/ 28 April 2016

Editorial: Oh, those wicked NGOs

Mending cracks: Minister of State Security David Mahlobo says South Africa's national security values have been undermined with the 'purported' leak of top secret cables.
Mending cracks: Minister of State Security David Mahlobo says South Africa's national security values have been undermined with the 'purported' leak of top secret cables.

Remember when South Africa was the last bastion of civilisation, standing against a “total onslaught” as well as the endless inner machinations of the communists who were trying to destabilise the country, with the aim of ultimately bringing down the government? That was in the 1970s and 1980s, when white rule through apartheid was indeed under fire from many sides. There was a global Cold War going on, too, and each side was constantly trying to undermine the other – and generating a lot of paranoia about that at the same time.

Today, using that kind of “reds under the bed” accusation looks very old and out of date, never mind irrelevant to South Africa. Which foreign nations would be funding groups to destabilise South Africa? And would they do it through nongovernmental organisations?

Minister of State Security David Mahlobo believes NGOs are the cat’s paws of hostile alien powers. Some NGOs had played their part in the freedom struggle, Mahlobo told Parliament this past week, but others “are just security agents that are being used for covert operations”, he said, claiming that they had interception equipment, mysterious funding, and – to top it all – funny names.

Admittedly, Mahlobo was saying this during his budget vote, and it’s a time-honoured tradition for ministers of security, like ministers of war, to exaggerate the threats to state and national security to get more money for their departments, their own spies and agents, and of course their own interception equipment and so on. Pumping up the paranoia is often a money-spinner for securocrats.

But it’s a load of nonsense. It’s as bad as saying the public protector is an operative of the CIA. It’s as silly as Julius Malema calling a British journalist “a bloody agent” just because he asked awkward questions.

It’s also scary, because suspicion of being an enemy agent can get a person killed. Usually that’s in a war situation, not in peacetime, though Stalin pioneered the uses of such accusations to eliminate internal dissent in society – and that seems to be the script Mahlobo is reading from.