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‘I would be surprised if I am not arrested,’ Tshifhiwa Matodzi told me when we met in November 2019.1 We were at Lanseria airport, the place where, in the heyday of the VBS saga, he allegedly picked up a suitcase stuffed with R5 million cash meant for bribes. He was wearing an unremarkable golf shirt and flip-flops, an outfit he seemed far more comfortable in than the suits and ties of his former career as chairman of both VBS Mutual Bank and Vele Investments.

Lanseria was an odd choice. It is far from anything – a small, low-traffic airport – but one of few places you can land private jets and helicopters. It has one decent spot to meet: a restaurant that, in the month before Christmas, was churning out countless oversized gingerbread houses and other overpriced holiday fare. Santa Claus was the only witness to our marathon four-hour coffee date.

Matodzi greeted me like an old buddy, though we had never met before. He was eager to talk and was good at it.

By now, the story of VBS was ingrained in the public consciousness. The bank had been looted into the ground – and, by all accounts, Matodzi was the man behind it all. He acknowledges that he was the motive force, but he refuses to accept that he has done anything wrong.

‘I was the mastermind of saving the bank’ was the first thing he said.

The story of VBS really starts with a group of friends in the late 1990s at what was then the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU). They would have been among the first black students at a bastion of Afrikanerdom that has since been renamed the University of Johannesburg.

A significant number of the main characters in the VBS saga met at RAU when they were accounting students. Matodzi was there, alongside Maanda Phalanndwa, the man who would become his business partner and eventually his co-investor in VBS – and then later his sworn enemy. Phalanndwa told me that, back in 1996, he and Matodzi were part of a small circle of ‘Venda boys’ living in the same residence at RAU. ‘We were all from Venda so it was easy for us to gel. We became friends.’2

Another classmate was Gobusamang Mothoagae. He would later enter the VBS scene through his company Tiisang Risk and Assurance Consulting – one of the many beneficiaries of ‘free’ VBS money. Matodzi is a shareholder in Tiisang.

Sechaba Serote met Matodzi and Mothoagae at university and later became the chief investment officer of Tiisang. That meant working at VBS and ultimately Vele too. David Ntlhokwe, who was appointed VBS’s head of credit, was also at RAU. So too was Mbulaheni Manwadu, who would become a VBS board member and sit on the all-important audit committee. When questioned by Advocate Terry Motau, fellow VBS board member Ernest Nesane described Manwadu as ‘also somehow compromised’.3

RAU alumnus Andile Ramavhunga, who would become the CEO of VBS, was a few years behind the rest. As was Mauwane Kotane, son of South African Communist Party (SACP) struggle icon Moses Kotane and a childhood friend of Ramavhunga’s, who would find his affairs caught up in VBS as well.

Yet another contemporary of Matodzi and Ramavhunga at RAU was Tsumbo Matambela, who would become a close family friend of the CEO and hold a managerial position at VBS as well.

Matodzi told me that he, Mothoagae, Ramavhunga and Serote ‘were very smart, even at school, so we would share ideas’. It was a small old-boys network in the making.

After graduating in the late 1990s, the ‘Venda boys’ parted ways, spreading out to become part of the first wave of young black professionals defining the new South Africa. Some went on to do articles at major firms in order to attain the sought-after badge of honour of being chartered accountants (CAs). Others set out to establish businesses.

Matodzi found himself on the traditional career path towards becoming a CA, doing his articles at accounting firm KPMG. He went on to work at other firms such as SizweNtsalubaGobodo and EY. Ramavhunga did his articles at Deloitte and then embarked on a varied banking career, largely at state-owned developmental institutions.

In 2001, South Africa had just 207 black chartered accountants. Young men like Matodzi and Ramavhunga were part of this vanguard.

This story also involves far older networks deeply embedded in what was once the putative Republic of Venda, one of four Bantustans granted so-called independence by the apartheid regime in the late 1970s for ‘separate development’. There were altogether ten of these homelands, excised from ‘white’ South Africa after black people were deprived of the right to vote or own property.

No one really owned this land, which was formally known as ‘native reserve’ land. Tribal authorities sanctioned by the apartheid government held it in trust. Chiefs decided who could stay where and there were no title deeds. There was no possibility of home finance – that is, until the Venda Building Society and the restoration of the Venda monarchy filled this gap.

The Venda kingship has a long, bloody and contested history stretching back to the 1600s. It barely survived colonial invasion and was then thoroughly co-opted into the Bantustan system. Throughout the twentieth century the true lineage of the overall kingship of twenty-seven lesser chieftaincies was frequently disputed – and still is.

Everything in Venda is named for the notables of the royal family. The city of Thohoyandou invokes the founder of the dynasty, who is still recognised today under the democratic dispensation. The name means ‘head of the elephant’ – a reference adopted by VBS Mutual Bank and later Vele Investments in their corporate logos.

