Johannesburg - President Jacob Zuma believes that there is no state capture and says the phrase is being used by some people to push a “political propaganda”.
Zuma said that when he establishes a commission of inquiry he expects an explanation of what “state capture” means.
“They can’t just make it sound so important, so big. We know what a state is when we define it. Nobody has said there are judges and the whole of Parliament is captured. And I am sure that the inquiry is one of the things they will have to clarify, that if fact it was all fake and political. It was just painting black a particular family and a few individuals,” said Zuma.
The President was speaking on ANN7 on Tuesday night.
Read:
He denounced the existence of capture while a mountain of evidence continues to be revealed about his friends, the Gupta family.
Zuma has been accused of allowing the Gupta family to influence the running of his administration. A trove of emails leaked to the media earlier this year revealed how the notorious family along with Zuma’s son Duduzane have influenced the running of government and State-Owned Enterprises.
He said that it was incorrect to say the state had been captured.
“The state is made of three pillars, it is the executive, legislature and the judiciary. If you loosely put this term and say there is ‘state capture’, you are actually saying that the executive, legislature and the judiciary they are captured. It is a wrong meaning of what people are saying, but they do this for political reasons,” said Zuma.
Also read:
“There is no Parliament that is captured, there is no executive that is captured, because even when they have tried to say they are talking about a few individuals. When they say ‘state capture’ that’s political propaganda,” he said.
Former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela released the State of Capture report in 2016 where she linked Zuma and some government executives to possible corrupt dealings with the Gupta family. One of those implicated was former Eskom CEO Brian Molefe.
Madonsela recommended that a commission of inquiry should be established by Zuma, but said that the Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng should appoint the judge to chair it. Zuma is currently challenging this report in court, because he believes he, as the President, he is mandated to pick the judge to chair the commission.