Pious on the outside, but ruthless on the inside

● With a Bible in one hand and bags of cash in the other, Gavin Watson, who died this week at 71, secured public sector contracts worth at least R12bn between 2004 and 2019, according to data from the National Treasury.

The former Bosasa CEO died in a mysterious car accident the day before he was to testify at a South African Revenue Service (Sars) inquiry into tax evasion and money laundering.

Watson’s former COO, Angelo Agrizzi, testified before both the Sars inquiry and the Zondo inquiry into state capture, but Watson kept his silence.

“When it’s finished‚ we can talk — but not now‚” he told reporters in February.

Watson was born in the Eastern Cape on July 12 1948, the eldest of four boys. His father Daniel was a farmer in the Somerset East district, and a lay preacher who filled the boys with religious fervour and nonracialism. Xhosa was the first language they spoke.

The brothers attended Graeme College in Grahamstown and were fanatical, talented rugby players who defied apartheid to play in the townships. Their stance made them heroes in the black community, though they were vilified by whites and harassed by the Special Branch. By 1978 they were active in the ANC underground.

In 1997, Gavin Watson became CEO and shareholder of a hostel catering company called Dyambu. Through a combination of excellent BEE credentials (the ANC Women’s League was also a shareholder) and sharp practices — such as paying off mine union officials and getting hostel dwellers to hold protests against incumbent contract-holders — Dyambu was awarded contracts at a number of mine hostels.

Watson won a lucrative Sasol catering tender after bribing the majority union boss to threaten a strike and leak competing bids to him. He gave the union leader’s wife a job and kept their fridge full.

In 2000 he bought out the women’s league stake for R5.5m and renamed the company Bosasa. (It is now African Global.) Catering and security contracts with mines, prisons, the South African Post Office and the Airports Company SA followed, thanks to advance knowledge of specifications and pricing and between R4m and R6m in cash bribes every month that Watson is said to have himself counted and dispatched.

According to evidence before the Zondo commission, he called it “Monopoly money — so that we can get the monopoly”.

Agrizzi said Watson’s biggest turn-on was not money itself but the access to power and influence it bought him.

When the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) produced a report on Bosasa in 2009, Watson ensured monthly payments were made to top officials at the National Prosecuting Authority, and the report was ignored.

Beneath his pious, charming exterior there was no mercy for those who did not play along. When new prisons boss Vernie Petersen refused inducements to extend Bosasa’s catering contract he was replaced.

After questions were asked in parliament about the SIU report in 2010, Watson warned Agrizzi and CFO Andries van Tonder to maintain confidentiality between them, or there would be “severe consequences”.

Agrizzi blew the whistle after suffering a near-death experience. He ditched his loyalty after Watson, while Agrizzi was lying in a coma, tried to cash in a R45m “key man” policy Bosasa had taken out on his life.

Agrizzi testified that Bosasa under the “very charismatic” Watson was like a cult. Before work every morning he led prayer sessions that staff were expected to attend.

His piety may or may not have been a front. But when Bosasa was given the contract to run the Lindela Repatriation Centre in Krugersdorp in the late ’90s, he ordered his head of security to ensure the police stepped up their arrests of illegal immigrants so the company, which was paid per person detained, could make more money.

Watson is survived by his wife Leigh-Ann and three children.