Zondo: What must happen now

Financial Mail | Natasha Marian

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice, US civil rights leader Martin Luther King once said. 

South Africans, at this point, would struggle to believe it. For years, the country has yearned for justice in the wake of the “national trauma” of state capture, as President Cyril Ramaphosa called it this week.

The unravelling of those years — reckoning with the wholesale corruption and gutting of state institutions — has been a long time coming. And it has come at a steep cost: Raymond Zondo’s commission of inquiry into state capture has a price tag of nearly R1bn, lasted almost four years, and involved hundreds of hours of testimony — often exhaustive, granular detail of the ways in which the state was repurposed to enrich a coven of business people and politicians.