CHAPTER 23

Friends in high places

The long-running TV staple Top Billing was a weekly showcase of opulence and excess. Hosts toured the homes of local and international celebrities, including the likes of Springbok rugby player Bryan Habana and US President Donald Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana. Beauty, fashion, food, home decor, travel and weddings were its mainstay, and Top Billing gave viewers a glimpse of how the other half lived.

In 2019, a decor insert showcased a villa in Hyde Park, one of the most sought-after locales in the country. Presenter Jonathan Boynton-Lee was dazzled by the vaulted ceilings in the foyer and the custom-made chandeliers that lit up curated artwork and sculptures.

‘This is more of an artwork than a house,’ he quipped, with his guide, the interior designer, nodding in stage-managed affirmation. ‘Our client wanted to add his own personality to the environment,’ the interior designer said. That client was Hangwani Morgan Maumela.

Only the finest would serve for the don of Tembisa Hospital. I trawled deeds-office records and found that his family trust had bought the designer villa in 2018 for a cool R25 million.366 Within a year, the interior designer was leading camera crews through the property and boasting that it had been renovated floor to ceiling, with no expense spared. From the tiles to the knives and forks, everything had been carefully selected for a high-end client. Bespoke and custom-made furniture was on display in the lounge, and a lift took you to a basement home cinema, a whisky bar stocked with handpicked malts and a 300-square-metre parking lot. Clearly, millions had been ploughed into the refurbishment, far beyond the purchase price.

By the time the Hyde Park remodelling was complete, companies controlled by Morgan and his cousin, Aluwani, had been registered as suppliers of the Gauteng Health Department. Morgan would still not talk to me about how he made his money, but it was clear that most of his wealth originated from Tembisa Hospital, where patients had starved to death and the sick and infirm slept on the floor because of perennial overcrowding. It was likely that this hospital had bankrolled Morgan’s luxury pad

The villa was Morgan’s primary residence. When I did my first accounting of his property holdings, I pegged the total value at R150 million, just based on the purchase prices.369 After the first story about Morgan was published, outing him as Tembisa’s tender don, my phone rang constantly. I was tipped off that there were more properties and that he had deep political connections. With the first story, I managed to shake the tree; now, the fruit came tumbling down. There were other properties acquired by the trust which I had missed.

There were two beachfront homes at Ballito’s exclusive Zimbali Country Club, with a cumulative value of R35 million. Morgan’s trust paid R70 million for another stand in Sandton and R30 million for two adjoining flats in Cape Town’s Sea Point. All in all, the trust held real estate valued north of R310 million.  It was a remarkable parade of extravagance.

Once Morgan’s role in the Tembisa saga was out in the open, many people – including some who were close to his inner circle – came to me with information. One man was from Vhufuli, the Limpopo village where Morgan had grown up. Others had been in his orbit when he hit his tender heyday. All insisted on anonymity and feared his reprisal should they be named. I can’t frame each in any more detail than I already have. Doing so would risk exposing them. But the value of what they told me, and what I was able to corroborate, created an image of a wealthy man with friends in high places.

I understood Morgan to be a quiet figure who valued his privacy. I was told that he was a frequent patron of the Bryanston nightclub Rockets. There he would lavish high-end booze and cash on women. He had a penchant for sports cars – vehicles that he had custom-painted in a particular shade of azure frost blue. These low-slung Italian supercars would literally stop traffic in the Rockets parking lot. When the Top Billing camera crew showed up at his villa, all the cars had been moved out to avoid attracting unwanted attention. Slowly, I was starting to get a sense of the man and what he spent his money on.

When I tracked down Morgan’s father, Basil Mudau, to his home in Vhufuli, the elderly man helped me establish Morgan’s family tree. This revealed ties to President Cyril Ramaphosa. The links stretched back to Ramaphosa’s first marriage, to Hope Mudau, in 1978.

Basil is Hope’s brother. Morgan’s mother, Mboneni, was a director in the Limpopo Health Department before she retired in 2021.372 This was nuclear. Ramaphosa had his image blighted when his official spokeswoman, Khusela Diko, stepped down from her post after she was tainted by the Covid-19 procurement graft. That scandal now seemed paltry compared with being related – albeit distantly – to a central figure in the procurement scandal at Tembisa Hospital and the assassination of a whistleblower.

