The Mail & Guardian this week secured advance access to an extraordinary attempt to document the African National Congress’s (ANC) anti-apartheid struggle — as well as its devastating internal battles around the figures of its president, Thabo Mbeki, and its deputy president, Jacob Zuma.
The vehicle for this penetrating exposé of the party and its leadership is a study of one of the movement’s most colourful and controversial figures: Mac Maharaj.
Padraig O’Malley, a United States-based scholar, began a project of documenting South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1989 and gained extensive access to key figures in the struggle.
The result is more than a biography. O’Malley’s book, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, is due for release early next month in South Africa, but in addition O’Malley has constructed an extensive electronic archive of his research, including transcripts of thousands of hours of interviews and documents never before published — such as the communication trail between operatives of Operation Vula inside South Africa and their commanders in Lusaka and London.
The truth behind Vula — the ANC’s attempt in the late Eighties to infiltrate some of its top leaders into the country, led by Maharaj — is a key theme of O’Malley’s research.
Another powerful element is a reprise of the Hefer commission, which was used so effectively to humiliate publicly Maharaj and his close ally, Mo Shaik, following their allegations about the apartheid past of then director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka.
O’Malley also delivers a stinging condemnation of aspects of the new South Africa and Mbeki’s leadership, with rather muted support from Maharaj, who is more concerned about highlighting concerns about the abuse of state power by the Scorpions and others.
The book’s foreword by Nelson Mandela glowingly endorses Maharaj and the book itself, which expresses deeply pessimistic views about the ANC. This will undoubtedly feed into the power struggle around the battle to succeed Mbeki — as will the book itself.
Operation Vula
The roots of the antipathy between Mbeki and Maharaj are obscure, but Maharaj’s links to the Shaik family — and the ongoing battle with the Scorpions — go back to Operation Vula.
In the late Eighties, as the apartheid government was beginning to explore possible negotiations, ANC president Oliver Tambo authorised a plan for senior ANC figures to infiltrate South Africa in order to direct the struggle and prepare for an uprising.
The plan was revealed only to a few top ANC officials, including Joe Slovo and South African Communist Party politburo members.
Maharaj was chosen to lead the charge, which used innovative communication technology to set up a secure line of contact between operatives in the country and exiled leaders.
O’Malley is sceptical about Vula’s impact, noting that the struggle had developed its own momentum by the time Maharaj had infiltrated South Africa: ”Although the Mass Democratic Movement did not know it, the ANC in exile needed the MDM far more than the MDM needed the ANC.”
But it was Vula that brought Maharaj into contact with a parallel ANC initiative, Operation Bible, run by Yunis Shaik, his brother Mo, and Jayendra Naidoo, reporting to then ANC intelligence chief Jacob Zuma.
Operation Bible was mandated to identify apartheid agents in the ANC’s upper echelons, but the Vula network came to rely on Bible agents for their security.
The Shaiks, O’Malley says, succeeded in turning a middle-level security policeman in Durban, who was disgusted by the torture of Yunis in detention. The security-police mole, code-named ”The Nightingale”, was a mother lode of information, removing security branch files for Mo to photostat before their return. Among these were the infamous reports of apartheid agent RS452, which Mo’s unit believed to be Ngcuka, then a prominent member of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers.
A report to that effect, O’Malley confirms, was transmitted to ANC intelligence in Lusaka.
It appears nothing was done to follow up the suspicion, though O’Malley has uncovered evidence that it was discussed with Mandela in 1990.
Ngcuka
But the information from Bible and the relationship forged in the underground with Shaik led Maharaj, more than a decade later, to a bruising confrontation with Ngcuka that turned Maharaj from struggle icon to party pariah.
The conflict with Ngcuka flowed from the investigation by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), then headed by Ngcuka, into another Shaik brother whose destiny was forged in the Vula era — Schabir.
Vula set up its own funding network, O’Malley reveals, creating channels for smuggling cash, money laundering and using South Africans who wanted to get money out to provide local funds in return for offshore ANC deposits.
Schabir — Yunis and Mo’s older brother — was entrusted with this task, which later facilitated Schabir’s access to ANC treasurer Thomas Nkobi. It also gave him access to Zuma and launched his business career, with, among others, French arms company Thomson CSF.
Fast forward to 2003. Ngcuka’s Scorpions had begun probing Maharaj as a result of payments he received from Shaik which they uncovered during the arms-deal investigation, which also zeroed in on Schabir’s relationship with Zuma.
When details of the payments to Maharaj were leaked to the Sunday Times, Maharaj harked back to the old suspicions about Ngcuka.
O’Malley writes: ”Mo Shaik was convinced that the NPA’s attempts to link Zuma to wrong-doing — were intended to derail Zuma’s chances of succeeding Mbeki — He resurrected a file Operation Bible had opened on Ngcuka in 1988 and brought it to Mac’s attention.”
Maharaj claims Ngcuka conceded there was no real evidence against Maharaj, but says Ngcuka tried to pressurise him to get Schabir and Zuma to cooperate with the arms-deal probe.
”Once Bulelani proposed mediation because he thought I could influence Zuma and Schabir, I began to feel there was a far larger game at play,” Maharaj told O’Malley. ”I believe [now] it was about who would succeed Thabo Mbeki; it was about the direction the country takes — it was about who can make the most from black economic empowerment.”
