The Democratic Alliance has again hit out at the African National Congress’s apparent ”inability” to provide answers on allegations that the ruling party may have benefited from a private oil deal with the government of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
In a statement on Thursday, DA MP Raenette Taljaard said ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama had failed to answer questions on the allegations yet again, during an interview with a Johannesburg radio station on Wednesday.
The DA has repeatedly called for an inquiry into allegations that the ANC may have used kickbacks from Hussein’s regime to fund its current election campaign.
ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe and ANC treasurer general Mendi Msimang allegedly had close links to a Johannesburg businessman on a ”blacklist” published by an Iraqi paper.
The newspaper, al-Mada, last month published a list of 270 companies and businessmen accused of buying millions of barrels of Iraqi oil at a lower rate than the market price, via the United Nations’s oil-for-food programme.
The Sunday Times recently reported that the two ANC officials flew to Iraq with businessman Sandi Majali, ostensibly to strike an oil deal, just weeks before he was awarded a multimillion-rand government oil tender in December 2001.
”The fact is that this mission was a dubious jaunt in furthering the already close ties between the Ba’athist party in Iraq and the ANC,” Taljaard said.
She said Ngonyama was obviously unable to draw a distinction between the ANC as a political party and the ANC in government. He had compared the trip to Iraq to one undertaken by President Thabo Mbeki to the Democratic Republic of Congo with prominent business leaders.
”This analogy could not be more inappropriate. President Mbeki was on an official state visit. Mssrs Msimang and Motlanthe were on a rag-tag bilateral party-to-party jaunt with Mr Sandi Majali, which cannot qualify as a formal South African business delegation.”
Taljaard said Ngonyama could not confirm or deny whether the ANC received funds from either the Ba’athists in Iraq or Majali’s companies.
” …the voters deserve to know whether Saddam’s crude oil funds are bankrolling the ANC in the 2004 election campaign. Whatever legitimate concerns exist about the impact of unilateral military pre-emption and the war on Iraq, this must not serve to obscure the need for the ANC to be accountable to the South African people about Saddam’s crude oil,” she said. — Sapa