David Beresford
another country
The weekend was quite spoilt for me by the sudden apprehension that South Africa might be brain dead. That the body is kept alive for sentimental reasons by well-intentioned medics, functioning with the help of bits and pieces of machinery. But that the professionals attendant on the body would, if polled, give as their considered opinion that the patient is no longer capable of conscious thought.
This was clearly a panic attack and I’m not sure whether I should be writing about it at all. Perhaps I should swallow a pill. It is all very well discussing the state of mind of the president in the public prints, but speculation whether a country should be pronounced dead seems somehow to be taking things a bit far.
But I raise the question more in the hope of gaining reassurance than of pronouncing the obsequies. No one would be happier than I if the patient gave a surreptitious wink, to signal that all is well and a well-earned rest is being enjoyed. It would even be a relief if the suspected corpse would rise up and deliver a withering denunciation of me for the effrontery of spreading rumours about its premature demise.
The basis of the fear is not scientific. It is more a case of a relative wandering unattended into an intensive care unit and being alarmed at the sound of beeping and the sight of a flat line on a monitor situated next to a much-loved one’s head.
The alarm in this case took the form of a story that appeared in the Sunday Times the weekend before last, headed: “Man poses as Mbeki’s ‘secret agent'”. It began with a startling account of how the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) South Africa’s counterpart to the CIA, or MI5 instructed “presidential staff to keep away from a man who, they say, has for five years masqueraded as a secret agent reporting directly to the president”, Thabo Mbeki.
Now, self-evidently, this fascinating tale attributed to senior sources in the presidency and the NIA gave rise to problems for the reader, quite apart from those arising for the president. In particular, it presented ambiguities with regard to masquerading. Was the charge one levelled against a secret agent pretending to be an adviser to the president, or against a presidential adviser impersonating a secret agent?
Reading on did not help. In fact, it confused the plot further when it emerged that, during the five years “the man” had ambiguously served the president, the presidency had neglected to ascertain his true identity.
“The man”, it transpired from the Sunday Times story (based, as said earlier, on presidential and intelligence sources), was known to the president’s staff as Bheki Jacobs. But he held himself out to the newspaper, in what appeared to have been an otherwise uninformative interview, to be one Uranian Solomons. The newspaper added, authoritatively, that he was also known to masquerade as Vladimir Illich Solomons, Hassan Solomons and, on occasion, “King” Solomon Solomons.
The report went on to denounce this mysterious character as the trouble-maker behind a number of recent controversies that had embarrassed the president. He was said to have circulated allegations such as those of government corruption in a multibillion-rand arms deal, claims of big-business involvement in a planned party coup and other gossip doing the rounds with regard to the head of state.
It was, self-evidently, a major political story, if one that raised more questions than it answered. But answers would surely follow. The president would, I reasoned to myself, summon a press conference on the Monday, either to denounce the report as a monstrous fabrication or to confirm it.
If to confirm it, then to announce at the very least a judicial commission of inquiry to establish how an unidentified man had managed to pass himself off to the head of state for five years, whether as a bogus presidential adviser or a fake secret agent. After all, if such confusion is apparent on the bridge of the ship of state, are the passengers and the crew not entitled to reassurance that someone, preferably qualified, has a hand on the helm?
The anticipated controversy failed to materialise last week. On Sunday, hoping for clarification one way or another, I rushed out to buy the Sunday Times again. “‘Secret agent’ sowed fear and loathing”, announced the headline to the story on page two. But the report underneath added little more by way of substantive information, other than to announce the man’s “real name is Hassan Solomons”. How they know that is difficult to fathom since the report goes on to disclose that the Department of Home Affairs presumably due authority where identity is concerned in this country has him registered as Uranian Vladimir Dzerzhinsky Joseph Solomons.
It was as I put aside the newspaper that the morbid thought hit me as to the functioning of South Africa’s brain. It struck me that this story and others like it ranging across the entire spectrum of what is properly subject for public scandal, from the gang rape and death of Chris Hani’s daughter to the Helena Dolny affair, to the refusal of authority to release crime statistics are pin-pricks to the body politic.
As when a neurologist sticks a needle into the limbs in search of evidence as to the proper functioning of the nervous system, so such stories demand a certain reflex reaction by society. When limb after limb is jabbed and fails to provide the due response, it is perhaps time to take several deep breaths and say as calmly as possible to the nearest stethoscope: “Ah … excuse me venturing a suggestion, being totally unqualified in this area, but could the patient be, well, you know, be … …?”