communications adviser, in
The Mark Gevisser Profile
Is he a man or a moustache?
`DO you know Leni Riefenstal?” Craig Kotze asks me. “I think I sometimes feel a bit like her. She did something for the art of communication, of strategy, and got caught up in the political situation.”
Riefenstal, of course, was the proto-spindoctor: with Speer and Goebbels, she constructed Hitler. She was also a magnificent film-maker. She claims that while she admired Hitler, she had no sympathy whatsoever with the Nazi cause. Whatever: Craig Kotze, who understands better than most that, as he puts it, “real power lies in how you communicate”, would have to be the first to acknowledge that she bears much responsibility, and thus culpability, for the excesses of her creation.
In marketing first Adriaan Vlok and Hernus Kriel, and now Police Commissioner George Fivaz, Kotze has, of course, also marketed himself. If they are strong, he is strong; if they are big, he is big. And so, upon meeting him, one is struck by his size. The only thing imposing about his physicality is his moustache — a vast, gabled affair that is more a parody of the thing than the thing itself.
Perhaps because it is so overwhelming, so out of scale, it becomes, as we talk, the personification of its wearer: at times a signifier of desperately wanting, perhaps too hard, to belong to the brotherhood of twirlers that goes back to Bismarck; at times an almost-camp mockery of them and all they represent.
An abandoned child from a broken home, he comes, “from the wrong side of the tracks” — he was brought up in foster homes and boarding schools, he has no tertiary education, and he has no contact with his family. All of this, he says, “means I have no illusions. You’re on your feet, thinking hard. Looking after yourself.” Perhaps that explains why, when Craig Kotze was a little boy, he wanted to be two things: “a soldier because I used to think armed might determined the fate of societies”, and “a historian, because it’s the historian, really, who determines who wins and who loses.”
He tried soldiering — as a national serviceman – — “but I soon realised that I don’t need a parade ground, and flags and trumpets and epaulettes to tell me how I should do what I think needs to be done. At the end of the day, it’ll always be the historians — the communicators, people like me – — who will manipulate people like the soldiers.”
Such sentiment is simultaneously Machiavellian in its intention and naive in its honesty. “I think I can do this job today,” he says at one point, “because I understand the dynamics of defending the indefensible.” Later, he qualifies this by saying he is talking about the “indefensible” in practical rather than moral terms, but still, if Kotze is as strategic as he claims to be, why is he telling me this? Does he realise what he’s saying?
His career as an historian started at The Star in 1982, where he was a crime reporter and military correspondent. He was a feverishly hard worker, and delivered more than his quota of front page leads. Unlike the stereotypical hard-boiled, tough-drinking crime-writers, he seemed to be fuelled by an idealistic — and overt — love of the police force and what it stood for.
Indeed, he dispels rumours that he was an agent by saying, “I was always upfront about my sympathies. Everyone knew about my loyalty to the police. There was no secret of it, no hanky panky.” If one is to listen to his superiors, he was used by the paper because of his excellent police connections. Because of the suspicion around him, though, he was never allowed to advance, as he wished to, into political reporting or opinion writing.
He thus jumped at the offer, in 1990, to work for Adriaan Vlok. The naive “romantic”, he went to Law and Order “because I thought they were getting a bad deal … perhaps I was a bit starry-eyed”. In this telling, he discovered upon arrival that he had to defend opinions he had no hand in making and this is why, now, as Fivaz’s adviser, he has put into place a system whereby “communications people are in on the decision-making from the start” rather than simply yes-men who do as they’re told.
But then, yet again, there’s an inconsistency that cuts to the heart of his inability to deal with his past. In the guise of cynical manipulator, he’ll tell you he did his job with eyes open, defending the police in the early 1990s to keep the image of the security forces strong so that the ANC would believe the government was stronger than it actually was, and would thus stay in negotiations. In this guise, far from simply following orders, it was he, in fact, who suggested to Hernus Kriel in 1992 that they blame the ANC’s mass action campaign for Boipatong: “I remember Kriel saying, `But how can we do that? We don’t know!’ And I said, `Haven’t you been watching television? Don’t you see shops being looted and burnt because of mass action? Violence is a natural consequence of mass action. And that’s what we have to tell the public’. It was a strategy of course. Personal feelings didn’t come into it.”
He ends this last statement with a nervous laugh. The ice is thin round these parts, and he knows it. Like Rommel, he was a good man doing a good job, caught up in the exigencies of history. He tries to explain that his “mistake” was that he saw things clinically and strategically rather than emotionally; then he says the government’s mistake was that it didn’t foresee the ANC was going to win and “these things would come out anyway”.
“These things”, of course, is evidence of state- sponsored violence. Kotze frequently stated, categorically, that there was “absolutely no evidence” of a Third Force, or of police collusion in violence. This earned him the contempt of many of his former colleagues in the media.
