Marion Edmunds
The mystery surrounding Cape Town gardener Bennet Sibaya’s relationship with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission deepened this week, after he denied providing commission investigators with evidence that he was involved in police “dirty tricks” operations.
Sibaya has refuted suggestions, made in a Sunday newspaper, that he told the commission he had been a Stratcom agent who worked voluntarily with the police to frame its head of investigations Dumisa Ntsebeza.
Sibaya last year accused Ntsebeza at a commission hearing of driving the getaway car involved in the Heidelberg Tavern massacre in 1993. He later withdrew the accusation, saying he had been tortured by police to make an affidavit at the time of the police investigation into the massacre.
The withdrawal came after he spoke to commission chair Desmond Tutu, whom he said was the only man he could trust.
Sibaya is due to appear before the amnesty committee next week to formally retract his original statement and to provide evidence in the conclusion of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army amnesty applications for the Heidelberg massacre.
Sibaya’s false claims did not correspond with those accepting responsibility for the massacre.
Ntsebeza was quoted in a Sunday newspaper last week, saying that Sibaya had supplied commission investigators with “sensitive new information”, which gave him reason to believe that an investigation into Sibaya ought to continue.
The article said commission investigators were “baffled by the type of sensitive information Sibaya possessed about apartheid security matters in the Cape”.
However, Sibaya’s version of events is far less sensational. He said this week his only contact with the commission was when he had phoned them after being chased by two policemen late one night before Christmas. “I was walking along the main road and two policemen drove near me and said, OWhy did you let Dumisa loose?’ and they asked me to come with them. So I ran away and climbed over the fence of a house and slept under a tree in the garden that night,” he said.
Sibaya showed the Mail & Guardian the house, its 2m fence, as well scars on his leg where the top of the fence had torn his flesh, when he scaled it in haste to escape the policemen.
This week he was found tending flower-beds at work, clad in blue overalls. He denied being wealthy, having a relationship with the police, or knowing anything about Stratcom. Ntsebeza said while the allegation of a Stratcom link was “far- fetched”, he refused to rule out the possibility that Sibaya was more than a gardener.
“Sibaya is a very complex character, but that does not make him a Stratcom operator. But why did the police choose him? Must we buy his story?”
Asked whether Sibaya had given the commission more information in December, Ntsebeza replied: “I would like to think so.”