Legalbrief | your legal news hub Thursday 23 September 2021 Blowing the lid off the Stellenbosch 'Mafia' Like most South African urban hubs, Stellenbosch has desperate poverty and fabulous wealth. What makes the City of Oaks (Eikestad) different is that there is a common thread among its ultra elite – they are mostly male Afrikaners riding high in the heart of Afrikanerdom. Legalbrief reports that author Pieter du Toit has blown the lid off this secretive club with his book The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire’s Club and, not surprisingly, the backlash has been formidable. The author says Stellenbosch became the spiritual home of the resistance against British domination after the Boer War and the current club includes Johann Rupert, Jannie Mouton, Markus Jooste and Christo Wiese. Julius Malema refers to them scathingly as 'The Stellenbosch Mafia', the very worst example of white monopoly capital, but his own party has close ties. In a 702 interview, Du Toit says Jooste 'desperately wanted to be part of that group (but) 'it didn’t turn out so well … it is a closed society'. Case-in-point: In 2006, the name of Steinhoff International started to appear on rugby jerseys in Stellenbosch. Business Insider reports that other companies found themselves pushed out, and Steinhoff was sponsoring rugby at the international level – even though that holding company had no direct exposure to consumers. For some, this seemed to be more about Jooste's ego than business, writes Du Toit. He said Remgro had earlier wanted to get involved with Stellenbosch Rugby Club, the largest of its kind in the world and a jewel in the university’s crown but they were elbowed out by Jooste and Steinhoff. In December 2015, the SARU announced that Steinhoff would be the main sponsor of the Springbok men’s and women’s sevens rugby teams. Du Toit writes that while EFF leader Julius Malema was speaking against Rupert, the party’s deputy president Floyd Shivambu was ‘cultivating a relationship with the ultimate so-called white monopoly capitalist’, notes a City Press report. ‘During the ANC’s brutal presidential election in 2017, Shivambu was one of Rupert’s go-to men in his informal intelligence network, sometimes explaining the inner workings of the governing party’s processes and procedures – and often giving Rupert a heads-up before major developments in the party. (During the height of the contest, Shivambu told Rupert that Cyril Ramaphosa would win the leadership race),’ the book states. ‘And while his party leader was attacking Rupert on any platform and ranting about white monopoly capital, Shivambu advised Rupert to set the record straight in public and suggested ways he might achieve that. ‘Believe it if you will,’ said Rupert, ‘but Floyd Shivambu advised me to do the PowerFM interview. Once he got to know me, when he realised what I was actually doing, that I was opposed to apartheid and who I knew (during the struggle), he said: “But nobody knows this. You’ve got to go on Given Mkhari’s show and do the Chairman’s Conversation”. While claims that Shivambu got friendly with Rupert may be damaging, one analyst believes that the party will not take action against him. Durban political analyst Thabani Khumalo said the party would probably handle the issue the same way it did with damaging allegations against senior EFF members over the VBS Bank scandal. A report on the IoL site notes that the book claims Shivambu asked for assistance to build a hospital in Limpopo and afterwards allegedly accompanied Remgro’s CEO Jannie Durand, to the Remgro-owned Fleur du Cap wine estate. However, Khumalo believes that until Shivambu challenges the book in court its contents will be seen as the ‘gospel truth’. ‘There are many campaigns to discredit one another and that makes it difficult to tell whether the claims in the book are true or not. The responsibility of those who are victims of these campaigns is to take them to court to be tested,’ Khumalo said. In the following excerpt, Rupert reveals the details of the Bell Pottinger-orchestrated campaign he alleges was launched to discredit him, and denies he has ever been involved in state capture: In November 2016, Rupert received a text message from a contact in the ANC. The message confirmed to him something that he had long suspected: there was an orchestrated campaign afoot to discredit him, his family and his companies. ‘They’re coming for you. The Guptas have hired Bell Pottinger to push the ‘state capture’ story onto you. They’ll earn R24m, plus expenses, for their work. It will be paid by an intermediary,’ the text message read. Rupert, who has always been vocal about his loyalty to SA (his private plane bears the national springbok symbol), has started to doubt the country’s future. His children live in England – he thinks it’s better that way. ‘When they are here (in SA) we don’t sleep. When they were here, they couldn’t go out into public without being insulted. It affected my family.’ The self-styled Afro-optimist doesn’t believe he’ll stay in the country if things don’t change drastically. ‘I’ve told some in government and the ANC in private as much: if SARS ever again tries to sabotage me … I have been by far the highest individual taxpayer in this country for the past 20 years.’ Rupert has also ruffled feathers by claiming that he had developed a ‘relationship’ with Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) on Monday said Biko never even met Rupert and they have records of the Struggle icon, which will back this up. The apparent meeting is contained in Du Toit’s book. A report on the IoL site notes that Rupert said he met Biko in 1970 while he was in Stellenbosch during a South African Students’ Organisation (Saso) conference. He claimed that he struck up a ‘relationship’ with the Black Consciousness leader, who died on 12 September 1977 after being assaulted by police in a holding cell, in Port Elizabeth. ‘Biko was in Stellenbosch to attend a conference of the Saso. We met one day and we continued talking until very late. I told him that if I were a black man, I would also be a Pan Africanist. I would also be a member of the PAC, not the ANC. We agreed that there could be no peace in the country unless there was a deal between white nationalists and black nationalists,’ reads an excerpt from the book quoting Rupert. Rupert’s claim has angered the PAC, which has accused him of trying ‘to distort and rewrite history’..