This question has often been asked since Mashatile was elected deputy president of the ANC in December last year and soon after became the deputy president of the country.
South African citizens were somewhat relieved that the infamous David Mabuza was no longer a heartbeat away from the presidency in the country.
Mashatile was not the Ramaphosa faction’s preferred candidate, but Eastern Cape Prime Minister Oscar Mabuyane, who has since made headlines due to revelations at the University of Fort Hare that he was admitted under false pretenses as a Master’s student at the controversial institution where the Special Investigation Unit (SUE) had to intervene after assassination attacks on the vice-chancellor and rector pointed to large-scale maladministration.
Mabuyane managed to obtain an interdict to exclude his own alleged dishonesty from the SOE’s investigation into mismanagement. In his court papers, he argued that he supports the investigation, but does not want his own alleged dishonesty to be part of the investigation.
But back to Mashatile. Already in September 2008, shortly after he beat Angie Motshekga in the race to become premier ANC chairperson in Gauteng, he was identified by the journalist Alex Eliseev as the “Don of the Alex mafia” – a dark network of powerful people from the Alexandra township – who is accused of not declaring his interest in several companies to the tune of R50 million, awarding dubious tenders and blowing hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ rands at a restaurant in Sandton.”
The lunch bill from two years earlier (2006) referred to was then R96 375.
The names emerging as part of the “Alex mafia” include Mashatile, as well as Mike Maile (brother of Gauteng MEC Lebogang Maile who recently denied that R1.3 billion earmarked for development work in Alexandra had disappeared), Nkenke Kekana (co-founder of Business Connexion who got big contracts in Gauteng and hired Mashatile’s daughter at the time while the tender process was open) and Bridgman Sithole (who was involved in Business Connexion with Mashatile and Kekana).
Mashatile was in the news at the time because he first declared his R50 million stake in the company, but later denied that he held shares there when his conflict of interest in awarding tenders to the company came to light.
Last week, new allegations of corrupt practices by Mashatile surfaced News24 published, but the icing on the cake was surely the video clip that has been circulating since Monday in which Mashatile’s bodyguards, all dressed in tight-fitting suits and armed with R5 rifles slung over their shoulders, brutally kick three helpless victims on the N1 highway and hit, before speeding off, leaving their victims flat on their backs on the highway.
The victims’ sin was apparently that they did not give way soon enough when the Don of the Alex mafia wanted to rush past on the N1 with his blue light entourage.
There is no end to the dishonesty and racketeering of the people in charge of our country. Factional battles have simply become a struggle to give each scavenger their rightful place at the feeding trough of corruption.
Very quickly, the opposition launched an application in terms of the Access to Information Act to find out who the passengers were in the vehicles at the scene and whether Mashatile himself might also have been in one of the vehicles that stopped to fix the sluggish victims. see.
South Africa is a mafia state and the “Don” is only a heartbeat away from the presidency.