‘He grew up as a nice boy, very quiet, and when he started working . . . he started in Pietersburg [Polokwane] doing these tender things. Whenever I asked him [about this work], he would say I am doing tenders,’ Mudau told me while we sat in the shade of a tree in the village. ‘I hardly knew what tenders he was talking about until the story came out. I felt very bad. I couldn’t even eat. I tried to contact him, but he was nowhere to be found.’

The father-and-son relationship was obviously rekindled shortly after my visit. I got a sternly worded reproach from Morgan’s lawyer.

I was not to speak to members of his family, and they considered me unethical. (Oh no!) They threatened to complain to the press ombudsman about my conduct.

When I could confirm that Morgan was a relative of Ramaphosa’s, I immediately sent questions to the president’s office. His spokesman, Vincent Magwenya, tried to deflect. Yes, they knew of Morgan and they were aware that he traded on his presidential link, but there was no relationship with the president. You know what African families are like, I was told.

‘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,’ Magwenya said. ‘The president does not have any knowledge of Maumela’s business dealings, nor was he aware of his involvement with the Tembisa Hospital or any other state entity. As stated, he has no relationship with Maumela.’

That Morgan and Ramaphosa are related had stunning implications. The SIU had, by then, launched a preliminary investigation at the behest of Gauteng Premier David Makhura. A full probe has to be authorised and proclaimed by the president. The probability existed that Ramaphosa would have to set the SIU on his own family. ‘The president considers every application by the SIU on its merits, and he will certainly sign such a proclamation should the SIU, as it so often does, motivate for the need for such an investigation. It would be extraordinary for President Ramaphosa not to sign a proclamation,’ Magwenya added.

It was clear to me then that Magwenya was trying to distance his principal from Morgan. For a tenderpreneur to have ties to the Union Buildings and those at the levers of power and political influence was scandalous. The spin doctor could distance Ramaphosa from Morgan, but he could not gainsay the latter’s friendship with Bejani Chauke, the president’s principal political advisor.

Chauke is a man who holds immense political sway. He ran for political office at the ANC’s elective conference in 2022 and played a critical role in the CR17 campaign that saw Ramaphosa take the party’s presidency. He was regularly dispatched as a special envoy to countries such as Saudi Arabia, and in political circles he is referred to as the president’s ‘fixer’. His company, Acute Strategies, is often involved in election campaigns in Africa.

Morgan and Chauke both had homes in the Hyde Park complex featured on Top Billing. With Maumela at Stand 3 and Chauke at Stand 6, the pair were neighbours.379 When I sent questions to Chauke about his friendship with Morgan, his response did not come to me. Instead, he went to News24 political editor Qaanitah Hunter. Chauke told her that my information was so outlandish, I must be addicted to cocaine.

I am not sure what his approach to my colleague was intended to achieve. If he wanted her to help him and try to convince me to abandon this story, he had obviously misjudged her. She is better than that. When another newspaper reported on separate claims about Chauke, he included my questions and responses to them in what he sent back. He claimed that he had only ever met Morgan twice, both instances being meetings of the body corporate. The trouble was that I had people who could place Chauke in Morgan’s home – constantly. One person told me how the president’s fixer appeared for breakfast at the villa one morning in a robe and slippers. And then there was the car registered to Ramaphosa’s police protection detail that had showed up at Morgan’s home. Now I had a plausible explanation for its presence. The fact was that Morgan had allies in the uppermost echelons of power, in both the ANC and the state.

I was also reliably informed that Morgan would regularly holiday with state-capture beneficiary Edwin Sodi – the quintessential tenderpreneur, who has geared his business empire to secure government work. The main arm of his network is Blackhead Consulting.

In 2014, through a joint venture, Sodi and his partner, Ignatius Mpambani, were awarded a R255 million tender by the Free State Department of Human Settlements to audit the prevalence of asbestos in low-cost housing projects. In 2015, the auditor-general issued a

report finding the contract irregular and advised the department to stop paying – but the money continued to flow. Here is the rub: Sodi and his ilk outsourced the work to another firm, paid them R21 million and banked the profit.

Mpambani was later assassinated – a murder that remains unsolved. His Bentley was riddled with bullets as he travelled through Sandton, and police found a sizable amount of money in the boot. Blackhead went on to win a contract to conduct similar audits on asbestos roofing in low-cost housing in Gauteng.

