No contract has been signed with Barry Gilder more than a week after the Cabinet announced he would be the new home affairs director general ”with immediate effect” and doubts have been cast over the supposedly unanimous Cabinet decision.
Cabinet representative Joel Netshitenzhe announced Gilder’s appointment last Wednesday, saying ”what was brought to Cabinet was a consensus view of the [interviewing] panel, including the minister”.
But it is understood that Minister of Home Affairs Mangosuthu Buthelezi had continued to oppose the National Intelligence Agency deputy director general until the last moment. Buthelezi preferred deputy director general Ivan Lambinon, a long-time civil servant who had acted as director general for almost 11 months.
Buthelezi was overruled. In an attempt to end the long dispute, he found that a contract for Gilder — the preference of African National Congress Cabinet members — was not a choice, but a requirement.
Government circles believe an agreement with Gilder will be signed by the end of Friday.
”I will formally take up office in the next few days,” Gilder told Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) at a Wednesday meeting on the contractual dispute between his predecessor, former South African Secret Service boss Billy Masetlha, and the minister.
Buthelezi did not formally welcome the new incumbent in his budget speech on Monday. Instead the minister said that he ”never allowed political considerations to distract” him.
”I have not given jobs and positions to my friends, nor have I prevented my foes from achieving them when they were qualified for them,” he said.
But Buthelezi also told Parliament: ”This might be my last budget speech as minister of home affairs”, provoking suggestions that the Inkatha Freedom Party leader may be on his way out.
Relations between the ruling ANC and the IFP are frosty, with the IFP in an unofficial electoral front with the opposition Democratic Alliance. In the past year the IFP has grown increasingly close to the DA, with leaders of both parties putting in symbolic appearances at the other’s congresses.
In KwaZulu-Natal, relations reached an all-time low when the ANC challenged the IFP’s rule of the province when provincial legislators were allowed to switch parties without losing their seats.
UmAfrika editor Cyril Madlala said tensions at provincial level had filtered into the national sphere. Many IFP members in KwaZulu-Natal also feel that Buthelezi does not receive sufficient respect as a senior Cabinet member and an inkosi.
”There is the view that no ANC minister would have been so roughly treated over the appointment of his director general,” Madlala said.
The Department of Home Affairs has regularly been used as a political football. The publicly acrimonious relations with Masetlha undermined the department’s effective functioning.
Tensions also bedevil the parliamentary home affairs committee. Last year it split along party-political lines over the controversial immigration law.
The ministry’s appeal to the Constitutional Court to set aside an earlier ruling declaring the immigration regulations unconstitutional is regarded as unnecessary by the ANC, which was made clear during the budget debate.
Netshitenzhe blamed the delay in signing the contract on paperwork. At Wednesday’s Scopa hearing Gilder took notes alongside Lambinon. His contract would be signed in the next few days, Gilder told the committee — twice.