There was occasion for thanksgiving this week, on the release from Mozambique’s Machave prison of Robert McBride, although there is something of a puzzle as to who should be thanked.
Not the African National Congress, few members of which turned up at Johannesburg International airport to welcome him home and thereby claim the credit.
Under the circumstances, the only plausible explanation we are left with is that offered by those with experience of our neighbour’s penal system; that it is nearly Christmas, when that country’s prisons begin filling up in anticipation of the “Christmas boxes” which are traditionally levied for freedom at that time of the year.
McBride, having refused several invitations to bribe his way to freedom, was presumably seen as too much of a spoilsport to contribute to the seasonal cheer and had to make way for a more rewarding clientele.
Of course there will be some hardened cynics who will suggest that more ANC members were not there to greet him because they were not aware of his pending return. That is difficult to countenance, considering that the Sunday newspapers trumpeted his release at the weekend. But then, in light of the history of our intelligence agencies, it would hardly be surprising were we to discover that our government is only informed as to what is contained in those newspapers published during office hours.
As this country stumbles from blunder to humiliation and back again in the field of foreign policy, it is becoming only too obvious that our government does not have the faintest clue what is happening in the world.
The McBride debacle is attributable almost entirely to the poisonous hand of military intelligence (MI), as has already been documented by this newspaper. Our readers hardly needed telling – as the joint standing committee on intelligence informed Parliament this week – that MI is still dominated by apartheid-era operatives.
South African mercenaries and arms dealers, many of them old guard, continue to pump weaponry and expertise into the conflict in Central Africa. In fact, it could be argued that South Africa’s most decisive intervention in the affairs of the continent since 1994 has been the contribution of privatised security forces such as Executive Outcomes to the conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Even more perplexing is the discovery in the Congo and Angola, at least, that South Africans are fighting and supplying arms to both sides. Our moral claim to being Africa’s great peacemaker is continually undermined by our status as Africa’s largest exporter of weapons.
Or so we can only guess. A senior government official, quizzed on arms shipments to the Congo, says he has been “watching CNN closely and I haven’t seen any South African equipment so far”.
And one cannot help but feel that the success our government is currently having in fanning the toy-town politics of little Lesotho into an international crisis once again reflects the dead hand of our so- called intelligence agencies.
The stories filtering out from behind the much cherished curtain of secrecy which surrounds the affairs of the intelligence agencies suggest the problems are far worse than simple inefficiency.
This week Parliament heard of the possible involvement of members of the South African Secret Service in the nefarious activities of the fugitive Zairean generals.
Last week Max du Preez, at the SABC, related the pathetic story of how the National Intelligence Agency (NIA)set up a “special projects unit” to track down apartheid’s missing billions, only to discover the unit itself was seemingly abusing state funds.
Recently this newspaper told the story of Donovan Nel, the senior NIA analyst seemingly framed on charges of threatening to blow up the president, in another spy vs spy imbroglio within that agency. And before that we had the still unresolved mystery as to how 11 minibuses and 1,2- million worth of high-tech surveillance equipment were stolen from the NIA’s supposedly secure premises.
To cap all that, our general incompetence in the field has seemingly contributed to the drying up of the intelligence flow from our former Western “allies”- notably satellite intelligence from the United States.
In the circumstances we hardly need Democratic Party leader Tony Leon to tell us – as he did Parliament this week – that “the intelligence community and agencies in South Africa are in deep trouble”.
What we needed to be told is what is going to be done about it. And we need to be told by the politicians collectively. We do not believe the ANC can be held responsible for the crisis; the problem is clearly founded in the country’s political heritage. This is, anyway, not an occasion for party point-scoring.
When the South African body politic is staggering around the world blindfold it amounts to a national crisis. The time has surely come for united action, in cleaning out the intelligence community.