Sodi is also one who enjoys the highlife. His home is an R85 million mansion in Bryanston. Viral Instagram footage from within shows his garage filled with a selection of limited-edition Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. Were these all funded by the taxpayer?

When the gauche businessman appeared before the State Capture Commission, he received a grilling over Blackhead’s R1 billion annual turnover and shady payments to ANC cabinet members Zizi Kodwa, Pinky Kekana and Thulas Nxesi, as well as millions of rand in donations he had made to the party. Sodi had also processed a payment of R3.6 million to the ANC for T-shirts, and the commission heard that he had dispatched R370 000 into Paul Mashatile’s personal bank account. In Sodi’s version, this was money destined for party work. Mashatile was never called on to explain this windfall.

The long and short of it was that Sodi sported political access and state work flowed his way – much like Morgan.

Sodi’s access to Mashatile, at least on the face of it, was beneficial. Between 2014 and 2017, the Gauteng Department of Human Settlements paid Blackhead R134 million for a housing project in Diepsloot East – but not a single structure was built. When the provincial government started paying Sodi in 2014, Mashatile was the chairperson of the ANC in the province. While cash flowed to Blackhead, Mashatile was given the run of Sodi’s luxury mansion on Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard.382 To all intents and purposes, the pair were close. Mashatile and Morgan held court, and the latter’s access to political power brokers was firmly cemented, in my mind at least. That Mashatile had these people in his orbit undercut the ANC’s public posture on the need to clean up corruption.

Morgan’s supercar collection, I was told, was the stuff of lore. My source, ensconced in his village, told me of his visits and how the sports cars – built for speed – travelled at a snail’s pace along potholed roads. At one of his palatial properties in Sandton, a garage large enough to house 27 vehicles had been purpose-built. Morgan was known in niche car circles and rumoured to customise his azure frost-blue rides with yellow brake callipers. In some instances, cars would be purchased and returned immediately to their European factories for retrofitting to specification, my sources alleged. But there was a problem. There was no such fleet registered in Morgan’s name. If he owned them, they were registered to proxies – people, companies or trusts. Maybe the automotive collection was merely a myth.

At one point, I was tipped off that Morgan was stashing a Lamborghini at a dealership outside the province. I drove off to find it. When I arrived, I was greeted by two lots. They had obviously drawn a line between the high-end cars and the more economic options. The former was in an enclosed showroom with velvet ropes and polished floors. The latter was outside, exposed to the elements with a fibreglass overhang that caught the wind. I am a journalist, and I look like one. I knew I would stick out like a sore thumb in the glitzy showroom, so I started by feigning interest and kicking the tires of the cheap cars outside. Slowly, I inched toward the building and then entered. An enormous man in a suit let me pass, and I started ambling along. I could feel his eyes burning into the back of my head. I didn’t have the bank balance to be in this room, and I was dressed that way too.

For me to link this car to Morgan, I would need to take down its vehicle identification number, (VIN), a painfully small series of numbers and letters embossed on the car’s frame beneath the windscreen. With this number, I could find a trail of everyone who had bought and sold the car.

There were footsteps at my heels – a salesperson. I spun a tale of how I was only browsing. I had a meeting later and was killing time; I really didn’t need any help. It was policy, she said, that all customers were escorted. Fine. I had a chaperone. I would have to steal a picture of the VIN, somehow, without alerting my minder and the large man at the door. I spotted the Lamborghini at the front of the showroom, encircled by velvet ropes. When I got close to it, I realised that, of nearly 100 cars in the room, it was the only one that had a sticker placed over the VIN.

I called Pieter and told him I had been bested by a piece of paper. He told me to go back and rip it off. I opted for the safer course. I was never able to find out if that Lamborghini, in a shade of blue with yellow brake callipers, was linked to the Tembisa tender don. His rumoured collection of cars was untraceable.

When the hospital saga broke publicly and Morgan and his network of companies were named in my reporting, he put his villa on the market. It was originally listed at the princely sum of R38 million. His family trust eventually let it go for R30 million. Other properties held by the trust were placed on the market too.

Until now, the trust had been buying stands across the country, and I wondered what had triggered the decision to sell. The Hawks’ Babita murder investigation was dead in the water, but a unit seized with economic crimes had been tasked with probing the hospital and its suppliers. The SIU had started its own investigation in earnest. To me, Morgan was acting like a cat on a hot tin roof.

'The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran had to die' is published by Tafelberg, an imprint of Jonathan Ball Publishers