In April 2006 Francois Bozizé, president of the Central African Republic (CAR), paid a three-day working visit to SA at the invitation of then president Thabo Mbeki. Bozizé was accompanied by his nephew and minister of mines and energy, Sylvain Ndoutingai. By the time they left, SA and the CAR had concluded a framework agreement that prioritised co-operation in defence and security. In a short space of time, this would come to represent direct military aid from SA.
Their visit came just as UraMin, a public company chaired by the Ghanaian mining mogul Sir Sam Jonah, was vying to acquire the Bakouma uranium deposit located in the middle of the CAR. Jonah sat on Mbeki’s International Investment Council and operated his private equity fund from SA.
UraMin’s man on the ground in the CAR was an old Africa hand by the name of George Roach, who ran a mining exploration company based in Johannesburg. Roach was negotiating a special mining convention that would set out the company’s relationship with the CAR government.
Now follows: Extract 1, from Chapter 7: Nuclear Country
For the duration of Bozizé’s SA visit, Roach had booked a boardroom at the Sheraton Hotel directly opposite the Union Buildings. There, literally 500m from Mbeki’s office, Roach spent a lot of time with Ndoutingai and his entourage, “trying to resolve aspects of the convention”.
One of the sticking points was that the CAR government wanted to be given 30% of the Bakouma project’s shares — for free. UraMin had valued the deposit at $200m, so that would have equated to a gift of $60m. “We told them no ways, the best you will get is 20%,” said Roach. “Then they wanted a sign-on fee. I said we can’t do that either.”
By the time Bozizé and Ndoutingai left SA, UraMin had reached an initial agreement on how to proceed with Bakouma. The deal UraMin signed in Bangui a week later, on May 6 2006, granted the CAR government a 20% stake in the project. To satisfy its demand for an upfront payment, the company bought back half the shares for $20m and invested another $7m in exploration and development costs. UraMin thus owned 90% of the project and the government just 10%. Roach was adamant no bribes were paid, and that the only money to change hands was the $20m UraMin agreed to pay for half the shares allocated to the government and a fee for the mining convention. “It was a payment to the state, and conclusively paid to a state account in Bangui,” he said.
At the very moment Bozizé and Mbeki were discussing a bilateral agreement that prioritised co-operation in mining and security, Sylvain Ndoutingai was engaged in intense discussions with UraMin, a company chaired and part-owned by Sam Jonah. We do not know exactly what the two presidents said to each other, but given the timing and confluence of events, we believe it’s not unreasonable to surmise that Bozizé could have interpreted future military aid from SA as being linked to awarding UraMin the rights to Bakouma.
At an investor presentation held on 10 May 2006, less than a fortnight after Mbeki and Bozizé met in Pretoria, UraMin announced the conclusion of the Bakouma deal. On the very same day UraMin was unveiling its latest acquisition, SA defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota touched down in Bangui for his first visit to the CAR to assess the security situation in the country in the light of recent rebel attacks.
Was this a mere coincidence?
A month later, in June, UraMin acquired a new BEE partner in SA, Lukisa, which was allegedly linked to the family of Mbeki’s deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (she has declined to comment on the issue).
The nexus of business and politics in the CAR and SA was beginning to look uncomfortably cosy.
In February 2007 SA formalised its military pact with the CAR. While signing military co-operation agreements with other African countries was a staple of the Mbeki administration’s trade and aid agenda, this particular engagement was dubious for other reasons. Besides training the CAR army, the SANDF secretly provided Bozizé with personal bodyguards — a move some military analysts deemed highly questionable.
Six years later, in early 2013, a rebel alliance known as the Seleka began to swarm across the country. When the rebels came within striking distance of the capital, Bangui, the administration of then president Jacob Zuma hastily renewed SA’s questionable military agreement with the CAR, slipping in a few new provisions that paved the way for sending a small combat force to come to Bozizé’s rescue.
It was led by Col William Dixon. Abandoned and betrayed by his allies, Dixon and his men would fight heroically against impossible odds in the so-called Battle of Bangui that took place from March 22 to 24 2013.
Extract 2, from Chapter 20: Holding the Line
Col William Dixon had picked up the special forces group on his way back from the French embassy. With their ammunition replenished, the Hornets and Land Cruisers were soon thundering down the road to join the fray. The convoy cut a swathe through a stream of panicked civilians fleeing the fighting on foot or in cars.
When they arrived at the battle line shortly after 11am, the Hornets deployed behind the hills as bullets cracked over their heads. Maj Peet Venter took charge. Occasional RPG [rocket propelled grenades] explosions could be heard above the small-arms fire. The crews dismounted under fire to ready their 107mm multiple rocket launchers for action. The rockets first had to be taken out of their packaging and fitted with fuses before they could be loaded into the firing tubes. Meanwhile, a heavy machine gun mounted on a Hornet was used to unleash a barrage of fire on the enemy advancing on the slopes of the western hill that Platoons 1 and 2 had just vacated. This had the salutary effect of forcing the rebels to keep their heads down, temporarily halting their advance.
