A Roman death is always a noble death and the hearts of military traditionalists will have been gladdened by the dignity with which the commander of the South African National Defence Force, General Georg Meiring, this week fell upon his own sword.
Modern constitutionalists may also take comfort from the effectiveness with which the executive acted in defusing that curious crisis which will no doubt be long-remembered as the “Robert McBride affair”.
But, like many an affair, this one leaves a string of unanswered questions which point to unfinished business where the government and the intelligence agencies are concerned.
When was the “Meiring report” – the intelligence document, now known to have been a fabrication, claiming a coup was in the making – first brought to the attention of the defence minister and the president himself? How could any report claiming that McBride and the Deputy Minister of Defence, Ronnie Kasrils, were party to a conspiracy to overthrow the government – an event as unlikely as the rivers running back from the sea – ever have been given an iota of credence? How could the authors of the report itself have imagined it would ever be taken seriously by anyone?
The questions barely require answers; the mere fact that they can be posed points to an alarming climate of distrust and suspicion within the security services.
The fact that the McBride arrest and the Meiring report were the handiwork of the same cast of characters, with one Vusi Mbatha, or Madida, at the centre of both, should be enough to convince even those myopic commentators who have been quick to condemn McBride but slow to acknowledge the evidence that he was framed that the two events are irrevocably linked.
Despite the secrecy which surrounds their activities, it has long been self-evident that all has not been well with our intelligence agencies. Military intelligence, left largely unscathed by the activities of the truth commission, is clearly little more than a home for unreconstructed reactionaries and conspirators from the ancien rgime. Whispers in police circles suggest crime intelligence has done woefully in its attempts to infiltrate organised crime. And many are the tales from the National Intelligence Agency to indicate that this supposedly “elite” body is in fact nothing more than the proverbial nest of vipers.
Our contacts and sources suggest that McBride was in Mozambique in the first place to search for answers that the statutory intelligence bodies were unable to deliver. We believe that the answers to the questions at whose behest he was acting and where he got the sizeable sum of money which, by all accounts, he was carrying when he was detained, speak volumes about the level of distrust in some African National Congress and government circles about the information that it receives through official channels.
The Democratic Party’s Douglas Gibson this week called for a “spring cleaning” of the intelligence agencies, a phrase suggestive of some light dusting and vacuuming. We would prefer to see an axe brought to bear on the underbrush.
It is said there is no honour among thieves and it might well be said there can be no trust among spies. But a government which cannot rely on its own intelligence is worse than no government at all.
Land of the rising sums
Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, accustomed to the austere regimen of South Africa’s financial authorities, must have been surprised this week during his visit to the Far East to discover that the Japanese government is urging its citizens to go out on a binge and spend, spend, spend.
Having failed to stimulate the economy with four successive reflationary packages (and a fifth in the pipeline), the government has torn up the economics textbooks and launched an advertising campaign. It has taken space in 22 magazines and on 22 000 poster sites imploring people to spend.
This approach addresses the economy’s most pressing short-term problem – lack of consumer demand – but it won’t necessarily work. The Japanese are becoming so afraid of their financial futures and so mistrustful of the government that they prefer simply to save rather than spend.
One of the few booming markets in Japan is for home safes, where people can keep their cash secure from prying governments and dodgy banks. The Japanese now save more than 30% of their disposable income, the highest ratio for more than 25 years.
The Japanese economy is not yet a basket case but could easily become one if fear becomes endemic. Its manufacturing sector is still a formidable wealth-creating machine. It has low inflation and a huge balance of payments surplus. But there is a paralysis of decision-making at the government’s heart, a financial sector dripping with bad debts and a stock market that has just taken a bath.
Japan has a problem Mbeki and South Africa would love to have: excess savings. But that doesn’t make a solution any easier. Consumers should spend more and corporations ought to invest more. But if they don’t, the government will have to spend it for them – on real projects, not pre-electoral confections. In case that doesn’t work, the rest of the world had better be on standby. The world’s second-biggest economy is too vital to be left to go belly up.