“In 1991 and 1992 the townships were on fire,” remembers Peta Thornycroft, now news editor of this publication, “and we needed help from the police to try and sort things out. Kotze cynically fed us party political rubbish. We all knew he was lying to us, and there was nothing we could do … If his mandate was to prevent questioning journalists from getting to the truth, he did his job bloody well.”
All of this is important now only because Kotze, after a year in some sort of internal exile as Sydney Mufamadi’s silenced spokesperson, has been given a second chance by George Fivaz. The Fivaz I met just after his appointment, in early 1995, was shuffling and tongue-tied. Within weeks, Kotze — excellent at his job — pumped him up into a media superstar. Not surprisingly, Kotze quickly became indispensable, and there is a widely held perception, inside and outside the police force, that Fivaz unfairly protects him. The peak of his influence was the Sword and Shield campaign, his personal invention: “We had to come up with a credible, imaginative and immediate response to the hysteria about crime … And so I thought, because I’m a student of military history, of a Roman legionary — sword and shield, integral, but with separate functions.”
It fell flat, though, not over the unfortunate coincidence that it is the widely-known motto of the East German secret police, the Stasi (Schwert und Schild der Partei), but over the claim that South Africa’s 10 000 most wanted criminals would be arrested within 30 days. Safety and Security secretary Azhar Cachalia slammed it as “ill- conceived … media hype”. Another senior player notes that “because the 10 000 weren’t caught, and could not even be identified, it was a disaster, leading the public to believe that the whole excellent 12-month plan — of which it was really only a small component — was a failure. It had the exact opposite of its intended effect: it demoralised the public and the police alike.”
Kotze, ever the doctor of spin, claims that “the controversy over the plan has raised consciousness of it in the public mind; has made it an issue everyone’s talking about. That’s what we wanted.” It was, however, a classic example of how, in advertising, the desire to create a good perception often neglects what is physically possible on the ground. It signifies, perhaps, a wind-change in the fortunes of George Fivaz, because when image and reality are so sharply divorced, the perception becomes that the product being marketed is “out of touch”.
Another compelling recent example of this phenomenon has to do with Fivaz’s glorious announcement, last April, that whole categories of police officers would receive pay increases of 38-40%. “We pleaded with them,” says South African Police Union national secretary Peter-Don Brandt, “not to create unfair expectations, as the truth is that as a result of our negotiations, only a small percentage would get that much. Our members expected 40% but now their salary advice shows that their increase is much less, and we have a rebellion on our hands!”
And so, for the third time in three years, SAPU — which represents the bulk of white police officers — has called for Kotze’s resignation: the first, astonishingly, was in 1992, when it felt he was discrediting the police by using his uniform — he was a captain at the time — to advance a political platform. Now SAPU wants him out because of “irresponsibility” over the release about the salaries. The charge is extreme and there are two sides to this story. But it underlines, once more, Kotze’s unpopularity.
Kotze says this is because he, like Fivaz, is a new broom, “while many of my colleagues are not showing initiative, and taking advantage of the situation to show their worth. They’re still caught in the fortress mentality of the old SAP, waiting for the phone to ring. That’s what we’ve been trying to eradicate, and that may produce resentment … My approach is quite simple: you get out there and advance! Create new positions for yourself, make lightning strikes, confront issues head on. Don’t wait … It’s the difference between trench warfare and blitzkrieg. I’m interested in blitzkrieg. Perhaps the others feel left behind.”
He is certainly right when he refers to a fortress mentality in some of his colleagues, and one could forgive his quick wit for being impatient with police doltishness. And he is quick off the mark: this week he effected a speedy response from Fivaz condemning the removal of press from the Thembisa stampede. But interviews with a wide range of his colleagues reveal that their primary greivance with him has to do with a ruthless style that brooks no dissent, that leads him to overstep repeatedly his reponsibility, and that does, many of them feel, prevent them from taking the very initiative he claims to have made possible for them.
Indeed, grievances have been lodged against him by several staffers in the commissioner’s office, and because of the crisis brewing in the communications corps, many feel Fivaz’s immediate intervention is required.
A former colleague, who has been close to Kotze, says that “he’s a survivor. He comes, literally, from the streets, and his life is dedicated to making sure he never slips back there. And so he is preoccupied with control, he’s very tough, he’s ruthless. I don’t believe he is driven by ideology. He is driven by the need to survive, and the need for power.”
He is an outsider who wants to belong but is scared that he’ll lose the strategic advantage if he gets too close; he is an insider who wants to keep his distance, but is scared he’ll lose his club- membership if he strays too far. He says that “I have no ambitions in my own right, but I think I have the mentality of someone who will always be the servant of powerful men and women.” I got the sense of a man who has not quite worked out how and where to place himself. Perhaps that’s why his means of control is to hold the image, of himself, as puppeteer; the power behind rather than on the throne.