problems with the beneficiary lists, she
explained. These were the same problems that had been raised in
progress reports in 2014 and 2015 by VNA. Matseke said Maono was
‘scheduled to complete the project within the allocated time frame of
three years’. In other words, the housing project launched in 2014
would be finished in 2020 , if everything went well.
A provincial government gazette from February 2018 announced that
the FSHS would channel a further R 156 million through the FDC for
the purpose of completing the Vrede project.^39 Including the previous
payments made to Tekeweni and VNA, the project cost had now
ballooned to at least R 220 million. The province seemed to be pouring
more and more taxpayers’ money into a project that it was incapable of
finishing.
During a visit to the site in December 2018 , I met a young man who
lived in a shack with his grandmother. Their makeshift home was
erected right next to a concrete platform on which the grandmother’s
ABT home should have been built years before. All around them,
people lived in shacks next to identical concrete squares. ‘My
grandmother was added to the beneficiary list in 2015 , so she has been
waiting for three years,’ the young man told me. Ironically, he was
wearing a bright yellow ANC T-shirt bearing Jacob Zuma’s grinning
face. I recalled something the former president had said on more than
one occasion about the ANC’s continued rule over South Africa.^40
Standing in a field littered with shacks and bare concrete slabs, baking
under the Free State’s merciless sun, I struggled to remember his exact