News24 Assistant Editor for politics and opinions QaanitahHunter will on Thursday talk to author and award-winning investigative journalist karynmaughan about her book, 'Nuclear: Inside South Africa's secret deal'.
“These Russians are shifty shakers,” said Anoj Singh, who would know what a “shifty shaker” was, being an alleged Gupta operator. He was Eskom’s CFO when the Zuma administration was trying to push through a R1-trillion deal to build nuclear reactors in South Africa. It would have been South Africa’s largest infrastructure project ever, and would have indebted South Africa to Russia for at least 30 years, probably longer.
Yet the story of the nuclear deal says a lot about how Jacob Zuma operated when he was president of South Africa and how elements of state capture worked, especially when they were driven from above. Presumably it was between bouts of treatment for the claimed poisoning that Zuma got to chat to his “friend” Vladimir Putin, president and virtual dictator of Russia, and the nuclear deal was set up. It is telling that Zuma tried to push the deal through in a way reminiscent of the way Putin has handled Russia’s oligarchs: it was surrounded by secrecy and there was a great vagueness about financing.
All this, and the resistance to the deal within government, meant Zuma had to start firing finance ministers and parastatal executives and replacing them with more compliant people – you could call them “shifty shakers”. He forced through the signature of an intergovernmental memorandum, which looked more like a binding commercial agreement with Russia and was manifestly illegal – the basis on which the deal was squashed by the court.
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