Tongaat-Hulett is the first company to make submissions to the truth commission, writes Enoch Mthembu
T ONGAAT-HULETT, the KwaZulu-Natal sugar giant, has become the first company called to account to the Truth and Reconcilation Commission, after the discovery of an activist’s corpse on its property.
The company has handed written submissions to the commission explaining the circumstances surrounding the leasing of three farmhouses to the security police.
This follows the exhumation of the corpse of African National Congress activist Phumezo Ngxiweni on the company’s land earlier this year on a farm called Waterloo, near Verulam.
Tongaat-Hulett insists this property and two others were leased “at arm’s length” between 1985 and 1995, and that it knew nothing of any “dirty tricks” activities.
A Tongaat-Hulett director, Johannes Magwaza, said this week: “The farmhouses were let out to the police because thugs were vandalising the farm. It was normal business practice.”
But the truth body has mooted the possibility that the leasing was done by Andy Taylor, the former head of the notorious Durban security branch who was recently acquitted in the Durban High Court of the murder of human rights lawyer Griffiths Mxenge.
Tongaat-Hulett officials say the policeman they dealt with called himself Andy Sullivan. A truth commission representative, Mdu Lembede, said this week: “We assume it was Andy Taylor who rented the house because he was mentioned by other amnesty applicants in his own unit as the one who disposed Ngxiweni’s body.”
He said the commission had “no reason to doubt” the submissions and would not be taking the matter any further – unless more evidence emerged during amnesty hearings.
The Mail & Guardian is in possession of the report drafted by an internal team of Tongaat-Hulett company investigators. The report says there is no evidence any company staff knew of or participated in “dirty tricks”.
But it says the company’s then agricultural manager, a Mr de Jongh, who let the houses, “knew or became aware the occupants were police. He was relieved to have a police presence on the land due to the high crime levels.”
The findings continue: “Senior management did not know the security branch was in occupation of company houses. Operational management and staff only began to suspect the occupants were plainclothes policemen as time went on.”
In his statement, De Jongh says: “During the mid-1980s, I was approached by a person who gave his name as Andy Sullivan. [He] inquired if there was any vacant company houses on the estates which he could rent. I offered a house to Mr Sullivan, who impressed me as a suitable tenant.” Over the next two years he leased two other houses to “Sullivan”.
Kevin Mee, of Tongaat-Hulett’s Verulam Blackburn Estates, where property was rented, says there were “long periods when there was no activity at the house. I was told it was rented by SAP people.”
He describes how he recognised the police from his days of playing “force rugby. I knew one by the name of Cassie and the other, a fairly big middle-aged man, as a regular rugby spectator. I do not know what their ranks were because of the absence of uniform and the unmarked cars they drove. I suspect they were either detectives or members of the security branch.”
Tongaat-Hulett’s group MD, Cedric Savage, says in a letter to the commission that the company was concerned about the “negative publicity which appeared after the exhumation of the remains of Ngxiweni … We therefore believe it is important to explain the company’s position.”