VBS. Dewald van Rensburg
is a problem so he thinks we must get a voting bloc. So initially I was amenable to it, but then there were rifts between myself and him and David …’
Matodzi hijacked a plot meant to benefit Dyambeu as a whole. ‘You see, Matodzi was being very clever with his own things planned,’ Mabilu said. ‘He controlled that entity.’15
Madambi Muvhulawa was one of the original board members of VBS when the bank was formed in 1982 and served as chairman until that AGM in 2015, after which he retired. He told me the same story: ‘These guys organised that the current board should be removed at an AGM … They organised most of the shareholders here in Venda, they called them up, somehow they got their contact [numbers] and they called meetings secretly and they mobilised them to say we must go to the AGM and agreed that they voted that board out.’16
Matodzi argues that Dyambeu knew all about the forum and had never decided he could not be a director. ‘That’s not true,’ he told me, claiming that they wanted him on the board. ‘The question was me being chairperson. The agreement was I need to be a board member, and then there was a guy from Telkom, Manelisa [Mavuso, a former Nedbank and Telkom executive who had been a VBS board member since 2014], that they wanted to be chair. It was not that they did not want me on the board.’17
Whatever the mechanism, Matodzi was now an ordinary director of VBS.
Mabilu said he was furious with Matodzi, but the king stepped in to defend him once more: ‘The king called me again at his residence in Venda and he said, no no no, it’s fine man, let’s forgive this boy again and what what what.’18
The first meeting of the new board was scheduled for 24 August 2015, where they would elect a chairperson. ‘So we sat as Dyambeu to discuss our own position. With Matodzi in the room,’ said Mabilu. ‘Then we said there is a guy called Manelisa Mavuso, he is going to be the chairperson. He used to be with Nedbank. He was a banker. We compromised and Matodzi was going to be the deputy chairperson. We even asked the king to lobby with the PIC representatives. Then they [the new VBS board] had their first meeting where the guy we said must be the chairperson is not even nominated.’
As far as Dyambeu knew, they had the votes of Matodzi and the PIC representative on the board for their chosen chair. It was a done deal, until it wasn’t. ‘Matodzi came out as the chairperson and I can remember … I picked up this thing was cooked with the king,’ alleges Mabilu.
For Mabilu, Matodzi’s betrayal was unsurprising, but he now suspected that his old friend the king had been drawn into the plot: ‘I pick up the phone, I call up the king and say to him, thank you very much, I realise you are not the kind of person I can deal with.’
Phalanndwa also lost an old friend. ‘Now Tshifhiwa was chair against the wishes of Dyambeu,’ he said. ‘The wheels have come off. He was a non-executive chair, but he did work like it was his own company.’19
Matodzi shrugs off these allegations. ‘It is the board members that elect me chair, I don’t elect myself,’ he told me.20
3
Battle of the Shareholders
By August 2015, Tshifhiwa Matodzi was the chairman of VBS, South Africa’s first and only wholly black-owned bank at the time.
He was backed by an apparently loyal executive team who, he claims, begged him to take the reins. The man leading that team was Andile Ramavhunga, whom Matodzi knew from university and had recruited to be CEO. Shortly after Matodzi became chair, VBS appointed Gobusamang Mothoagae, another old friend and RAU alumnus, as a long-term consultant. Mothoagae’s company, Tiisang Risk and Assurance Consulting, received R2.5 million’s worth of business from VBS in the last few months of 2015.1 This relationship would continue until the very end.
Tiisang was a seemingly legitimate company doing work in the public sector. In a 2017 declaration of assets, Matodzi admitted to being a shareholder in Tiisang and a related company, Tiisang Private Capital.2 He also allegedly controlled Tiisang’s bank accounts.3
Matodzi called on old friends from university to make up for what he believed was a dearth of skills at the bank. He turned to the Venda boys because, he claims, VBS was initially a passion project offering lower salaries than employees would have previously earned. ‘The bank had no skills. The bank had no money to pay salaries. So you can only approach people you know,’ he told me. ‘I was very actively looking for people I know, who I can sell the dream. I said, guys, we need skilled people here.’4
It may have been a necessary expedient for a tiny black-owned bank with zero connections in the established financial services sector, but this kind of crony recruitment also set the scene for the bank to fall under the complete control of a small number of individuals. Matodzi was not the only one hiring friends.
When Ramavhunga became CEO, he almost immediately called up his childhood friend and fellow RAU alumnus Mauwane Kotane and gave him a contract to source business for the bank. Kotane was at the time a respectable financial consultant and on the board of the Finance and Accounting Services Sector Education and Training Authority. The conflicts of interest, however, were laughable. Kotane and Ramavhunga had a number of business ventures together, and Kotane even returned the favour by paying Ramavhunga’s private consulting firm, Andile Ramavhunga Consulting, hundreds of thousands of rands for undisclosed work done in 2015 and 2016. Ramavhunga only begrudgingly admitted to Advocate Terry Motau that this was a conflict of interest.5
Kotane later drew his old friend and VBS into an under-publicised scandal in Namibia, which we’ll get to later.
By the time Matodzi took control, VBS had already begun developing a loans-for-friends culture. One of its major new clients in 2015 was Brilliant Telecommunications, his and Maanda Phalanndwa’s company. In the course of 2015 and early 2016, Brilliantel got R15 million out of VBS. Phalanndwa also received personal loans, which he says he either paid back or is still paying back.
Matodzi hasn’t forgotten that: ‘VBS helped him [Phalanndwa] a lot. That company would have died. He’s got apartments in Durban funded by VBS. Brilliantel has vehicle finances. He got lots of help. He’s lucky. If I was a vengeful person I would have just said to [investigators], check this guy; they would’ve chased him.’6
Dyambeu was becoming a hindrance to Matodzi with the constant infighting and his partners’ increasing exasperation every time he broke ranks. To get out of Dyambeu, he would have to first get out of Brilliantel, through which he and Phalanndwa owned their VBS shares. In October 2015, little over a month after becoming chair of VBS, Matodzi resigned from Brilliantel and set out to get direct shareholding in first Dyambeu and then VBS. His critical royal allies – Venda king Toni Mphephu Ramabulana and attorney Paul Makhavhu – also needed an exit strategy from Dyambeu and, by extension, the VhaVenda Heritage Trust.
‘The king and Matodzi, they wrote a letter to Dyambeu requesting that they want their shares in their personal capacity. Even the king wanted his 51 per cent in his individual capacity … so we blocked that,’ said Mabilu, the man who originally made Matodzi’s VBS investment possible by pitching in R3 million at the insistence of his one-time friend, the king. ‘We said to the king, you did not even buy the shares, they don’t belong to you anyway, they belong to the VhaVenda Trust and the trust is supposed to be the trust for the Venda people which means the dividends or whatever goes into … these shares belong to the community, you are just a custodian. That’s when they realised they were not winning, then they established Vele.’7
Vele Investments was named for another Venda king, Vele-la-Mbeu, who reigned in the 1700s. The company was set up in the first week of November 2015 by a law firm called Khampha Inc. Its immediate owner was a holding company called Vele la Mbeu, but its indirect owners were unclear from the start, although at least Matodzi and the king were by all accounts shareholders.
The way Vele found its way into VBS is mired in controversy. Mabilu and Phalanndwa claim it was clearly fraudulent, a view that would later be shared by the authorities.
On 18 December 2015, VBS called on shareholders to take part in a rights issue. This is when shareholders are asked to contribute new