President Thabo Mbeki is like British Prime Minister Tony Blair and not only because of their similar approaches to modern social democrat politics. Both do fine ostrich impersonations when it comes to arms deals.
Blair is risking his legacy by trying to douse the British Serious Fraud Office’s (SFO) probe of BAE’s global slush funds in arms deals with the Saudis, Czechoslovakia, Tanzania and South Africa, among others.
These slush funds were used to pay out bribes of an estimated R1-billion in the course of the South African arms deal. BAE Systems sold South Africa Hawk and Grippen jets.
Mbeki is risking his legacy firstly by denying that he knew of cooperation requests from British investigators and secondly by copying Blair’s rationale that the national interest will be harmed by forensic scrutiny of our arms deal.
This is nonsense. The national interest and the far more important public interest is being harmed by the government’s failure to acknowledge that the arms deal was beset by corruption, that its unsophisticated negotiators were duped by counter-trade deals and that many of its comrades became the playthings of arms merchants who splashed the dosh around. Last week we showed how Fana Hlongwane, a former adviser to the late defence minister Joe Modise earned an estimated R70-million from BAE.
Perhaps it is too inconvenient a truth for Mbeki because he led the Cabinet committee overseeing the arms acquisition and then squashed an effective investigation when allegations of bribery first hit the headlines in 1999.
And he appears to be doing the same thing again.
How much enthusiasm will there be at the National Prosecuting Authority to assist their British colleagues, when it is clear that what the SFO is looking for is unpalatable to the president? Indeed, no explanation has yet been provided for why the SFO has been waiting for months for its request for legal assistance to be processed.
The new evidence raises the question why the Scorpions’ own probe of the BAE deal lies dormant while enormous resources were and are still available for the investigation into Schabir Shaik and Jacob Zuma. After the scale of payments revealed last week, it makes the amounts these two men received look like peanuts and it leaves the NPA exposed on allegations that its prosecutions policy is biased.
The South African arms deal, like the British-Saudi one, is an object lesson in how arms contracts can infect the body politic with a set of insidious compromises whose malignant impact continues for decades.
The questions will not go away; the government will act in the national interest if it joins the quest for answers.
The incredible lightness of being Tony
If ours were a more robust democracy, convicted fraudster Tony Yengeni would have been told by his comrades in the ruling party to leave prison quietly (and preferably in a modest Toyota Conquest), to shut up, to feign contrition, to not touch a dop and to tackle his community service with gusto.
The man with the shining bonce, natty suit and dark glasses, jailed for taking a hefty discount on a fancy four-wheel drive from an arms deal linked company, is a symbol of a fattened and materialistic African National Congress.
His exit from prison, like his entry 144 days previously, was an ANC jamboree. Upon release, Yengeni played the injured MK soldier imprisoned wrongfully by a vengeful state. With an utterly unrepentant attitude, Yengeni said that three courts had been wrong to jail him.
To wild applause from the ranks of the ever-confused ANC in the Western Cape, Yengeni effectively ripped up the rule of law, the judiciary, the fight against corruption and many other values which underpin the Constitution to which the very same party gave birth only 10 years ago.
It is a shame and it is symbolic of the way in which the succession battle in the ruling party will come to damage our democracy if wise men and women do not immediately take a leading role. The reason the party cannot tell Yengeni (a national executive committee member) to shut up or ship out is because his populism means that he can swing a crowd. He is being played by camps keen to win his support in the race for the ANC presidency.
The ANC’s abiding legacy will be that it built democratic institutions that can be held up as role models, not only for the rest of our continent, but for the developing world. South Africa has a Constitution that is a world-leader. The ruling party should not squander this legacy with expedient and short-term concerns such as the political wanderings of loose cannons and empty vessels like Yengeni.