Communist Party headquarters, Johannesburg, July 2005
WE HAD GATHERED AT PARTY headquarters in downtown Johannesburg for a regular executive committee (Politburo) meeting on an upper floor offering a sweeping view of the city, but since insufficient members had turned up the gathering was postponed. While we chatted in a convivial mood over coffee, discussing when to reconvene, I suggested that instead of dispersing, we use that morning to informally discuss the situation that had arisen over Mbeki’s recent dismissal of Zuma as the country’s deputy president. That had occurred on 14 June 2005 and was announced by Mbeki in an address to a combined session of the two houses of parliament. Mbeki had been unanimously applauded for his firm stand against corruption, and the media likewise was in agreement that he had no other option, owing to a High Court judgment of 2 June, handed down by Judge Hilary Squires, which found that Zuma had benefitted from his financial adviser Schabir Shaik’s crimes. Shaik was found to have paid over R1.3 million to Zuma between 1995 and 2005, and allegedly solicited a bribe for him of R1.5 million from the French arms company Thomson-CSF (later renamed Thint Holdings). In return, the company allegedly expected to receive favourable treatment and protection from Zuma regarding its bid in South Africa’s arms acquisition programme. Shaik was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, of which he served just over two before gaining parole.
I had initially met Schabir Shaik in his hometown of Durban after clandestinely slipping into the country in 1990 just before Easter to join Mac Maharaj, Siphiwe Nyanda and Janet Love on an ANC–SACP mission codenamed Operation Vula. They had been in the country for two years doing exceptional work in establishing a senior leadership presence. My involvement, and that of several others, came late in the day (the ban on the ANC and SACP had been lifted in February 1990). Even with negotiations looming, the realistic possibility that the De Klerk regime might negotiate in bad faith meant the ANC needed to retain its insurrectionary capacity. Schabir Shaik, who came from a notable family of brothers, appeared to be paying the rent for an office we were using. While Operation Vula landed Maharaj, Nyanda and a score of others, including Billy Nair and Pravin Gordhan, in detention, both Janet Love and I missed arrest by sheer luck, ducking and diving for a year, until we all received indemnity by June 1991. This was in time for the ANC’s first legal national conference in the country since the 1950s.
While we set about the monumental tasks of organisational renewal, strategising for negotiations and winning electoral power, there was a primary need for funds. This was not only intended for the organisation’s coffers but to assist exiles and former prisoners to find their feet and continue with their honest lifetime toil of serving the ANC and the people. The organisation became a magnet, drawing all sorts of carpetbaggers and vultures to feast for flesh and favours. Insiders like Schabir Shaik were quickest off the mark. With the uncanny instinct of the predator, the weakest targets were easy to identify.
My one-time friend Jacob Zuma had returned home to a previous wife in rural Zululand, and at least two wives from exile, with nine children between them,1 and several other offspring fathered over the years. He was a leader, he was influential and bound to rise to higher office. He had no property, no bank account, no savings, but many mouths to feed. He was helpless at balancing his books and gullible. Schabir Shaik became his initial financial adviser and confidant.
By no means all freedom fighters behaved like Zuma, but those who did would justify their behaviour on the basis of sheer entitlement: they had suffered in the struggle, hence they were poor; their needs were great; it was their time to feed – the country owed it to them. In exile Zuma seemingly had not revealed such a side of his nature. Now with power- and favour-seekers on hand, masks slipped. It is said that power corrupts. I believe power reflects one’s character, for it can be wielded for positive and negative purposes depending on the nature of those who possess it. In those early days, before his corruption trial, Schabir Shaik was conveniently available to fill Zuma’s car with petrol, buy him fancy shirts, pay his children’s school fees and his rent, and settle his debts. Zuma appeared not to give such charity a second thought. These favours were described by Shaik as ‘loans to a friend’, and who can say that he had no such regard for Zuma? Mandela hoped to save Zuma’s dignity by raising R1 million for his needs, but even that did not suffice. It failed to have the desired effect on Zuma and it simply aroused the appetite of the greedy in the movement who felt they should similarly benefit. For some there is nothing that arouses the appetite for more money than getting some money. It is like the alcoholic and drink, the gambler and the winning stakes – there is never enough. Not even when, as in the case of Jacob Zuma, your wife is a minister with a handsome income and you are a provincial economic affairs minister and, later, deputy president:2 powerful positions which come with free accommodation, a retinue of servants, official vehicles, drivers, protectors, overseas travel, a swarm of benefactors, gifts and expense accounts. How useful, then, if you can manipulate your political power for private benefit.
Zuma was extremely fortunate that the country’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) had declined to proceed against him after Shaik’s conviction even though NPA officials stated there was a prima facie case for so doing. They had identified 783 individual potentially corrupt actions. Bulelani Ngcuka, head of the NPA, stated that the NPA did not feel they had a winnable case – but this was most likely a ploy to avoid embarrassment to the ANC and the government. Mbeki had wanted Zuma to voluntarily resign from office but Zuma had refused, arguing that if he did it would be an admission of guilt. An overly polite Mbeki, in my view, was snagged in a trap, and had no other recourse than to fire his deputy. Zumaites in the ANC, some with their own axes to grind against Mbeki for allegedly failing to call off investigations into their own malfeasance, were on an unprecedented warpath, and a huge schism developed. The SACP and the trade union ally, Cosatu, both of whom had been frostily ignored by Mbeki on unpopular issues of policy, sided with Zuma as a preferred candidate for leadership of the ANC. Their main opposition to Mbeki related to the government’s economic policies, which they deemed a decided shift to the right, and to allegations that he was concentrating too much power in the Presidency at the expense of the liberation alliance.
The disgraced Zuma, who had never disagreed with Mbeki’s policies, raised the spectre of a conspiracy against him hatched by ‘counter-revolutionaries’, and his supporters seized that idea with alacrity. If, as Karl Marx famously said, religion was the opiate of the masses, then to smear a comrade as ‘counter-revolutionary’ without concrete facts was a sure way to convince the shallow-minded and also provide good enough reason for opportunists needing a cause. In my view the accusation is the first and last refuge of the scoundrel. Those in the SACP and Cosatu opposed Mbeki on ideological grounds, and although some had personal reasons too, I did not lump them into the same group as those I characterise as crony capitalists. The fact that the comrades at SACP headquarters supported Zuma for the top leadership spoke volumes about the extent to which he had succeeded in exploiting their antagonisms to Mbeki and their belief that he was a suitable man for the left and for the country. The situation was ugly and fraught with unforeseen consequences. A National General Council had been held by the ANC in June 2005, shortly after Zuma’s dismissal that year, and the mood towards Mbeki had been hostile. It was soon thereafter that we of the SACP were taking stock of the situation when we gathered at the Party headquarters in Johannesburg.
In the SACP offices I studied the group of battle-hardened communists, comrades with whom I had worked for several years to change South Africa and the world. Foremost among them were the Party general secretary, the feisty Blade Nzimande; the chairperson, Gwede Mantashe, a weather-beaten former mineworkers leader who did not mince his words; and the gently spoken poet and ideologue, Jeremy Cronin, whom I had once trained in London for underground work. His activity had led to a ten-year prison sentence. As I was not just a comrade, the old ‘ANC Khumalo’ and MK veteran, but an Mbeki appointee and the intelligence minister at that, I could feel for sure that despite obvious respect they showed me, there was an element of doubt about my motives.
I was relieved at the opportunity to speak my mind. The underlying tensions had festered for too long. I had been so engaged in ministerial matters that I had neglected political work to my detriment.