The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
A storied British army unit, the Special Air Services (SAS) has a catchy slogan: Who Dares Wins!
The slogan celebrates and encourages courageous daring as a sure way to victory in any military and political conflict. The SAS are the British equivalent of the US Marines, dare-devil commandos. Inspite of their traditional democratic pretensions both the US and the UK, and their NATO allies, have secured the political and economic hegemony of the Euro-American Empire in the world through military might. The Euro-American Empire has military states as its political oxygen and economic blood. Democratic cultures and traditions that are boasted of as Euro-America’s gift to the world and to humanity are just performances that hide the military actuality of things.
In Africa, South Africa boasts of a vigorous and exemplary parliamentary democratic tradition that is accompanied by strong and working institutions and what are called Chapter Nine Institutions. Only in South Africa does an entire President, cap in hand and sweating brow, stand before a Public Protector answering personal and political questions. South Africans, a people given to political protest and spectacular public expression of political discontent, boast of probity and accountability of their democratic system that keeps leaders on their toes.
But that vigorous and indeed exemplary democracy is also a performance and a show and not the political oxygen and economic blood of the Republic. Instead, the slogan of South African Real Politik should be: Who Spies Wins! From the times of juridical apartheid to the present, I observe, South Africa has always been a spy state. The political idea and historical reality of South Africa has been the domain of the spook first and other things next.
The Domain of the Spooks
Behind P.W Botha’s back the apartheid South African intelligence decided that it was the time, in 1985, to talk to the ANC about the future, democracy and black rule. Enemies had to forge what Willie Esterhuyse called “impossible friendships.” Botha was, like all tyrants that do not bend until they break, still stuck in apartheid mode, his Crossing the Rubicon speech of 15 August 1985 was a stubborn insistence on racial discrimination and Afrikaner supremacy against the wind of changing times in the whole world. It is the spies that carried the day.
It is actually Niel Barnard, the Head of Intelligence that, behind the President’s big back, approached a Stellenbosch University philosopher, Professor Willie Esterhuyse, and instructed him to do what was then impossible, contact the ANC’s exiled strategist and political thinker, Thabo Mbeki, for secret talks that would end apartheid.
On 2 September 1989, Thabo Mbeki and the ANC’s chief spy, Jacob Zuma met two apartheid regime spies Maritz Spaarwater and Mike Louw at the Palace Hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland. Mbeki had travelled under the pseudonym of John Simelane while Zuma was Jack Simelane.
Mbeki broke the ice of that meeting with a now legendary signature: “Well, here we are, the terrorists, and for all you know f*****g communists as well.” Zuma did not receive any gift from the two apartheid spooks on that historic day but Mbeki did, two packets of Rum and Maple, and Boxer pipe tobacco, and the meeting began. When the talks got mentally taxing and cerebrally demanding the spies retreated and positioned themselves as interested observers.
Observing interestedly, the spies deployed Stellenbosch University philosophers as their mouthpieces and spokespersons. Pound for pound Mbeki and other personalities in the ANC intelligentsia such as Wale Serote chewed bone about the future Republic. Politicians were the followers and the spies led, like the true spooks they led from the dark and the back. The New South Africa, the Rainbow Nation is credited to heroes like Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu when in actuality it is a design of the spooks.
It is now in the public domain that for all the years in Robben Island the spooks worked on Mandela, turned him from a fire-eating radical to a forgiving saint. The TRC that was fronted by praying and singing bishops like Tutu became a public opinion management spectacle that used religion to fold the hearts and minds of angry blacks, and to temper the fear and rage of guilty Boers. Only competent spooks could pull such a ruse of the ages.
At the end, under a cloud of prayers and hymns, political power moved to the blacks and economic power remained with the whites, and so was the transition from apartheid to democracy managed. Unbending die-hards of the apartheid regime such as Botha himself and those of the liberation movement like Chris Thembisile Hani, somehow, did not make it to the New South Africa. Nicely and ghostly the spooks moved the war from the military terrain to the terrain of dialogue, a favourite political arena of the spy world. Spooks love to create and to collect words.
The Things that could not be said
In 2013, Reverend Frank Chikane published a troublesome book that disclosed information that had been classified. It is an explosive book. Chikane cautioned that those that want to understand South African politics should say “farewell to innocence” because it is a dark world ruled by superpowers of the world through powerful intelligence and counter-intelligence networks with “disinformation and covert operations” as the favoured political tools of choice.
Chikane, a former operative in the presidency of Thabo Mbeki argued that private international intelligence groups that operate in South Africa are more powerful that the elected government. The South African media, private and public, Chikane notes, all became “soft targets for manipulation” for purposes of public disinformation and espionage for private but powerful interests. Apartheid spies did not, with the dawn of democracy stop working for apartheid interests, they continued.
Chikane paints a vivid picture where the South African media became true weapons of mass deception where journalists became spies or were recruited by spies to shape public opinion in certain ways and directions. Big international businesses and some apartheid corporations systematically bribed and bought some politicians of the liberation movement in order to be able to control the new political dispensation and secure white economic interests in the Republic. “The old corrupted the new,” Chikane observes, and the spies were awake twenty four hours. Thanks to spiedom the new South Africa, Chikane concluded, became “colonialism in a new guise.” It is the spies and their powerful handlers, globally and nationally that have captured the state in South Africa.
The Political Underworld
Post-apartheid South Africa became a domain of a political underworld that controlled political power and big money. Powerful politicians were private pawns of the underworld. Even the best political observers and analysts in the Republic miss the point that it is the “spy tapes” that changed Jacob Zuma’s political destination from that of a cold prison cell to a warm Mahlambandlovu State House.
When the long political knives were out for Zuma in 2017 an enterprising “journalist,” Jacques Pauw, published a revealing book; The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and out of Prison. It was a forensic account about Zuma’s private and political life, detailed to the level of salt in his food, sugar in his tea and colour of his underwear. The research that went into that book is neither scholarly nor journalistic but a true work of spycraft.
When Ace Mahashule, the Secretary General of the ANC, a storied Jacob Zuma ally, was making life impossible for CR17 another inventive “journalist” Pieter-Louis Myburgh (2019) published a punchy narrative: Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Capture. Again the information and detail that are deployed in the book are not the artefact of scholarship or journalism but pure spookcraft.
A spy and a Gentleman
Even some of the most astute observers of South African political gamesmanship are taken by the game. The street wisdom is that Jacob Zuma is dead afraid of the grilling by the Zondo Commission and is using lawyers to delay or to deny the platform.
Some pop-psychologists even came up with the observation that Zuma’s frequent and constant cough and clearing of the throat is a sign of extreme nervousness. Nobody seems to read the “cough” as Zuma’s threat to let out the big secrets. I have no doubt that most big South African politicians are losing weight in fear of what Zuma might disclose about them before the Commission.
From the 1970s to the present the man has banks of intelligence about politicians in the ANC and outside. Several times in critical moments Zuma has threatened to disclose juice and bile about people who matter in South Africa. Zuma’s laugh and cough are nothing but true threats of the spook.
It is not Zuma but opponents and detractors that are dead afraid of his appearance before the Zondo Commission. In South Africa, intelligence in shape of secrets and mysteries about people and organisations is the ultimate political capital. Who spies wins in the Republic! Zuma’s disclosure, after a careful cough of former Minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi as a spy that was recruited by the apartheid regime in Lesotho was not the bomb but a sly and spooky warning shot to big names.
I, reasonably foresee that Zuma’s legal and political problems will be carefully managed to sleep for the happiness of everyone, taking him to the political cross may not be politically wise, in one laugh and one cough big names might roll.
- Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected] .
