The hunt is on for informants in the ANC, report Ann Eveleth, Rehana Rossouw and Peta Thornycroft
THE African National Congress is sitting on information linking one of its prominent provincial members of Parliament in KwaZulu-Natal to the former South African Security Police.
The allegations about the MPP first surfaced in 1994 following the death of an ANC member believed to have discovered the agent’s alleged connection to the security police and its successor, the Crime Information Services Division.
Subsequent internal probes into the allegations produced the “proof” the ANC was looking for, which included the man’s police identity number – information which has now been handed to senior officials in the Department of Safety and Security.
ANC KwaZulu-Natal representative Dumisane Makhaye said exposure of apartheid-era informants was “an essential condition for national reconciliation and healing. This becomes even more important in the case of KwaZulu-Natal which bore the brunt of “third force” activities. The network is still intact and functioning,” he said.
The five former security policemen who told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission last week that there were people in government “structures” who spied on anti- apartheid activists were referring to operatives who hold office at a fairly low level The security police in the Northern Transvaal during the late 1980s operated on a regional basis and were unlikely to have recruited spies with a national profile. Those agents were usually handled by head office in Pretoria.
While the men – Jack Cronje, Paul van Vuuren, Roelf Venter and Wouter Mentz – were told they do not have to identify their former agents to the truth commission’s amnesty committee, they have talked among themselves about their spies. And there are no national names among those they mention. The highest ranking are two city councillors who worked in their region.
The men’s former askari, Joe Mamesela, last week told the New Nation there are five Cabinet ministers who were paid police informers. He has not divulged any names or explained how he came across the information at a time when informers with such a high profile were handled at head office level.
Names of several top ANC leaders appeared as regular contacts on National Intelligence Service documents after the National Party government and the ANC began meeting secretly in 1989.
There was regular contact between national ANCchairman Jacob Zuma, Deputy Intelligence Services Minister Joe Nhlanhla and Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad with the National Intelligence Service.
While the PW Botha administration approved of the meetings, it covered its back in the event of a leak. The meetings could have been explained as an intelligence-gathering exercise. As a result, the senior ANC members involved in the ground-breaking meetings were allocated source numbers. Some ANC stalwarts believe these numbers are now being used to suggest they were informing on their organisation.
The truth commission had neither “the time nor the resources to sniff out informers”, deputy chair Alex Boraine said on Thursday.