Testimony before the Hefer Commission on Friday refuted three of the earlier allegations against South Africa’s chief prosecutor Bulelani Ngcuka, whom the commission is probing.
Reports over the past few weeks suggested that the apartheid government granted Ngcuka a passport in return for informing on activists. It was alleged that the former security police might even have funded his university studies for the same reason.
A further, similar allegation suggested that Ngcuka did not serve a prison sentence for refusing to testify in a treason trial during the early eighties.
On Friday, all these were denied in testimony before Judge Joos Hefer.
Mbulelo Hongo told the commission that he and Ngcuka were in close proximity on virtually a daily basis as they served their three-year sentences together in various prisons.
Hongo was sentenced on the same day and for the same reason as Ngcuka — refusing to give evidence against their comrades in the anti-apartheid struggle. They were released together from the same prison in August 1985, Hongo testified.
He said they were in jailed for ”not a day more and not a day less” than the three years they were sentenced to.
Hongo, who first befriended Ngcuka during their earlier student days at Fort Hare University, described him as someone who was not particularly active in student politics.
This was despite the fact that those were times of great political turmoil and student unrest, from 1974 onwards.
Hongo said Ngcuka was more interested in cricket than being a ”main instigator”. If the security police funded his studies in return for spying on fellow-students, ”they should have asked him to return the money, because he was never prominent in student affairs,” Hongo testified.
Ngcuka’s legal team presented old Fort Hare records indicating that their client had financed his studies there with bursaries.
Hongo confirmed that Ngcuka was the top student in his class.
Another witness, Martha Duma Tutu, shed light on the way in which Ngcuka had obtained a passport from the apartheid government.
At the time, Tutu owned a travel agency that was a front for the African National Congress (ANC) to arrange travel documents for activists going into exile.
She told the commission that Ngcuka had applied for a passport through her agency before he was arrested in 1981. The passport was granted while he was in detention and before he was sentenced.
Tutu picked it up on his behalf from the erstwhile Department of Bantu Affairs. She later handed it to an attorney friend for safekeeping after the security police started harassing her.
She lied to the officers, telling them she had handed the document to Ngcuka’s family, Tutu testified.
Ngcuka reportedly used the passport after his release from prison to travel to Switzerland, where he joined his wife. – Sapa