Battles in the African National Congress are typically fought underground. They smoulder along the seams of the party, occasionally showing above the surface in seemingly isolated outbursts from the party’s more incendiary factions, like the ANC Youth League or Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
However, the war around the fate of Deputy President Jacob Zuma has generated so much heat that the fire has now come into the open in anticipation of a major battle to be fought, ironically, in front of a retired Judge, Joos Hefer.
The Hefer commission, which got off to a shaky start in Bloemfontein on Wednesday, is nominally about whether or not National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid agent.
But the underlying issue is whether Ngcuka’s office has been abused to attack the political and economic power blocs that now find themselves together around Zuma.
What the appointment of the commission has already done is force some of those alliances into the open, revealing, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they represent, collectively, a serious threat to President Thabo Mbeki’s power base.
United as much by a common enemy, Ngcuka, as by political and economic interests, this camp consists of Zuma, Mac Maharaj, the Shaik brothers, the Brett and Roger Kebble mining dynasty and key figures in the ANC youth league. Less obvious but still there are Tony Yengeni and Madikizela-Mandela. Businessman Tokyo Sexwale, while not part of any campaign against Ngcuka, is drawn in to the picture through his business association with the youth league and the history of suspicion with which he is perceived to be viewed by the Mbeki administration. Even ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe has shown his support for Zuma in a number of articles and statements.
Between them they represent a sizeable chunk of the party, including an increasingly marginalised ”left”, some of whom see a Zuma presidency as a last short-cut to power.
Anyone doubting the extent to which the Zuma investigation and the allegations against Ngcuka have divided the ANC should recall, as previously reported in the Mail & Guardian, that the Presidency had to intervene to stop Motlanthe from joining the party in an interdict against Ngcuka contemplated by Zuma’s lawyers.
For Zuma’s backers, the Hefer commission is about political survival. If they manage to trash Ngcuka’s credibility then the investigations he has launched are weakened — and the possibility exists that he will be replaced by someone more malleable.
But no one wants to admit that the battle revolves around the fight to succeed Mbeki, so Ngcuka has become the target in an attempt to brand his investigation of Zuma as an attack on the ANC as a whole.
It is portrayed as being driven by Ngcuka’s supposed history as an old-guard spy, or his alleged alliance with foreign intelligence agencies wishing to weaken the ANC-led government, or by the personal ambitions of Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Penuell Maduna and Ngcuka himself.
Maharaj, for instance, likes to portray Ngcuka as akin to J Edgar Hoover, the American FBI boss who used his investigative power to act as a political king-maker.
Brett Kebble this week publicly repeated allegations that the Scorpions were ”controlled” by the CIA and that Maduna and Ngcuka were engaged in selective prosecutions ”in furtherance of your own political aims”.
The Shaik camp, in turn, privately likes to portray the investigation of Zuma and the arms deal as driven by an American bid to undermine the ANC and by a United States geo-political contest with the French, particularly over control of African oil resources. One of the Shaik brothers, Schabir, is of course the local business partner of the French arms giant Thales.
But what evidence is there that Ngcuka’s investigations have been politically motivated, or that his targets represent a coherent political grouping?
The evidence is circumstantial, and can be traced largely through the series of leaks that have driven the story.
What nearly all the players in the Zuma camp have in common is that they have felt the sting of the Scorpions, and not only that, they have been the victims of detailed leaks to the media.
Many of them in turn are also connected in some way to the whispering campaign against Ngcuka that preceded the publication of the ”spy” allegations — the event that precipitated the establishment of the commission.
Indeed, the Hefer commission is as much about the media and its role in the power struggle within the ANC as it is about spies, much of it played out in the pages of the country’s biggest newspaper, the Sunday Times.
The commission represents the culmination of a process of leaks and counter-leaks that can be traced back as far as the leaking of the notorious Madikizela-Mandela letter to Zuma that reproduced damaging gossip about the president in January 2001.
That was at the height of a crisis for the Mbeki presidency, driven by the president’s views on HIV/Aids, but compounded by Mbeki’s handling of the arms deal investigation.
It should not be forgotten that the Hefer commission is yet another toxic spin-off from the arms deal. The allegations against Ngcuka were flushed into the open by his investigation of claims that Zuma had solicited a bribe from one of the main contractors, Thales.
But in 2001 the focus was on Mbeki and his publicly misleading defence of his decision to exclude the Heath special investigation unit from the arms deal probe. And Zuma, at that stage, was supportive of the investigation and was providing political cover to Andrew Feinstein, the ANC MP who was spearheading the investigation.
A key strategic thinker in the Zuma camp admits: ”Everyone, but everyone, has used the arms deal to try to bring down the ‘other’ side.”
Since then, Mbeki appears to have turned the tables. Madikizela-Mandela has been convicted of fraud. Her ally, Yengeni, a bit player in the arms deal, has been publicly humiliated and convicted for not declaring his discounted car received from European defence company EADS.
Yengeni, who was building himself an economic power-base via his alliance with the youth league, was also a casualty in the Sunday Times exposure of the Zama forestry consortium, which included the youth league’s Lembede Investments.
That story also cost a key member of the youth league, Andile Nkuhlu, his job with the Department of Public Enterprises. He went on to consult for Sexwale’s Mvelaphanda group.
As the Scorpions investigations of Schabir Shaik, Zuma and Maharaj progressed, punctuated with media leaks, the Zuma camp began to hit back. As early as last year the M&G was approached by a former employee of Shaik with the unsubstantiated allegation that Ngcuka had impregnated an under-age girl.
Earlier this year a series of articles about he began appearing, saying Ngcuka was resigning to join De Beers and that his luxury car was about to be repossessed by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development.
In mid-July Ngcuka’s lawyers wrote to Sowetan Sunday World about a planned article on the under-age girl story, denying it and threatening legal action. The claim was later also publicly denied by his wife, Phumzile.
Around July 20, an anonymous e-mail was widely circulated to media houses, repeating the allegation and raising others: that Ngcuka had been a spy, that he was corrupt, that he was protecting his friend businessman Mzi Khumalo and that he was pursuing a political agenda against Zuma.
The e-mail prompted Ngcuka to call his off-the-record briefing with selected editors on Thursday July 24. By that weekend Maharaj had a report on the briefing.
During the next two months, various media were provided with material to back up the spy claim. They included the Sunday Times, Sunday World and e.tv.
When the Sunday Times refused to publish the story, their reporter Ranjeni Munusamy took it to City Press, which splashed the question ”Was Ngcuka a spy?” on the front page of its September 14 edition.
The appointment of the commission appears to have been an attempt to bring the campaign against Ngcuka under control by placing the spotlight on his accusers — specifically Maharaj and Mo Shaik. So far that tactic has failed, with Maharaj and Shaik on Wednesday succeeding in giving the commission itself the task of finding the apartheid-era documents needed to back up their case — which they have detailed. These include prison records and numerous specific security police reports.
Scorpions sources suggest that Shaik and Maharaj could also have cast the net wider and higher than just Ngcuka.
In doing so, they have again succeeded in upping the ante. Either the commission will be able to obtain from the police and intelligence agencies documents which are likely to include damaging new information, or they will be unable to do so, leaving the commission — and Ngcuka’s reputation — in limbo.