The final report of the Hefer Commission of Inquiry into spying allegations against national prosecutions head Bulelani Ngcuka was critical on Tuesday of Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s threat to ignore a subpoena to testify.
”All I wish to say is that it would be a sad day if, for fear of incurring the wrath of a political organisation to which he belongs, the holder of one of the highest offices of state were to consider ignoring a subpoena issued by a commission appointed by the president under a power vested in him by the Constitution,” the document states.
This was in response to a letter from Zuma to the commission last November, in which the deputy president agreed with a sentiment expressed by Hefer in an earlier letter that he would not wish to reach a point where he had to issue a subpoena.
”… (I) indeed hope that we do not have to reach that point as I also would not want to reach the point where I would be forced not to respect your subpoena,” Zuma wrote.
Zuma, head of the African National Congress’s intelligence unit at the time of a 1989 probe into Ngcuka, declined to testify before the commission as information he dealt with at the time was the property of the party.
He said he had no right to discuss such matters outside the ANC.
President Thabo Mbeki, in a letter to Hefer, agreed with the judge’s statement on Zuma.
He said the ANC had informed the commission that documentation obtained from Zuma had been handed to the new state intelligence agencies. If he was subpoenaed, the party said, Zuma would only be able to give such evidence as he could remember.
”Since the ANC would object to any submission based on reconstruction from memory, of a report submitted in 1989, 14 years earlier, this placed him in the invidious position that he would be obliged to defy either the commission or the ANC,” Mbeki’s letter explained.
”Senior officials of the ANC informed me that had a subpoena been served … it would have acted according to the law.”
The commission found that Ngcuka ”probably never” acted as an agent for the apartheid government.
The ANC on Tuesday welcomed the findings of the Hefer report, saying the commission was ”a necessary undertaking to safeguard the integrity of an important institution of the democratic state, the office of the national director of public prosecutions”.
The ANC will study the report and ”reflect on related processes” to establish whether there are any matters on which the organisation needs to pronounce or act.
In its statement on the report, also released on Tuesday, the New National Party said it had warned from the outset that a commission of inquiry was not only irrelevant, but would create a ”dangerous precedent”.
”A lot of time and money has since gone into the exercise of investigating these allegations — allegations which have now been proved to have been unfounded,” the NNP said.
The NNP said Ngcuka should consider legal steps against his accusers. — Sapa