Review: Vivien Horler

The Shadow State – Why Babita Deokoran had to die, by Jeff Wicks (Tafelberg)

Not since Jacques Pauw’s The President’s Keepers have I been so appalled at what is going on under the tissue-thin veneer of normalcy in SA.

The late Pravin Gordhan entreated us to join the dots, and that’s exactly what prize-winning News24 investigative journalist Jeff Wicks has done.

It’s enough to make one wonder about emigration. The British deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has resigned over a tax oopsie – a lapse, or possibly a deliberate criminal action – that would have some of SA’s politically entitled snorting into their cornflakes.

Wicks has teased out an extraordinary spiderweb of people involved in stealing from the state, based on subverting tenders. At the heart of it was  –or is? –  Tembisa Hospital, on Gauteng’s East Rand, which lost R2.3 billion – that’s billion – to what Wicks describes as privateers. Money that should have gone to providing services to patients.

He writes: “What was spawned from within Tembisa Hospital is an evolved form of state capture.”

The Guptas’ efforts were easy to find, because high-value tenders attract a lot of scrutiny. But, he says, state capture is not over. “It is just blossoming in a different form. Real extraction happens every day through small, insignificant payments that often go unnoticed.

“It happened at Tembisa Hospital and at least five other facitlities in the [Gauteng] provincial health network. The captors have infiltrated muncipalities, provincial administrations and parastatals. It is through small, innocuous transactions executed at scale that the capture continues.”

Twelve days before she was shot 12 times outside her home in Johannesburg’s Mondeor on August  23, 2021, Babita Deokaran, a senior civil servant and accountant with the Gauteng Health Department, sent a WhatsApp message to her boss, the department’s acting CFO Lorato Madyo: “Morning CFO, I am just worried that the guys at Tembisa are going to realise we are not releasing their payments and know that we are on to something. Our lives could be in danger.”

A couple of hours later, Madyo replied: “Morning Babita. I have requested the HoD grant approval for investigation.”

There was no investigation, and Deokaran was murdered.

Madyo later resigned while suspended on 13 charges of misconduct. Wicks says she has since changed her name to Daniella Molapo.

I will not go on about the appalling police and Hawks investigation into her killing, which has been publicised before.

Nor will I talk about the mind-boggling corruption involving extraction from Tembisa Hospital that Deokaran had flagged, including the notorious skinny jeans tender which paid R500 000 for 200 pairs of jeans for girls aged six to seven – that’s R2 500 a pair. (And why was a hospital buying all those children’s jeans?)

I thought I’d look at the chapter on Vusimusi “Cat” Matlala, whose name I’d heard for the first time only when the one of the Patriotic Alliance’s top men turned out to be present at Matlala’s Sandton home when Matlala was arrested in July 2025 for the murder of DJ Sumbody (real name Oupa Johan Sefoka).

Matlala has a diverse and “colourful” portfolio of business interests, according to Wicks. “Through three companies, he became a tender player as the ultimate beneficiary of Tembisa Hospital contracts worth R5million… that’s how he first apeared on my radar.”

His wife Cordelia Kabeng, whose shopping is eye-watering, according to posts on her Instagram profile on Instagram, (“Large Dior Toile de Jouy book tote – R68 000″) boasted of her “high-speed, armed and (illegally equipped) escorts taking her to drop off her ‘cubs’ ” at school.

Wicks put Motlala into the network of one Morgan Maumela, a man of untold wealth whose property portfolio included a Camps Bay property bought for R32million, a Bantry Bay property for R72million, a villa in Gauteng’s Hyde Park for R25million, and a R13.5million home on the banks of Hartbeespoort Dam in NorthWest. There were other properties in Ballito and Sea Point.

Wicks then chased down Maumela’s father Basil Mudau to a Limpopo village called Vhufuli, where he established that Basil is the brother of Hope Madau, first wife of Cyril Ramaphosa. Our president is Morgan’s uncle by marriage. (See what I mean about spider webs?)

The president’s spokesman, Vincent Magwenya, told Wicks: “To the extent that Maumela is the son of the president’s ex-brother-in-law, the president has no further knowledge of Maumela, nor has he ever had any relationship with him…”

Names in this chapter include Bejani Chauke, the president’s principal political advisor; recently suspended [ie after this book was published] police Lieutenant-General Shadrack Sibiya; and the state capture beneficiary Edwin Sodi – the guy apparently behind the Free State asbestos investigaton. The Zondo Commission heard Sodi “had also processed a payment of R3.6million to the ANC for T-shirts, and the commission heard he had dispatched      R370 000 into (vice-president) Paul Mashatile’s personal bank account”.

Not in the book of course, EyeWitness News today [September 6, 2025] reported former police minister Bheki Cele had been “invited” to give evidence to the Madlanga Commission in connection with seven calls he made to Matlala on a single day in May this year.

Matlala ran a company called Medicare 24 Tswane which, according to its website, provides occupational health services from a strip mall in Boksburg. In June 2024, Medicare won a three-year tender to provide health services to the police for R360million, despite Matlala having been implicated in the Tembisa Hospital procurement saga uncovered by Deokaran.

“So, a man under suspicion of public procurement malfeasance was given a massive tender by the very organisation investigating him,” writes Wicks.

The day News24 published this story, Matlala resigned his directorship of Medicare. Wicks writes: “This business providing health services for SA’s [countrywide] police force is now run by a 39-year-old woman whose only business experience is in the cleaning company she founded – a company that has never traded.”

Wicks wrote this book partly to pay tribute to Deokaran and her courage, but also to pull the thread to untangle what she had initially raised in her WhapsApp to her Gauteng Health Department bosses.

It is a brave read – Wicks has been afraid for his own life – but also a profoundly depressing one. The spiderweb stretches everywhere, and nothing seems clean.

And one last little depressing tidbit: Deokaran picked up on a series of tenders that came in just under R500 000 – the maximum the department’s CFO could OK without more senior approval. That limit has now been raised to R1million.

If this cesspit of corruption could be centred on a single hospital in Gauteng, one shudders to imagine what the NHI might unleash.