Former City Press editor Vusi Mona refused to tell the Hefer commission on Thursday who the sources were for the story that first raised allegations that Bulelani Ngcuka, the National Director of Public Prosecutions, had been an apartheid spy.
“I won’t disclose the sources. I think this commission has the powers to call [Ranjeni] Munusamy and [City Press reporter] Elias Maluleke and establish it from them,” he told Norman Arendse, counsel for Penuell Maduna, the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development.
Arendse repeated the question, before Hefer said: “It would be a bit of subterfuge to get at her [Munusamy’s] sources this way”.
Arendse turned to the “remarkable similarities” between an anonymous document entitled Meeting of Editors with the Invincible One, Mr Bulelani Ngcuka and Mona’s own report on the meeting that he handed to the public protector.
Mona said he had no idea who had authored the “invincible” document, and he was “not in the habit of distributing anonymous documents to get my point across”.
Mona said former Sunday Times editor Mathatha Tsedu had phoned him on the Monday morning after the City Press story about Ngcuka, and told him he had been “courageous” and that it had been “the best way you could have handled it [the story]”.
Evidence leader Kessie Naidu asked Mona if he agreed, that when Ngcuka told the editors to stop writing in the briefing, “his specific course of was to convey to you gentlemen that you should not quote him”.
“Correct,” said Mona.
Naidu then asked Mona why he was giving wrong evidence to the commission, because his earlier testimony held that he believed Ngcuka wanted them to publish his comments, but not attribute them to him.
Vusi Mona: ‘I was reckless’
Former editor spills the beans