Over 25 years ago I reported on Pagad, an anti-drug and anti-gangster community organisation, which turned into a vigilante group that unleashed a campaign of urban terror, with pipe and car bombs targeting clubs and restaurants.
It was not police detectives but a covert intelligence unit led by former ANC intelligence operatives that delivered the breakthrough after years of escalating deadly violence by Pagad’s G-Force paramilitary. Over 11 months from December 1999, when key leaders were arrested, to preventing the Keg & Swan pub bomb in November 2000, this shift to intelligence effectively ended urban terror. Co-operation and support from Scorpions prosecutors proved invaluable to both operatives and prosecutors, who secured lengthy jail terms.
Details of the strategic shift from getting people in charge to take note of Pagad marches and anti-state rhetoric in 1996, to securing buy-in for Operation Lancer’s strategy based on intelligence, are revealed in Lives on the Line by David Africa, a personal friend. The book also analytically transports what happened then to today’s security services’ flailing and government’s obsession with bureaucracy, “vacuous symbolism” and persistent anti-intellectualism.
The bottom line is that luck didn’t end Pagad’s urban terrorism, but a change in strategy. That strategy centralised intelligence provided by the expertise of ANC intelligence members whose leadership was based on trust and delegation, not issuing directives, and even persuaded those who had served the apartheid police.
“The resilience, strategic nous and innovation that characterised the best the ANC had to offer, coupled with the institutional memory and discipline of former [Security] Branch staff we recruited, proved a potent combination and was ultimately the basis for our success,” Africa writes.
He recounts how SA Police Service (SAPS) crime intelligence bugs needed “much prayer and finger-crossing” to work, the intra-police rivalry that deliberately sabotaged the covert unit’s efforts, and how VIP bodyguards based at the Acacia Park parliamentary village arrested the would-be Swan & Keg bombers. Real life smoke-and-mirror tactics emerge, from befriending families of key Pagad members to turning a high-level Pagad member caught in a midday tryst into an informer.
Yet little, if anything, of what brought about the successful end to Pagad’s urban terror has been internalised. All that ever happened was a two-hour so-called “lessons learnt” debriefing. This failure to learn from home-grown success means intelligence and police services are stuck in bureaucracy and vacuousness and SA remains greylisted by the Financial Action Task Force, amid organised crime and embedded corruption, racked by the polycrisis of poverty, unemployment, inequality and state incapacity.
The constitutional focus on the safety of people has been replaced by a narrow focus on the security of the state. As terms such as sovereignty are thrown about, years of “back-to-basics” by the SAPS has failed to ease crime levels as police now include the jackboot “stamping the authority of the state” as a performance indicator in their annual reports.
For Africa, SA national security services remain “disadvantaged by the lack of political imagination and leadership that has come to define SA’s executive. This poverty of imagination and leadership is writ large in the absence of a national strategy to determine the nation’s purpose.”
So the government remains stuck. In April 2024 the cabinet adopted the latest national security strategy without the public consultation and discussion it promised after calls from the 2018 and 2021 expert panel reports. Without a publicly known national security strategy based on fully articulated national interest positions, it is impossible to hold the government to account, whether on matters of economic growth or international relations.
This helps explain SA’s stumbling about amid US President Donald Trump’s tariff-triggered global economic turmoil. In the absence of strategy it is impossible to take the steps needed in the best interest of SA’s people. The government instead focuses on fuzzy rhetoric, optics and knee-jerk responses with little use beyond catchy headlines.
Luck didn’t end urban terror, and nor will luck and rhetoric end SA’s polycrisis abroad and at home.
• Merten is a veteran political journalist specialising in parliament and governance.
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