Dixon swung out of his vehicle to take command of the paratroopers. It was time to regain the initiative. “Michel, take this platoon and take back that hill!” he barked at Maj Michel Silva, gesturing towards the men from Platoons 1 and 2 gathered at the base of the hill.
Silva took two pathfinders with him to execute his mission. He looked around for their company commander, Maj Stephen Jiyana. “Where the fuck is your commander?”he yelled several times. No-one knew, so Silva took command himself.
Meanwhile, Venter whipped out his range table and took charge of Rfn Mulaudzi’s mortar group, which was positioned on the low ground just behind the western hill. The hill itself was now occupied by rebels, so Venter ordered the mortar men to move a short distance further back towards Bangui. They were told to ready their weapons for firing on the high ground of the western hill.
Suddenly the special forces group spotted 30 or 40 rebels running down the slope directly in front of them. The Hornets and mortars were hidden under camouflage cover, so the enemy had probably not seen them. Now they were just 400m away. Venter requested and obtained permission to fire straight at them with the 107mm multiple rocket launcher. Used to hit targets up to 8km away, it was a massacre at point-blank range. Bodies and limbs could be seen tumbling through plumes of dust three storeys high. Afterwards, body parts lay strewn in the bushes. Silva recounted watching the event. “If you’ve ever seen what happens to the human body when it is hit with a 107 ... it’s a spectacular sight,” he said. “It just disintegrates. Pink mist.”
The deafening roar of 28kg, high-explosive rockets exploding right in front of the paratroopers must have been awe-inspiring, and they let out a cheer. The action, which would earn Venter the nickname “Butcher of Bangui”, immediately halted the advancing rebels; they began to retreat to the north, where they were met by a barrage of mortar bombs set to land on the northern approaches of the hill almost a kilometre away.
Silva and the two parachute platoons charged back up the western hill, Dixon urging them on with the battle cry: “Paratroopers! Paratroopers!” They fired on anything that moved until all was quiet. Within 30 minutes, they had subdued the enemy and retaken the ground they had lost. There were no casualties among the South Africans. Everyone had done what they were trained to do.
By the time the battle was over, Dixon had lost 13 of his men, with another two succumbing to their injuries later — the republic’s worst military defeat in the democratic era. The news that SA soldiers had died defending Bangui and the secrecy surrounding their deployment led to calls for parliamentary oversight, but these were soon quashed by the ANC.
Extract 3, from Chapter 30: Unlawful engagement
The public outcry over the deaths of SA soldiers had the government scrambling to do damage control. On 5 April, the day after the heated joint standing committee meeting, the presidency issued a statement claiming that Zuma had fulfilled his legal obligations and taken the public’s right to know into account by writing to parliament a week after the deployment. This conveniently ignored the fact that he only did so after heavily armed SA paratroopers and special forces operators were spotted patrolling the streets of Bangui, causing the press in SA to kick up a fuss.
Moreover, the initial letter Zuma wrote was scant on detail. Apart from containing a serious numerical error, it simply stated that the troops would be used for training the regular army and to help demobilise armed groups. The notion of a “protection element” was introduced for the first time in the second, clarification letter. Even then it was done almost as an afterthought, by stating this element would be scaled down if security improved.
This can hardly be said to satisfy the requirements of the constitution and the Defence Act, which both clearly state that the president must inform parliament “promptly and in appropriate detail” of the reasons for deployment. A review by parliament’s research unit noted that neither of the letters defined “the exact role and mandate” of this protection element.
The revised memorandum of understanding (MoU) between SA and the CAR, which was cited in Zuma’s second letter, might have been expected to provide clarity. Instead, the document was an exercise in obfuscation. Just over a fortnight later, on 19 April, [defence minister] Mapisa-Nqakula tabled an “explanatory memorandum” in parliament that set out the terms of the new agreement, which was based on a set of diplomatic notes she signed on 31 December 2012. The memo stated that the agreement amended by the diplomatic notes now provided for “self-defence, protection of property and to save human lives”, as well as “the positioning of SANDF reinforcements in the territory of the CAR” for exactly the same purposes.
Neither the minister’s memo nor the notes themselves spelled out whose lives the SANDF was supposed to be saving — citizens of SA or the CAR — or how. But we have seen evidence that the operational orders given to Dixon’s force explicitly authorised the use of force to protect allies and civilians under imminent threat. And at the time the minister signed the new agreement, the allies and civilians under threat were Bozizé’s government and the population of Bangui.
We believe the MoU documentation was deliberately vague because Zuma knew it would come under parliamentary scrutiny, whereas operational orders would not. In our opinion, the imprecise language was designed to hide an irregular, back-room, president-to-president deal that would be snuck in through the back door and made to appear legitimate after the fact.
These are edited extracts from The Battle of Bangui: The inside story of SA’s worst military scandal since apartheid by Warren Thompson, Stephan Hofstatter and James Oatway.
The book was developed with the support of the Money Trail Project (www.money-trail.org) and is published by Penguin Random House SA. It costs R320 and will be available in bookstores this week.
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