The Makhado Local Municipality, in which the bank was based, is named for Thohoyandou’s great-grandson. Makhado’s son was Mphephu I. His grandson, Mphephu III, is where Venda history meets this story.

Mphephu III, otherwise known as Patrick Ramaano Mphephu, was recognised by the apartheid government as paramount chief and president of Venda in 1979. One of his creations was the modest Venda Building Society, which offered regular Vendas mortgages to build on communal land.

The person who brought the young RAU men into this orbit of power was Patrick Mphephu’s nephew, Toni Mphephu Ramabulana, who became king in September 2012.

‘Obviously the elite Vendas, we all knew each other,’ Matodzi told me.

That’s not exactly true. Everyone knew the king, and the king, seemingly, knew everyone. His role in this saga is that of ubiquitous matchmaker.

When he met the Venda boys, the king was in a precarious position after a long battle to restore the monarchy and claim his throne. Following a military coup in Venda in 1990, the monarchy had been abolished and the Venda royal house demoted to the status of the other twenty-seven chieftaincies of the vhaVenda. In democratic South Africa, with Venda absorbed back into the country, a movement for the restoration of the monarchy grew. There were court challenges spanning many years until 2012 when the Thohoyandou High Court restored it under the Mphephu royal line, and Toni Mphephu Ramabulana became king.

A thirty-something lawyer named Nkhume Paul Makhavhu won the battle for the Mphephu royal family. Having been intimately involved in the family’s affairs from as far back as 2005, his role would morph into custodian of Toni Mphephu Ramabulana’s business interests. ‘The people in the royal family are clueless as far as business is concerned,’ Makhavhu later told Advocate Motau.4 As the king’s representative, Makhavhu would play a major role in the saga that ensued.

Although lacking in business acumen, the king did bring to the table a nationalist aura that would help the RAU alumni in their machinations. But probably the most important fact about the king at the time of his accession is that he was broke and thus beholden to the Venda business elite.

One such high-profile patron was David Mabilu, a celebrity property developer in Limpopo best known for his extravagant wedding that saw him fly guests to Mauritius, including his friend Julius Malema, and for making his fortune from government contracts to build subsidised houses, which are reportedly among the best in the business. He was also involved in a controversial land-flip deal in which he bought properties from one arm of government and then sold them to another at five times the price. In 2019 he bought a newspaper, the Sunday World. It wasn’t his first. He also funded the African Times, a Limpopo-centric publication that collapsed in 2018. Like many rich people, Mabilu has a charitable foundation. It is also rumoured that he is embedded in Limpopo political circles, the crucial fourth leg of the overlapping networks that made the VBS fraud possible.

These circles are a treacherous terrain and Mabilu found himself on the wrong side of some powerful people in the course of the VBS saga.

Mamphe ‘Danny’ Msiza was a rising political star. He’d had a long career in the liberation movement, being one of the founders of the main anti-apartheid youth movement in Limpopo, the Motetema Youth Congress, in the 1980s. He started out in African National Congress (ANC) structures in the 1990s and was elected as the party’s provincial treasurer-general in 2015. Treasurer-general is a powerful position within the party’s provincial executive committees (PECs). The ANC is a top-down organisation and in the provinces the leadership can exert massive influence on appointments at municipal level, including those of mayors, municipal managers and financial officers. In his position, Msiza had the power to summon these functionaries to meetings and make not-so-subtle suggestions about what they should and shouldn’t do.

In early 2017, there was talk of then president Jacob Zuma making Msiza a minister in his cabinet. According to Msiza’s protégé, Kabelo Matsepe, Msiza was not keen, preferring to stay on in the province, perhaps with his eye on the top ANC job in Limpopo: chair of the PEC.5

There are a few versions of how Msiza became VBS’s political patron, but there is no doubt that his influence became the key to drawing municipal deposits into the bank.

Phalanndwa told me that Matodzi knew absolutely nothing about politics or politicians. What he did have going for him was a knack for getting close to the powerful and making himself indispensable to them.

Venda is a small place. VBS mobilised its cultural, political and business leaders, drawing in more and more people. Among the other corporate Venda notables who came to play a major role were Robert Madzonga, erstwhile chief corporate services officer of mobile giant MTN, and Maanda Manyatshe, former CEO of MTN and the South African Post Office.

VBS Mutual Bank brought all these networks and motley characters together into mutually beneficial alignment, until things fell apart and everyone involved suffered permanent damage. Political aspirations were quashed, careers were ruined, royal status was indelibly tainted and many of the Venda boys found themselves in the dock facing jail time.

‘The whole VBS thing has humbled everybody,’ Mabilu told me. ‘A lot of people were thinking they were powerful.’6