I am not privy to how lexicographers go about selecting the word or phrase of the year. But if it were up to me, ‘State capture’ would have won the accolade hands down in any one of the past few years. It indeed captured the preoccupation of a nation shocked by revelations suggesting that, in pursuit of gain for himself and those around him, its President had sold his soul to the devil.

But ‘State capture’ is not quite a recent coinage, and neither is it a new concept. It dates back about two decades, when economists at the World Bank started using the term. This followed a study that the Bretton Woods institution conducted in the 1990s into rampant corruption in former Soviet bloc countries, which, at the time, were morphing from authoritarian socialist systems to market-based democratic systems. The study uncovered alarming levels of business influence on State decision-making processes. The influence was not necessarily exerted through illegal means – it could take the form of donations to political parties in a setting where this was not regulated and elaborate lobbying of all sorts.

Graft watchdog Transparency International has come up with a definition of State capture that I quite like, and it is: “A situation where powerful individuals, institutions, companies or groups within or outside a country use corruption to influence a nation’s policies, legal environment and economy to advance their own private interests.”

What we have had in South Africa during the past few years is a classical example of the State capture that took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s: where a small number of entrepreneurial networks did their damnedest to control procurement and other allocative activities within government departments and State-owned entities. As we all know, it was mostly the Guptas and the fellows at Bosasa who bled our public purse of billions. But, as political scientist Tom Lodge explains in a book titled State Capture in Africa: Old Threats, New Packaging? – which was published in 2018 but upon which I only stumbled this past week – State capture also describes a whole range of other activities where those outside the State influence decision-making by bureaucrats to their advantage.

I know it is cold comfort, but South Africa is not the only country on the continent to have fallen victim to State capture. In one of the earliest instalments of this column, I wrote about the bizarre coincidence of the Presidents of South Africa and Togo . . . err, let’s say allegedly . . . being in the pockets of immigrant families from one country – India – that shared the same surname – Gupta. Regular readers of this column should be all too familiar with the damage, economic and otherwise, that the Guptas who washed up on our shores wrought over the past few years. Their namesakes who chose to settle in Togo are close friends of that country’s President, just as our own Guptas are buddy-buddy with former President Jacob Zuma, and they reportedly cut a deal with him that allowed them to buy practically all of the country’s phosphate for a song and make a killing when they sell it overseas.

There are several other examples of State capture in Africa. In Tunisia, for example, when Ben Ali was at the helm, business interests that had captured him benefited from manipulating the entry regulations of the country’s investment code, according to Lodge. In the island nation of Madagascar, some allege, both the executive arm of the State and the judiciary have been captured by bad guys who log and export the country’s prized rosewood at the expense of ordinary citizens.

In Zimbabwe, we find State capture of a different hue. The governing party, maintained its grip on power for nearly 40 years through its control of institutions that preside over electoral processes. The Institute for Security Studies’ Derek Matyszak explains the party’s modus operandi in State Capture in Africa: “President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party used the capture of key institution of State to subtly manipulate electoral outcomes, [doing this] through the combination of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, the security sector and the courts.”

The tragedy, according to the World Bank’s research, is that, in the long term, countries that have been the victims of high levels of State capture experience low growth, low investment and high unemployment.