The ANC Billionaires - Big Capital's Gambit and the Rise of the Few

'We were talking about the rise of Japan, about Ronald Reagan's Star Wars ... globalisation, technology. And they were still banging on about the Freedom Charter.' - Anglo American's Michael Spicer on the ANC in the mid-1980s. In 1985, a group of white South African business leaders, led by Gavin Relly, the executive chairperson of Anglo American, travelled to a game lodge in Zambia to meet with the exiled ANC leadership under Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki. This visit set in motion a coordinated and well-resourced plan by big business to influence and direct political change in South Africa. In The ANC Billionaires, top-selling author Pieter du Toit draws on first-hand accounts by major roleplayers about the contentious relationship between capital and the ANC before, during and after the country's transition to democracy, and shows how the liberation organisation was completely unprepared to navigate the intersection between business and politics. He also ties the rise of the new elite - including Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Saki Macozoma - to the ANC, a party of government and patronage.

PIETER DU TOIT is an award-winning journalist and assistant editor at News24. He is the author of the best-selling The Stellenbosch Mafia (2019) and the co-author of Enemy of the People (2017), with Adriaan Basson. Pieter is a former editor of HuffPost South Africa and news editor of Beeld and Netwerk24.