Nwabisa Makunga: What Zupta years teach us

Call it cautionary optimism if you like. There is a sense in the air that what Julius Malema coined as the Zupta empire has begun to crumble.

The relentless exposure of the #Guptaleaks, as daunting as they may be to keep up with, has awakened us to the kind of mafia running our country.

Consequently, increased public pressure from all quarters of our society has begun to turn the screws on the powerful enterprise operating a shadow state in our land.

Just last week, Eskom lenders drew a line in the sand. They forced Treasury to act against unscrupulous executives who appear to have assisted the Guptas to steal truckloads of money from the power utility.

The emerging details of the complex web of dirty deals are absolutely mind-blowing.

Perhaps on its own, the suspension of Eskom chief financial officer Anoj Singh and the wider Treasury-induced probe may not mean much.

After all, suspending senior government officials is common practice in South Africa.

Getting them into orange jumpsuits and locking them up in stuffy prison cells often proves elusive.

Nonetheless, this is an important step.

Similarly to the ousting of Hlaudi Motsoeneng at the SABC, it lays the groundwork for, hopefully, a legitimate process of accountability.

It also suggests a welcome push back against state capture at its most vital organs – state-owned enterprises.

It signals that the ground has begun to shift and the wheels are coming off.

But don’t get the bubbly out just yet.

The road ahead of us will be a long and even more difficult one.

There are many more scoundrels who continue to abuse their borrowed power for their own selfish needs.

They will fight to the bitter end to hold on to such power and the ill-gotten gains it has afforded them.

But it is our duty as citizens to protect our democracy and its institutions, and to ensure that justice prevails.

To do that, we must take heed of the important lessons from these Zupta years. There are many. But for the purposes of this column, I will highlight just two.

The first is the simple concept that there is no room for ignorance or complacency in a democracy.

While there had been pockets of campaigns centred around certain causes, since 1994 the level of social activism in our country had generally dropped.

Of course there are reasons for this, but they are not my point today.

However, came 9/12 and President Jacob Zuma fired Nhlanhla Nene in the middle of the night.