Last straw
The last straw was Ngcuka’s secret briefing to black editors before announcing his decision to charge Shaik, but not Zuma. ”He said I was a liar and he demeaned my wife — that he would get at me through my wife. With that, the gloves came off.”
Maharaj became embroiled in the clumsy attempt to shift the spy suspicions against Ngcuka into the public domain. But he reveals that before doing so, he briefed Mbeki and showed him a copy of Mo’s reconstructed file.
Maharaj suggested a proper investigation of the claims.
Instead, Mbeki announced the Hefer commission, whose terms of reference were repeatedly adjusted to place the onus on Maharaj and Mo to prove their allegations, despite the fact that the security agencies refused to cooperate or release their files.
”He wanted a public humiliation of Mac and Mo — the better to teach the lesson,” writes O’Malley.
The spy claims against Ngcuka were dismissed as untrue, but O’Malley has gone back over this ground, interviewing former intelligence agents and retired judge Joos Hefer.
Intriguingly, their interviews are embargoed until the year 2030, but O’Malley quotes Hefer from an interview last year: ”There are questions which remain unanswered and it’s a pity that one couldn’t see what’s in the records because there is something there; they wouldn’t have hedged like that if there wasn’t something.”
O’Malley believes Maharaj’s motive for taking on Ngcuka was more complicated than backing Zuma or protecting himself — though the investigation of Maharaj continues.
There was, he argues, also real concern about the abuse of power personified by Ngcuka’s refusal to answer questions at the commission about his meeting with editors.
O’Malley tracks the succession since Maharaj withdrew — and his conclusions are grim.
”The ANC never had to face the consequences of its own failures as a liberation movement — In government, the ANC is still immune to external criticism and is responsive only to itself —
”Some characterise the succession war that Zuma has come to personify as a war about ideas — but it looks less grand. There is a new terrain of struggle. The struggle for power, and in this struggle what the pundits call a battle for the soul of the ANC is increasingly becoming a battle for a large empty space.”
Maharaj’s wife doesn’t pull her punches
When Maharaj decided to quit Cabinet and active politics at the end of his term as transport minister in 1999, he visited Mbeki, then deputy president, to tell him of his decision. Mbeki, says Maharaj’s wife, Zarina, gave his comrade five minutes.
”Had Thabo reached out to Mac, he probably would have stayed on [in government]. When he decided that he had to leave, he asked to see Thabo. Thabo gave him five minutes and didn’t even try to persuade him not to leave. He just said, ‘Okay, fine.”’
Zarina Maharaj’s embittered recollection, as quoted in Shades of Difference, sheds light on what is largely a no-gone zone for Maharaj himself: his fraught relationship with Mbeki.
O’Malley writes that he often pressed Maharaj on the topic, but that Maharaj’s ”harshest” criticism of Mbeki was that he was ”non-confrontational”.
Not so for Zarina. In the extensive interviews she gave O’Malley, she appears to blame Mbeki above all for her husband’s troubles. The interviews and other background material are posted on O’Malley’s website.
Maharaj’s public troubles started in February 2003, when the Sunday Times published an exposé of benefits the Maharaj family had received from Schabir Shaik — on the face of it inappropriate, as Shaik’s company had benefited from transport department tenders while Maharaj was minister. Maharaj denies corruption, but the matter remains the subject of a Scorpions investigation.
About this, Zarina tells O’Malley, clearly referring to Mbeki: ”The powers-that-be never liked Mac and were almost relieved when Mac resigned as a minister — [and] literally walked Mac to the car in five minutes as Mac tendered his resignation. So there were people who really wanted to see Mac once and for all hurt, once and for all — what I’m saying is that, yes, they were gunning for Mac and this was a perfect excuse.”
Zarina traces the dislike of her husband in part to a racial issue — he, as an Indian, refused to ”know his place” vis-Ã -vis the African majority.
Maharaj left the country in 1977 after his release from Robben Island. ”I think by then already Thabo was beginning to sense a threat from Mac,” says Zarina. ”Mac upstaged him in all these meetings; Mac was just a little bit too brilliant and a little bit too unapologetic as an Indian, because it was already floating around that the trouble with Mac is that he talks as if he’s an African, he has no sense of apologetic-ness about him — That was his biggest crime.”
Swiping at the Pahad brothers, she continues: ”Mac was a real threat whereas the type of Indian he [Mbeki] wanted around him was exactly what he got, Essop and Aziz.”
While Zarina does not corroborate rumours that Maharaj supported Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential challenge to Mbeki, she says: ”He [Mbeki] was very, very cross about the fact that Cyril and Mac were the ones who were seen to be handling the negotiations at Codesa [Congress for a Democratic South Africa] where he had been the heir apparent.
”I think he was already very angry. I believe that he did say at an NEC meeting, and we’ve heard it from some [ANC] NEC sources, that when Mac was in prison with Operation Vula, he said, ‘Let them swing.”’
Zarina claims that her husband had always respected Mbeki ”as a thinker, as a strategist”. She adds, however: ”It’s just in the recent period when he realises that Thabo is really — that he began to think, ‘Shit! What have I done?”’
O’Malley appears to concur that Mbeki was out to get Maharaj through his handling of the Hefer commission in 2003. He calls it Mbeki’s ”most venal move”, saying: ”Whether for reasons great or petty, he gave the thumbs-up for the revolution, like most revolutionary movements in history, to start eating its own.”