STATE CAPTURE IN SOUTH AFRICA, how and why it happened

268pp., paperback, Johannesburg, 2023

Contributions include:

"Understanding and Explaining State Capture" and "Old Ways and New Days: An interview with Barney Pityana" by Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Peter Vale

"Elite Formation, Factions and Violence in the Political Economy of Corruption" by Karl von Holdt

"Legal Mobilisation against State Capture" by Jonathan Klaaren

'How Professionals Enabled State Capture" by Cherese Thakur and Devi Pillay

"Media Capture, the Mirror of State Capture" by Reg Rumney

"State Capture and the Popular Imagination: Narrowing the narrative" by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh

"Cycles of State Capture: Bringing profiteers and enablers to account" by Hennie van Vuuren and Michael Marchant

"Can Democracy Bind the State? Comparative thoughts from Brazil, India and South Africa" by Patrick Heller.

"State Capture tells us why South Africa is no different from most of the postcolonial world. It juxtaposes the structural explanations that direct us to historical processes, to deflection analyses that solely blame elites of the preceding racist and colonial society, to descriptive studies that explain the state capture underpinnings and finally to comparative cases where similar processes play out and may have even been challenged. A must-read for all who are interested in the failed promise and future of this tragic land." Adam Habib, Director, SOAS, University of London

Mbongiseni Buthelezi is Director of the Public Affairs Research Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg.

Peter Vale is a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria and senior fellow at the Public Affairs Research Institute. He is visiting professor in international relations at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil, and an honorary professor in the Africa Earth Observatory Network, of which he is a founding member.