Jeremy Cronin: CROSSFIRE
General Georg Meiring’s blunder in passing on to President Nelson Mandela a cock-and-bull story about a “left-wing” plot has got me thinking about Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals. What is the connection, you wonder?
There have been persistent rumours about Stals’s role in the apartheid-era State Security Council. Little light has been shed on that structure in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, so we can only speculate about our governor’s role (if any).
Recently, British newspapers have been running stories on the Absa/Bankorp lifeboat deal, in which the Broederbond banking empire was rescued by a hefty (possibly illegal) Reserve Bank bale-out with public funds. Some stories have suggested that the Reserve Bank assisted third-force elements to set up offshore operations.
But the parallel between Meiring and Stals is not necessarily in the domain of conspiracy. The Meiring episode has highlighted the whole question of the uses and abuses of information.
Meiring’s blunder is hard to explain. Did he really believe he was going to get away with such an improbable story? Actually, he did.
The “left-wing plot” story has a vintage. In July 1990, in the week before the unbanned South African Communist Party was to have its first public rally, the apartheid regime gloated that it had uncovered a red plot to undermine the negotiations. That plot was Operation Vula.
At the time, Mandela was well aware of a major African National Congress underground leadership structure, established in the late 1980s under the direction of Oliver Tambo. It was this network that ran the clandestine communication line between the imprisoned Mandela and the exiled ANC leadership in the sensitive 1989 period, as negotiations were being nurtured.
What Mandela appears not to have known in July 1990 was that this network was called Vula. So when the Vula “conspiracy” story first broke, there was a moment’s hesitation.
If they had noticed this, Meiring’s circle would have been encouraged; they may even have misread its significance. The apartheid disinformation operatives certainly continued to play the Vula card for all it was worth in the following years.
In the second half of 1992, apartheid intelligence structures produced an 18-page document. It claimed Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela were preparing a breakaway party, and that Hani had established in Zimbabwe a secret army of disenchanted elements from the SACP, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army and Umkhonto weSizwe.
This disinformation came back to haunt the De Klerk government in the days after Hani’s assassination. In the face of national and international outrage, the De Klerk government kept a very low profile, hoping its own character assassination of Hani would be forgotten.
But not everyone thought the renegade army was a figment of disinformation. In Parliament on April 19 1993, the Conservative Party’s Schalk Pienaar wanted to know why the government was suddenly so coy. “Why did the government not tell South Africa what Chris Hani was busy with in the last few months?” (The Citizen, April 20 1993).
The next “red plot” came into the public domain in February 1994, through the good offices of Dries Bruwer, president of the Transvaal Agricultural Union. He announced that white farm-owners would prevent voter education on their farms, in defiance of the law. Bruwer cited an “SACP” document in his possession as the reason. According to Bruwer, the document was supplied to him by a “reliable source in military intelligence”.
This “SACP document” was distinguished by its numerous Afrikaans spellings (“kabal”, for instance), and Afrikaans syntax (“the regime was with its back against the wall”). It also did not seem to know that “workerism” is regarded as an irritating deviation in the SACP.
But it was good enough to convince Bruwer, Ziba Jiyane, then in the Inkatha Freedom Party, and sundry Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging leaders. The document detailed a series of operations directed against right-wing forces, culminating in Operation Sunrise, which was to be the master-plan for a socialist insurrection.
This was not the first time Operation Sunrise had been invoked. In a nasty profile on Joe Slovo in Rapport (September 5 1993), De Wet Potgieter wrote: “Rapport learned this week from a very reliable source that Operation Vula, the underground movement of the SACP … is still continuing. It is no longer known as Operation Vula, but Operation Sunrise.”
In short, we should not see Meiring’s recent peccadillo as an isolated event; third-force disinformation has been spinning a “left-wing plot” for years. The repetition of the story has not been without its success. The gullibility in many quarters (with the honourable exception of this newspaper), after Robert McBride’s arrest in Maputo, illustrates the point.
But where does Stals fit into this? We are living in an information age. Those who control the information can set the course for those who think they are actually steering.
In the last months of the negotiation process, a hard-fought battle was waged over whether the Reserve Bank’s strategic (not just operational) independence should be enshrined in the Constitution. Those who called for the alignment of the bank with the policies of any future government lost the argument.
Stals has used his now enshrined independence to stubbornly press on with sado- monetarism. After the 1994 election, the Financial Mail boasted that “the government has changed, but the goals of the Reserve Bank remain the same”. Stals’s monetarist obsessions continue to hobble our economy.
But the Reserve Bank is not just the key institution for developing and implementing monetary policy. It is also a crucial source of strategic economic information.
When ANC members arrived in senior positions in the Department of Finance, they were alarmed to find there was virtually no economic policy capacity. That capacity had been shifted almost exclusively to the bank. To this day, government’s understanding of how the economy is performing remains heavily reliant upon the bank’s economic modelling. By all accounts, that modelling is a secret, known only to Stals’s inner circle, the old guard.
Over-reliance on the bank’s model was one of the key concerns of those who, in the ANC alliance, had problems with government’s macro-economic framework. Now, however, the proponents of the growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear) in government are also increasingly critical of the bank’s modelling. They are convinced that the bad news on job creation and growth is inaccurate.
Coming out of different corners from within the ANC alliance an interesting consensus is developing. Could Stals’s information be as flawed as Meiring’s?
Watch this space.