DREW FORREST, Johannesburg | Friday
FORMER Umkhonto weSizwe (MK)commander and defence minister Joe Modise challenges the principle that one should not speak ill of the dead. At best, his record is an ambiguous one.
Modise was of former president Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo’s generation, joining the African National Congress Youth League in 1947 and cutting his political teeth in campaigns against Bantu education and the Sophiatown removals in the 1950s. A Treason Trialist, he was among the first ANC leaders to go into exile, where he spent nearly half his life. MK chief for nearly 30 years, he was closely associated with the ANC’s move to armed resistance.
The flood of extravagant tributes, including the Order of the Star of South Africa for meritorious service to the country bestowed on him in his last days, reflects his symbolic stature as one of a generation of titans now turning to dust.
But the fact is that he was neither a good nor respected guerrilla commander. A reluctant and largely absent defence minister, he would probably not have won a second term if he had been available. His one, indisputable legacy is a R66-billion national headache – the arms deal.
Former ANC exiles who knew him in the 1980s are at a loss to explain his power and seniority in the exile period. “I never heard a good word about him,” one remarked.
It is even suggested that the ANC’s emphasis on multi-ethnic leadership – Modise was Tswana-speaking – may have been influential.
The likeliest explanation was his courage in channelling MK recruits into neighbouring states in the early 1960s.
“He took people out and kept coming back,” said one analyst. “The respect he earned catapulted him into the leadership, and the longer he was there, the more entrenched he became.”
From 1965, when he was appointed MK head and a national executive committee member, until the ANC’s unbanning in 1990, it is hard to find a significant MK success for which Modise could claim credit. So infiltrated was MK, and so ill-prepared and under-resourced its fighters, that many were arrested within days of crossing the border.
The main charges against him are inertia, keeping a safe distance from the action and lack of concern for MK troopers – and in all respects he is contrasted with his deputy, Chris Hani. Sources consider it significant that while several attempts were made on Hani’s life, Modise was left alone.
“He was never in the camps; Chris had to sort out the 1984 camp mutinies,” was one complaint.
Another exile said: “When I met him in Lusaka, all he seemed to care about was building his house. He was obsessed with his lawn.”
The 1993 Motsuenyane Commission on rights abuses in the camps found that he failed to exercise due oversight. It also heard that he asked a guerrilla to bring him shoes from South Africa.
True to form, the ANC circumvented the Modise “problem” by creating a parallel structure. The move to armed propaganda in the mid-1970s saw the creation of a small, close-knit “Special Ops” unit under Joe Slovo, who answered to ANC president Oliver Tambo. This unit executed the Sasol and Koeberg attacks.
Among the senior ANC exiles who returned to South Africa to initiate “talks about talks” in 1990, Modise is seen as important in bringing together the generals from both armies.
Roelf Meyer, then defence minister, recalls a “positive” Modise-brokered meeting in late 1991 between defence force chief Kat Liebenberg and MK’s Siphiwe Nyanda. “Joe struck me as someone looking for answers.”
But other commentators accuse him of excessive cosiness with defence force top dogs. The Mail & Guardian wrote that he “became chums with the defence establishment through 18 months of integration talks” and referred to his “readily available helicopters and hunting trips in [defence force] game reserves”. A 1992 top-secret defence force document, later leaked to the M&G, makes it clear that elements in the defence force aimed to bolster Modise at the expense of the “South African Communist Party/Kasrils/ Hani faction”.
As minister, sources say, he tended to favour the advice of defence force chief Georg Meiring over his defence secretary, Pierre Steyn, and ANC department officials, including deputy minister Ronnie Kasrils.
One consequence of this, and of Modise’s inherent hawkishness, was a drift from the 1996 defence white paper, which emphasised commitment to arms control, lower defence expenditure in favour of social spending and a defensive military posture.
As minister, his overweening focus was on South African arms purchases and exports. Frequently abroad at arms exhibitions, he missed a meeting of the Interstate Defence and Security Committee in 1995 – despite chairing this important regional body – to attend a weapons show in Saudi Arabia.
The arms package was Modise’s baby. Strongly sympathetic to the generals’ agitation for new military toys after 1994, he drove it through the Cabinet in the teeth of initial resistance, notably from minister without portfolio Jay Naidoo and Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel.
Parliament’s defence committee chairperson Tony Yengeni played an honourable role in withstanding pressure for a new force design until a proper threat assessment and the completion of the Defence Review, says defence analyst Laurie Nathan.
Whatever the government’s claims, Parliament did not endorse a massive procurement exercise. Stressing that the government could not afford the force design option, it called for defence spending within medium-term expenditure projections of about R10-billion a year.
Insiders say Modise went straight to the Cabinet claiming approval to procure, winning speedy backing.
Other matters he left to Kasrils, generally seen as de facto minister. “He gave little direction and paid little attention to policy,” said one source. “He didn’t read the White Paper. The standing joke was: Don’t give Joe a memo of more than one page.”
Repeatedly credited in posthumous tributes with integrating MK and the South African Defence Force under civilian control, he is considered to have done little more than preside over a process driven by Kasrils and engineered by MK’s Aboobaker Ismael and Brigadier Jack Grundlingh in the Transitional Executive Council’s sub-council on defence.
In his sixties, unwell and openly desirous of a comfortable retirement, he is believed to have been appointed only after MK objections to Mandela’s first choice for the defence portfolio in the government of national unity, the National Party’s Kobie Coetsee.
Modise’s arms hobby horse seems to have alerted him to new opportunities.
Chairperson of two private companies within three months of leaving the government, he told the media that while marketing Armscor products abroad “I built enormous business contacts”. Asked whether he had paved his way for private business ventures while in office, he replied: “That is silly – no one can prescribe what you do.”
The arms deal investigators found his involvement in a company that benefited from the procurement “extremely undesirable”. Their one substantial recommendation – of a cooling-off period for ministers entering businesses related to their past portfolios – is clearly aimed at him.
Assessed over his whole life, the “meritoriousness” of Modise’s contribution is open to question.
In his youth, he said, he could think of nothing but liberation. But he ended a sad and not very admirable figure, his fires banked by the languors of exile, age, ill-health and the temptations of office.