The definition of State Capture: South Africa is no longer a majority rule - Zuma

By Jacob Zuma

"As far as I know a state is composed of three elements: the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary. So if that is the case, what is state capture? Does it mean these three arms have been captured?"...asked former President Jacob Zuma during his address of the SASCO congress at the Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha yesterday...

"Is it true? We have a commission that is sitting investigating the state capture, is the state captured? In my view these are politically decorated expressions. Absolutely, there’s no State that is captured. Even when people try to describe it, worse when they give evidence, there are some individuals who were doing things with other people , not a single one of these 3 are captured. Judiciary is not captured, is it? Is Parliament captured? Is the Executive captured? So where is the state capture?

Now as students why don’t you debate these things? Why do you just swallow anything that people say? This thing is a politically decorated expression to achieve something I don't know. I mean I could challenge anyone, there is no state capture in South Africa. There are people who did things to others in one form or another, and you can call it by any other name but not this big name 'STATE CAPTURE'. Please, please, politically let us not swallow anything that is given to us.

What is a definition of freedom? Who can define freedom for me? What is #Freedom? I have a view that our freedom is not complete but we call it freedom as if it is complete. For example; colonialism. Some country in Europe sent a journalist long before the Berlin conference to go and investigate what is in Africa. That journalist discovered that this continent is very rich and its wealth has not been touched; that partly influenced a conference of countries of Europe who met to discuss dividing Africa amongst themselves.

The colonisation of Africa happened after they came to colonise. What does colonisation mean? It meant that they will come find a piece of land, take full control of it, its people and everything. If it was found by the British it would be a British colony and be made part of British empire. If found by France it would be made part of French, by Portuguese to be part of Portugal and so forth.

We then started a struggle to decolonise ourselves. I’m of a view that in the process of our fighting we narrowed the definition of our decolonisation. We only looked at political decolonisation and not economical decolonization. We are still colonised economically. We have not yet decolonized ourselves economically. They came, colonised and made the laws which protected their companies and everything. And we are so afraid of these laws. Why can’t we change this?

We take these laws that were made by colonialists as if they are equal to The 10 Commandments. They take our wealth everyday, we are doing nothing about it yet we remain poor. We have not yet decolonised ourselves sufficiently and that’s the matter I’m raising with the African Union because they are supposed to do so, we are supposed to make the laws to decolonise ourselves, so that we have our own things. Anyone who ever wants our gold, silver whatever must talk to us first. We starve and all our wealth is making other people rich.

SASCO students  captivated by Zuma's speech at Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha yesterday

What is our understanding of Democracy? Aren’t we saying the main feature of democracy is majority rule? In other words those who are a majority rule. Democracy is exercised in Parliament where decisions are taken by a party that represents the majority of the country. And that is supposed to be the final decision. This is called Parliamentary Democracy.

Instead of making a Parliamentary democracy our democracy, they made it a constitutional democracy. What did that mean? It meant Parliament doesn’t have the last word; the majority does not have the final word. You make a decision, an NGO takes you to the Constitutional Court and the court says your decision is unconstitutional. So we don’t have a majority rule. It’s a matter I believe we need to debate. Think about it."