The tug-of-war in home affairs may soon be over but the puzzling nature of the saga remains
Drew Forrest
Government sources say the running battle between Minister of Home Affairs Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his director general, African National Congress ex-spook Billy Lesedi Masetlha, is close to resolution. A well-placed official says the committee set up to break the impasse chaired by Deputy President Jacob Zuma and including Buthelezi himself is close to completing its work.
There is speculation that Masetlha is to be shifted to a vacant director general’s post, possibly in foreign affairs. Suggesting Masetlha now acknowledged matters were untenable, the Financial Mail quoted him this week as saying he might be gone by December.
Last week’s spat over the deportation of a British executive with local business interests, where Buthelezi slapped down Masetlha and justified the move in the media, underscored the extent of the breakdown. Mail & Guardian attempts to interview Masetlha this week were unavailing.
In a context where the ANC took pains to draw Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party into a ruling coalition, it remains unclear why President Thabo Mbeki appointed Masetlha against Buthelezi’s stated wishes; why he was allowed to operate almost as a parallel minister; and why a chronically dysfunctional relationship was allowed to continue for so long.
Part of the answer lies in Masetlha’s party seniority and security background. A student leader during the Soweto 1976 uprising and active in the formation of the Congress of South African Students, he skipped the country in 1979 and rose rapidly through exile ranks as a security operative.
By the late 1980s he was second in command of the ANC’s London mission, a key “forward area”. There is some speculation that part of his role was to monitor mission chief Solly Smith and Sechaba editor Francis Meli, suspected of being security risks.
Repatriated, he sat on the transitional executive council’s sub-council on intelligence. From there it was a short step to director general of the ANC government’s external intelligence arm, the South African Secret Service (Sass).
ANC insiders were divided this week on his performance at Sass. Describing him as “rational and sober”, one said he had a gift for strategic intelligence and delivered “a quality product” to the government. Another questioned this, saying he was a “difficult and complex man” prone to factional politics.
There is consensus that he is an Mbeki loyalist and forceful and stubborn by temperament. His transfer to home affairs in late 1999 is ascribed, in part, to conflicts with Minister of Intelligence Joe Nhlanhla.
But the Mbeki administration’s redefinition of home affairs as an element of the state security apparatus, and desire to keep a non-ANC minister and his non-ANC entourage under scrutiny, also seems a factor. Buthelezi immediately complained that his director general was appointed to spy on him.
Asserting that Masetlha was “a strategic deployment”, a former ANC intelligence source said the party’s suspicions focused on Buthelezi’s Italian-American adviser, Mario Ambrosini.
Post-1994 South Africa is littered with struggles between ministers and director generals, but Masetlha took his role as an ANC plant in an IFP ministry to extremes.
Even ANC sources describe his conduct as “clumsy” and “provocative”. Sandwiched between him and the vainglorious parliamentary committee head Aubrey Mokoena, who has filibustered the immigration Bill into the ground, Buthelezi could be excused for suspecting an ANC plot to thwart him.
Buthelezi’s immigration Bill five years in the making and widely seen in ANC circles as Ambrosini’s baby is a case in point. Masetlha provoked a crisis in ANC-IFP relations when he announced last May that Mbeki’s office would be put in charge of the Bill and that a Cabinet committee would overhaul migration policy.
Masetlha suggests there has been unwarranted ministerial interference in the running of his department. But the issue is the magnitude of decisions he has made without consulting his political principal, and his encroachment on the latter’s political role.
Listing 64 disciplinary infractions, Buthelezi accused him last year of overriding ministerial instructions on departmental and foreign diplomatic appointments, and launching a R10-million internal restructuring programme without authority.
In April last year Buthelezi said he had been “shocked” to learn from the media that Masetlha had ordered that asylum-seekers and refugees be turned back or detained at border posts.
The long and acrimonious dispute over Masetlha’s contract, which he refused to renew despite legal opinion that it had lapsed, underscored his view that he answers directly to the president. What apparently irked him was that the ministry and specifically Ambrosini framed the contract extension he was asked to sign.
An ANC source said this week the party would not placate the IFP at any price, but that there was a strong body of opinion that the relationship was in bad repair and needed to be “nursed”.
The Masetlha imbroglio in part reflected difficulties in relocating a senior party man to a post of appropriate standing, and Mbeki’s frequent and often successful tendency to leave problems to solve themselves.
But Mbeki’s high opinion of Masetlha and the premium he attached to personal loyalty were also factors. The underlying resentment of many ANC members towards Buthelezi had given Mbeki additional scope to indulge the home affairs director general.