Mail & Guardian reporters
One of South Africa’s top nuclear scientists has been given two weeks to leave the country after the Department of Home Affairs accused him of fraudulently obtaining citizenship.
Marcel Dube, who has lived for many years in Zimbabwe, was appointed executive general manager (technical services) at the Atomic Energy Corporation (AEC) in 1996. He was the organisation’s most senior black official and the only black member of the AEC board.
Last week the Department of Home Affairs ordered him to leave South Africa within 14 days, after declaring him in breach of the Aliens Control Act.
Dube’s expulsion raises serious doubts about the security around South Africa’s nuclear programme – all employees are supposed to be subjected to an intelligence clearance before being appointed.
A former senior AEC official, Mojalefa Murphy, said: “The AEC is the custodian of the inventory of nuclear bomb-grade enriched uranium. It is also the nation’s technical agency for the administration of nuclear safeguards.
“Owing to the national and international security obligations, a top-secret clearance by the National Intelligence Agency is mandatory for AEC personnel, particularly at top management level.”
Dube’s lawyer, Howard Belling, said this week he was filing an urgent high court application against the minister of home affairs to contest the expulsion order. Belling said home affairs had come to some “hasty decisions” based on information that Dube had false documents, was not born in South Africa and was not entitled to citizenship.
Belling said Dube had been back in South Africa since 1995, but his birth had never been registered. He said the application was likely to be filed on Thursday afternoon, after the Mail & Guardian went to press.
The AEC last week denied Dube was being deported, claiming he had taken three weeks’ leave to “sort out a number of questions regarding his citizenship” – an explanation repeated by Dube, who said there were simply a few technical errors in his file at home affairs. This week Dube referred all queries to his lawyer.
However, the home affairs department this week confirmed Dube had been given two weeks to leave the country after violating the Aliens Control Act. The department would not elaborate.
It is understood Dube applied for a work permit to South Africa in 1996, but was refused because he had overstayed his visitor’s visa. He nevertheless later gained full citizenship and his job at the AEC.
It is unclear how Dube managed to sail through AEC security clearance with false papers.
AEC chief Waldo Stumpf this week said Dube had slotted in very well at the AEC, and was helping to change the organisation’s culture. “There is no tension in the organisation about his appointment,” Stumpf said.
Stumpf said he doesn’t know the details of Dube’s home affairs problems, other than that Dube had requested leave to attend to some problems about his citizenship.
“When he joined two years ago he said he was a South African citizen,” Stumpf said, adding that Dube had received security clearance.
But Murphy, who claims he is better qualified than Dube but was turned down for promotion at the AEC, said he warned Stumpf that Dube was not a South African citizen.
After being suspended from his position as executive general manager (corporate external relations), Murphy and Stumpf agreed to a mediation process conducted by Professor Johan le Roux of Rand Afrikaans University.
“I said at the mediation meeting that one of the issues I was unhappy about at the AEC was the fact that they had employed a non- South African in a key post,” Murphy said.
“When Le Roux asked Stumpf to clarify this, he said he was not an intelligence agent and could not investigate his staff because he was not an intelligence agent and his staff had constitutional rights.”
The AEC recently had another brush with home affairs when police raided it and pounced on Chinese workers who had been secretly working on dismantling parts of the country’s nuclear fuel programme to take back to China.
Director General of Home Affairs Albert Mokoena had to apologise to 40 Chinese nuclear technicians, who had valid business permits.