South Africans love a good intelligence dossier. Every few years a badly written document purporting to be one makes its way to the media, and a career is destroyed.
A few years ago, when I was working with union leader Zwelinzima Vavi, he became a victim of such a dossier. It accused him of all sorts of unpatriotic things against the state.
He approached the office of the inspector-general for intelligence to establish the status of this so-called dossier. After many months, the report was published. It read something along the lines of the dossier being the work of a new breed of people known as “information peddlers”.
This was the early days of post-truth politics, which would be elevated into an art form by the biggest producer of fake news in the White House.
This wouldn’t be the end of it. After a series of skirmishes with his then-finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, former president Jacob Zuma finally found an excuse to sack him. This came in the form of another “intelligence dossier” that linked Gordhan to plots to undermine SA’s sovereignty.
For once, Cyril Ramaphosa spoke out against the decision to dump Gordhan. He would know very well how it feels to be a victim of smear politics. In the early 2000s, with Tokyo Sexwale and Matthews Phosa, he was accused of plotting against Thabo Mbeki, then-party leader and president of the country.
On the eve of the ANC’s 54th national conference, in 2017, e-mails said to have been written by Ramaphosa became public. He tried but failed to interdict their publication, since they had no other value beyond embarrassment.
Private communications of several of Ramaphosa’s ministers, including former home affairs minister Malusi Gigaba, have circulated on social media.
After ousting Zuma, Ramaphosa appointed a high-level panel chaired by former security minister Sydney Mufamadi to look into the affairs of the State Security Agency (SSA), the spy agency that was irregularly created through the merger of the National Intelligence Agency and the SA Secret Service in the Zuma years. A redacted version of the panel’s report was published on Sunday.
Its findings are damning and have become Ramaphosa’s latest nightmare. On “what went wrong”, the panel says: “From about 2005, with the emergence of the divisions in the ANC, there has been a growing politicisation and factionalisation of the civilian intelligence community based on the factions in the ANC.
“This has been partly aggravated by the fact that many in leadership and management of the intelligence services have come from an ANC and liberation struggle background and have seemingly, in some cases, not been able to separate their professional responsibilities from their political inclinations.
“This became progressively worse during the administration of the former president, with parallel structures being created that directly served the personal and political interests of the president and, in some cases, the relevant ministers.
“All this was in complete breach of the constitution, the white paper, the legislation and other prescripts.”
The former president referred to is Zuma. He shot back on Twitter: “This committee has 2 well known Apartheid spies. I’ve never sold out nor written letters to the SB [Special Branch, a notorious apartheid agency to crush activists]. I feel nothing when Apartheid spies call me corrupt. I hope people are not opening a can of worms which they might regret.”
The reference to the SB appears to be a dig at Ramaphosa, who has been accused by COPE leader Mosiuoa Lekota of colluding with the apartheid regime. Ramaphosa has denied this.
Zuma’s constant threats to drop bombshells show one of the flaws of the negotiated settlement, especially in dealing with security agencies and double agents.
It is not the first time Zuma, a former ANC spy boss himself, has been accused of using state agencies for his own ends.
In his recently released memoir, Time is not the Measure, Vusi Mavimbela writes about his brief stint as Zuma’s director-general during his first term. The former NIA boss recounts two troubling incidents: how an unknown person ended up in a senior intelligence post; and how his own correspondence was monitored, apparently with Zuma’s knowledge.
Mavimbela, now SA’s ambassador to Egypt, did not last.
These abuses of power by ANC leaders are serious. Not only does SA have porous borders (village and township economies have been taken over by foreigners), but its anti-terrorism capability is a joke due to these factional battles.
Ramaphosa has his work cut out. He has to follow through with a cleanup, especially of senior personnel, through a special tribunal.
It’s hard to imagine any credible cleanup taking place without addressing the sideways shifting of former SSA head Arthur Fraser to correctional services.
And Ramaphosa should deal decisively with the impasse around the security clearance of the inspector-general for intelligence.
Unbundling the SSA, announced in Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address, is only a start.
• Dludlu, a former Sowetan editor, is executive for strategy and public affairs at the Small Business Institute.
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