The affair involving allegations that National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka was an apartheid spy should teach South Africa an important lesson, says President Thabo Mbeki in his weekly letter to the nation. He argues that forgiveness — and the end to labelling — is required.
The president indicated that in the early years of the post-1994 government of national unity — which the ruling African National Congress shares with the former apartheid rulers the New National Party and the former homeland based Inkatha Freedom Party — the heads of the intelligence agencies carried over from the apartheid era had been asked to release the names of the informers and spies they had used in their struggle “against the democratic movement”.
These leaders had refused to do so.
“All this was intended to ensure that those of the former apartheid ‘handlers’ who still entertained hopes of engineering a counter-revolution would have no possibility to blackmail their erstwhile informants to participate in such a counter-revolution,” said Mbeki.
The letter on the ruling party’s website on Friday says that one of the remaining great tasks is for South Africans to determine “what lessons we should learn from the entire process [the Hefer Commission of inquiry into the allegations] and create the space in all our hearts and minds to allow those lessons to inform our behaviour in future”.
“The charge that … Ngcuka had been an apartheid spy and that consequently he had abused his office to advance the cause of counter-revolution was to make the assertion that he was misusing his position to shred our democratic constitution, to defeat the democratic revolution, and with it the hopes of our people.
“By any measure, these outcomes are manifestly of constitutional significance and indubitably of public importance, to use Judge [Joos] Hefer’s carefully chosen words. Accordingly, we could never have received them lightly. Neither would they ever allow for a flippant response.
“We appointed the Hefer judicial Commission of Inquiry because we had no information that created any basis on which we could conclude that either the national directorate or the Scorpions [investigations unit] had been transformed into a base of counter-revolution.
“We had to ensure that we do not allow the situation to persist according to which things should continue to be said that served to discredit the institution or the office of the national director or the person holding the office.”
Mbeki said that during the constitutional negotiations in South Africa, “we proposed the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We hoped that by the end of its life, the commission would have helped to create the conditions for all of us to put the past of arrests, detentions, bans and banishments, torture, legalised murder and secret assassinations behind us.”
Significantly he said the Hefer commission had provided the lesson that “none of us should ever again seek to win whatever battles we are waging by labelling others as having been apartheid spies”. — I-Net Bridge