Social commentator and broadcaster Lukhona Mnguni courted controversy last year when he branded politicians amasela – Xhosa for thieves – who steal public money. The context of this unsavoury characterisation was the spiriting away of taxpayers’ money that was meant to insulate both lives and livelihoods in the early days of Covid-19.

Mnguni’s utterances may have thrust him into the bad books of the high and mighty, but the amasela tag is simply not going away. Remember when severe flooding hit parts of KwaZulu-Natal in April and very few people warmed to the idea of government entities distributing State-provided resources to cushion those who had been rendered homeless and were in desperate need of food, water, medication and other provisions? The preference of most ordinary people was that the money be channelled through charitable organisations. Gift of the Givers – which has done fabulous work in disaster-hit spots here and abroad – was the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) of choice for many.

Granted, there are many, many men and women of probity serving in government. However, the public clamour for an NGO, rather than a government entity, to play a central role in relief efforts in the aftermath of the KwaZulu-Natal floods suggests that, in the popular imagination, those serving in senior positions in government are mostly amasela.

By the way, it’s not only in South Africa where those in power are perceived to be inherently corrupt. In surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, research outfit Afrobarometer found that the majority of Africans believed corruption in high places in their countries had increased during the previous year and that the authorities were doing very little to snuff out the scourge.

On average, across 18 countries, six out of ten Africans told Afrobarometer researchers that corruption had increased in their country, with 41% saying that corruption had actually “increased a lot”. Only one in five said corruption had decreased at least “somewhat”.

What got me thinking about Mnguni’s controversial branding of our leaders in government as amasela is the media reportage around European countries turning to African gas as an alternative to Russian supplies following the latter’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Reports emerged last month that Italian Ministers had travelled to Angola and Congo-Brazzaville, where they concluded new gas deals, and that Italy was also eyeing Mozambique as it sought to end its dependence on Russia by mid-2023. Germany’s new leader, Olaf Scholz, said in late May, while on a visit to Senegal – which is endowed with huge gas reserves – that his country would seek to pursue gas projects with the West African country. The partially State-owned Nigeria LNG has also been inundated with requests for gas from European countries it does not currently supply.

Earlier this year, the European Union decided that natural gas investments are equivalent to investments in ‘green’ energy, which implies that, for the foreseeable future, African gas from existing and yet-to-be-developed projects will be flowing to Europe.

How much of the gas bonanza will be used to line the pockets of amasela in gas-endowed African countries? A lot, I would say. There have been multiple precedents of this, some of which are captured in Nicholas Shaxson’s 2007 book, Poisoned Wells, which details how the citizens of Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe, and Nigeria, besides other countries, remain poor, despite having produced huge quantities of oil for decades. It is mostly the elites in these countries who have benefited, together with the oil companies that corrupt them. Nigeria has been Exhibit A. It has produced hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of oil since the early 1960s, but for many citizens there is little to show for this.

Could we be entering a new era of gas amasela?