Inside the NEC’s battle plan

The ANC national executive committee (NEC) decision to investigate the arms deal as part of a support strategy for Jacob Zuma represents an attempt to find a political solution to an intractable problem — the criminal charges hanging over the person nominated to lead the country.

At its first meeting on Monday the new NEC formally confirmed Zuma’s status as the ANC’s candidate for president of South Africa in the 2009 election and its support for him during what it called ‘these trying times”.

‘The NEC agreed to establish a committee to look at the practical form this support will take and consider the broader context within which this case is taking place. This will include a detailed factual report on the arms deal to enable the NEC to apply its mind on the issues and provide leadership,” the NEC said.

ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe told the Mail & Guardian the process was initially an information-gathering exercise so that the new leadership could take an informed approach.

He said the idea of a ‘political solution” might be attractive, but the ANC did not want to be accused of trying to get ‘preferential treatment” for Zuma.

But several sources told the M&G, at least part of the motivation is to find evidence to use as leverage against President Thabo Mbeki.

Intractable problem

An ANC insider said: ‘They think they can screw Thabo — they’re trying to solve an insoluble problem: the charges facing Zuma. The NEC is committed to supporting Zuma, but how? They think that Thabo pushed the Scorpions investigation in one direction, so he can push it in another. They think Zuma doesn’t really have a case to answer. But it’s more about pushing back at Mbeki.

‘The re-charging of Zuma was seen as the first strike — they want to hit back because they think there is a serious threat [from a re-opened arms deal investigation] that Thabo himself will be exposed.”

An NEC member said: ‘They want to set this thing up so that people, say people sitting overseas, can feel safe to come and say — Thabo told me to do this or that.”

This interpretation accords with suggestions made last year by Chippy Shaik — the former chief of acquisitions for the department of defence — that if Zuma won the Polokwane battle he might re-open the arms deal investigation.

‘It’s the only way he can really clear his name,” Shaik, who is now living in Australia, told the M&G at the time.

Former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, whose recent book on the arms deal implicated Mbeki in preventing a thorough investigation of the arms deal, told the M&G he had already written to ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe offering to give evidence to the committee.

But it is clear that the NEC does not want an independent or public investigation that it cannot control. It has emphasised that the findings will not be made public.

The new NEC wants to come to grips with the political fallout that has been the arms deal’s enduring legacy. One member said: ‘The NEC is trying to grapple with this thing. It has divided the party; it has created this problem [with Zuma]; it’s such a big thing, it has created havoc, yet the party has never applied its mind on this.”

Another senior NEC member said: ‘My sense is there is nothing vindictive behind this. We are faced with a a prospective president of the country facing charges — this all flows from the same source [the arms deal] — yet the NEC has never been given a full account of the arms deal — In the past the NEC was told, ‘if we tell you it will leak to the media’ — so we were kept in the dark.

‘We need to know what role did the arms deal process play in the actual investigations that ensued. To be corrupt, you must gain. Did JZ gain? Did others gain? In my opinion neither JZ nor [Tony] Yengeni held the key to decisions in the arms deal — how come they became the sole focus? We’ve been pummelled into taking the view that there are only two guilty people in this whole thing.”

The ANC’s desire to seek a political solution to the ‘Zuma problem” was well telegraphed, notably by the June policy conference decision to relocate the Scorpions under the control of the South African Police Service.

It seems likely that it was this, rather than any intervention by Mbeki, that prompted the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to recharge Zuma in late December.

An observer with good insight into NPA thinking said there was a feeling that the Zuma matter had to be set in motion before the NEC meeting for fear of a political intervention to stop the process before Zuma was re-charged.

‘The idea of trying to manage the Zuma matter politically was spelled out pretty clearly, so there was probably a feeling that you had to ensure it became part of a court process before the NEC meeting.”

This action has both sharpened ANC perceptions of the NPA as operating with a political agenda and put the party on a collision course with the prosecuting authorities.

In effect there is no way to prevent Zuma from facing charges without undoing the decision to prosecute him. The fact that the prosecuting authorities, not just the Scorpions, are now in the firing line was very evident during the NEC meeting.

‘Grave misgiving’

According to the NEC: ‘The meeting expressed its concern and grave misgivings about the timing of these charges and the general conduct of the NPA in this case, including inconsistency in the application of its mandate and leaking of information to the media.”

The NEC discussed a document purporting to be a record of a meeting of top NPA officials called by Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy on July 25 last year in response to the ANC policy conference decision to place the elite crime-fighting unit under the control of the police, said the senior NEC member.

The document shows McCarthy suggested the NPA adopt various strategies to reverse this decision ahead of the Polokwane conference, which was expected to endorse the earlier policy proposal. The meeting ‘adopted” decisions to embark on a publicity campaign and to lobby politicians and business people to support the retention of the Scorpions as an independent entity.

The senior NEC member said: ‘The NEC felt regarding the meeting of July 25 that it showed that McCarthy and his team are ‘political’. There is no intention to interfere in the natural course of the law, but it’s important to understand that the independence [of the NPA] is not absolute. If we find that the NPA was not independent [in its investigation of Zuma] then we have to find a constitutionally acceptable mechanism to find a solution.

‘The [NEC] investigation will want to establish JZ’s guilt or not. We don’t believe the NPA. The NPA has shown itself to be a political machine. Can a political machine, as they have become, deal with this thing in a clean and constructive manner? You can’t meet with businessmen and do Hollywood-style policing to gain political support.” The likely path for dealing with the NPA follows a well-worn ANC legend — that the NPA was infiltrated by third-force elements who manipulated Scorpions investigations to divide the ANC.

The same sort of explanation emerged from the ANC’s internal investigation into the hoax-email matter — and the emails themselves appear tailored to support this legend, painting key members of the Zuma investigation team as part of a white, right-wing conspiracy.

Key Zuma strategist Mo Shaik has long pedalled this theory, which has the advantage of allowing Mbeki and his allies to be exonerated — at least publicly — from responsibility for the alleged politicisation of the NPA.

It also probably dovetails with the survival strategy of another Mbeki loyalist, police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi, whose prosecution the Scorpions admitted is a ‘make or break case” for their own survival.

But the ‘political solution” ultimately hinges on the new party barons turning their success in Polokwane into legislative and executive muscle long before 2009.

At the same time cooler heads, notably the ANC ‘top six”, have been at pains to send a message of stability and continuity, pooh-poohing talk of any significant short-term changes in parliamentary or government leadership. How this impasse is managed, not only in the Zuma case, depends on how Mbeki and his supporters in government react.

Mantashe confirmed a recent meeting between Mbeki and Zuma, but refused to say anything about it. Another source said Mbeki was ‘sulking”. The first major test of the relationship between the two centres of power — and of whether the executive will bend to or resist the NEC — will be at the ANC lekgotla due to start next Friday.

One NEC member said that Mbeki had to realise he was a lame duck: ‘He’s a deployee; policy is made by the party. He lost at the conference; the fact is now the president of the country is not [the president] of the party; no national liberation movement has seen a coup of this nature — a peaceful democratic coup. He has to come to terms with that reality. What is it he can do? He has run the last leg of trying to use the Scorpions.”