TOM EATON | Now we’re talking business: government’s forgotten partner in crime

The revelation that Zweli Mkhize’s daughter-in-law allegedly ploughed R1m of Digital Vibes loot into two beauty salons has been treated as a minor, and therefore transitory, scandal. Which is a pity, since it offers an almost perfect example of what the kids call a “teachable moment”.

According to the report by the Scorpio investigative team, Sthoko Mkhize ploughed R650,000 into a Tammy Taylor Nails franchise in Pietermaritzburg and another R446,000 into a new salon called Gold Ace Cuts and Curls.

By modern SA standards, the figures are comically tiny. If they are ever mentioned in the annals of state capture, they will surely be a footnote of a footnote. If you accept that R500bn was stolen over 10 years, at an average rate of R5.7m an hour, the amount that launched Gold Ace Cuts And Curls is about five minutes’ worth of looting.

Many businesses in SA have been founded and run by honest and admirable people who paid their workers what they were worth. But it is also true that many started as laundromats for washing stolen wealth.

It is very likely, therefore, that this particular example of sleaze will be filed under the Small Kerfuffles folder in the Amateurish Theft folder in the B-Grade Tenderpreneurs folder in the Corrupt Also-Rans folder in the bulging State Capture folder. At the very least, it will be filed under Government Corruption.

Which, as I said earlier, is a pity. Because it should also be filed away under Cautionary Reminders About The Nature Of Business In SA.

I’ve written before about how thoroughly we’ve been trained in this country to draw a radical distinction between the state on the one hand and the private sector on the other. The ANC has encouraged this idea itself: by setting up big business as the enemy, and then revealing itself to be rotten to the core, it compelled millions of us to believe that the enemy of our enemy (or at least the party stealing all our money) was our friend.

If you think I’m exaggerating, name three ANC leaders you believe were heavily involved with state capture. Easy, yes?

Now name three of auditing firms integrally involved in the enabling and cover-up of state capture.

If you are like me, you had to think for a moment.

The fact is we do not think about private sector corruption in the same way we think about government sleaze. Which means we keep failing to understand the extent to which they are deeply and intimately intertwined, each protecting and entrenching the other.

Many businesses in SA have been founded and run by honest and admirable people who paid their workers what they were worth. But it is also true that many started as laundromats for washing stolen wealth, whether that wealth was the labour of exploited and oppressed people under colonialism and apartheid, or our tax rands under the new dispensation.

Gold Ace Cuts And Curls is unlikely to survive. If it isn’t shut down as a business built with the proceeds of a crime, then the economic sabotage of Pietermaritzburg will almost certainly finish it off.

But it’s worth imagining a future that looks a lot like our past; in which ferocious journalists don’t show us the connection between the state and private sector; in which we fail to learn; where the salon hangs on for a year, then two, then five.

A second branch is opened, and then a third and fourth.

Ten years later, Gold Ace becomes a chain of beauty and wellness stores. Ten years after that, it lists on the JSE.

And after 50 years, its long-serving CEO tearfully accepts the standing ovation from the bright lights of SA business, celebrating half a century of one of the country’s most beloved businesses.

And nobody remembers how it started, because they’re all too busy being angry with the government.