Staff Photographer
Sandi Majali, the man who got huge oil contracts from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with the help of top African National Congress officials, has been a beneficiary of government sponsored development programmes in which he allegedly left a trail of broken promises and debts.
The Mail & Guardian earlier this month exposed the ANC’s links with the Saddam oil deals, revealing that ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe and treasurer general Mendi Msimang accompanied Majali on trips to Baghdad starting in late 2000.
Majali’s companies, Montega Trading and later Imvume Management, received allocations of millions of barrels of oil from the Iraqi regime, which attempted at the time to use the allocations to buy diplomatic favour.
In South Africa, Imvume won a R1-billion tender to supply the government with four million barrels of crude for strategic stocks. The tender, issued by the state-owned Strategic Fuel Fund Association (SFF), was controversy-ridden, inter alia because it called specifically for Basrah Light, an Iraqi crude grade.
SFF officials have defended the deal, arguing that Basrah was cheap and appropriate for storage and was the mix required by local refineries. But the Sunday Times last weekend highlighted how, weeks before the SFF tender was issued in December 2001, Motlanthe had again accompanied Majali to Baghdad.
Another question mark around the award of the tender to Imvume relates to Majali’s business history, involving development projects.
At the centre of these was Majali’s company, Thuthukani ma Afrika (TMA), involving skills training and rural development. Its activities were exposed in an April 2000 television feature broadcast on the SABC’s Focus programme.
Thuthukani started a so-called “national youth skills training programme” intended to give unemployed youth basic training and place them with large state projects, initially the construction of the Kokstad Supermax prison and the Umtata Academic hospital.
The contractors, in this case including construction giants Concor and Murray & Roberts, were required to set aside a certain number of jobs for youth trainees provided by TMA.
The young workers were to have received pre-project skills training provided by TMA and paid for by the government, but the project had short-lived benefits in the case of Kokstad and appears to have fallen apart in the case of Umtata.
According to Focus, the trainees were unhappy with the level of pay they received and the contractors were unhappy with the quality of work they provided.
The programme reported that by February 2000 only three of the original 295 young people trained — at a cost of R6 000 each — had jobs at the Supermax site and only nine others were known to have secured construction-related jobs elsewhere.
Focus reported that at Umtata there was no support or supervision provided for the trainees and that promises from Majali of money to pay supervisors or instructors never materialised.
Majali told Focus that he was not responsible for detailed implementation, but conceived the strategy and put the experts together. As with the Iraq contracts, it appears that Majali was able to trade on his access to highly placed people in the ANC or the government. At the time Majali had contact with Minister of Public Works Stella Sigcau.
A senior ANC MP this week bemoaned the fact that a number of business people misrepresented themselves as doing business for the account of the party. But he said: “The fact that he [Majali] travels with [Motlanthe and Msimang] suggests that he is rather more integrated [in the ANC] than some of the others.”
Majali’s lawyer, Barry Aaron, has confirmed to the M&G that Majali has made donations to the ANC. “Mr Majali is a long time member and supporter of the ANC. He, as with many other business people in a position to do so, financially support the ANC, as he is entitled…
“There is nothing untoward whatsoever in his acting as he did and there [were] certainly no ulterior motives or agenda in doing so.”
If the ANC helped Majali get allocations from Saddam in return for funding, it exposes the party to a charge that it offered South African diplomatic influence to the highest bidder.
While the ANC and the South African government were arguably correct in condemning American unilateralism in the war on Iraq, a number of high-profile visits to Baghdad by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad, during which he actively promoted business with the Saddam regime, may be interpreted as having veered towards support of a dictator ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama earlier denied foreign policy had been for sale, saying: “The ANC has never received material assistance from any government or organisation in exchange for ‘diplomatic support’ or ‘diplomatic favours’.”
Meanwhile, Majali and Imvume, who have previously refused to answer M&G questions unless they were granted a right to preview or vet intended articles — not a right recognised by the media in general — last week served a R1-million defamation suit on the M&G. Editor Ferial Haffajee commented: “We are defending the action — and our right to probe whether the relationship between business and politics crosses ethical or legal boundaries and risks compromising the integrity of our young democracy.”