‘Me and Mbeki come from far’

Disgraced police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi owes his dizzying rise after 1990 to his close personal bond with President Thabo Mbeki and the latter’s direct sponsorship, commentators agree.

Selebi confirmed their intimacy in an interview with Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy in 2006, included in the papers in his court application last week.

‘The one thing I will never do is embarrass the president,” he insisted. ‘That man, me and him, come from far.”

Confronting a security establishment almost unanimously pro-Zuma, Mbeki would have been anxious to keep the head of the South African Police Service on side.

And Selebi’s proximity to the president and his career path have given rise to speculation that he has additional leverage because he might be privy to potentially embarrassing secrets relating to corruption in the arms deal.

This does not mean Selebi was an undeserving beneficiary of patronage.

Observers emphasise that his ascent from relative obscurity in exile to South Africa’s representative at the United Nations, foreign affairs director-general and police commissioner in just five years also reflected his unusual decisiveness, persuasiveness and clarity of mind.

‘We all knew he and Thabo were very tight,” said a former foreign affairs official who worked under him, who asked not to be named. ‘There was mutual respect.”

The official ascribed his ‘tragic” fall to a combination of naivety and arrogance, saying it occasioned ‘widespread dismay” in government circles.

Former Mail & Guardian editor Howard Barrell, a former ANC underground member who has researched the movement in exile extensively, said this week that Mbeki turned to younger talent such as Selebi after 1990 because ‘at a time when there were so many incompetents holding positions and no tradition of recall, he could do the job”.

Barrell said the two men had a similar sense of humour and urbane manner.

Born in Soweto in 1950, Jacob Sello Selebi later worked as a history teacher in the township. By a curious irony, a close friend and professional colleague at the time, Mokotedi Mpshe, now leads the Scorpions’ inquiry into Selebi’s alleged corruption and obstruction of justice.

Little is known of his pre-exile political activities. But Barrell described him as ‘a very able underground operative” linked to a group of former Robben Islanders, including Joe Gqabi and Martin Ramokgadi, who began rebuilding the ANC in the then-Transvaal in the 1970s.

‘Jackie played a pivotal role in the early reconstruction of the ANC,” Barrell said.

A relative latecomer to the ANC’s exile fraternity, Selebi appears to have reached Lusaka in the mid-1980s, where Barrell said he energised the ANC Youth League.

Author Mark Gevisser commented that Selebi’s relationship with Mbeki, then Oliver Tambo’s powerful political secretary, certainly started at this point, as it was one of Mbeki’s tasks to identify and mentor youthful talent.

But it was only after 1990, when, said Barrell, Selebi was elected to the ANC’s enlarged national executive committee that his political career blossomed.

His first big break — and a major exposure to donor organisations and the handling of big money — was as head of the ANC’s welfare department, responsible for resettling returning exiles.

However, it was his stint at the UN in Geneva, from 1995 to 1998, that seems to have caught Mbeki’s eye and set Selebi on the road to high office.

In the heady days when South Africa strove to give moral leadership to the world he won wide accolades for his role in the successful international campaign to ban landmines. As the country’s first chairperson of the UN’s Human Rights Commission, said the foreign affairs official, ‘he won credibility for South Africa in multilateral forums and showed he could lead huge cumbersome structures and rally people”.

Said Barrell: ‘Jackie cajoled different people into the agreement on landmines; he managed to get a kind of critical mass. People were really wowed by him. He was extremely charming and very clever and he put these talents to good use. He was a star in Geneva and it’s not surprising that he made it through the ranks.”

In his exchange with McCarthy Selebi defended himself by emphasising that he won a human rights award while at the UN and that the world body made a film about him.

On the crest of the Geneva wave Selebi was recalled by Mbeki to lead foreign affairs as its director general, where he had huge influence.

The official who served under him said his grasp of the nexus between foreign and domestic policy and willingness to cut through red tape was particularly impressive

A year later, he told McCarthy, Mbeki ‘took me aside — we have a problem; can you go to the police? When he said I say so, I said I’ll go.”

If his rise was on merit, Selebi’s continued tenure as police chief amid the mounting evidence against him can be explained only by his political connectedness.

Only once did he appear to stray into Zuma’s camp when, during the 2003 Hefer Commission, he had controversial spook Bheki Jacobs arrested and allegedly flown from Cape Town to Pretoria in a police executive jet. Jacobs had compiled a report alleging a conspiracy by Zuma to overthrow the president.

But Selebi was prominent in Mbeki’s defence over the ‘hoax emails”, threatening to arrest the perpetrators.

Even his first contact with murdered businessman Brett Kebble appears to have been motivated by a naive desire to serve the presidency. He told McCarthy his objective was to secure a copy of the Kebble-funded video, The Media Trial of Jacob Zuma, which he handed over ‘for the benefit of the chief”.

It has been argued that Selebi, like Zuma, deserves sympathy as a penniless returnee from long exile suddenly exposed to the temptations of power.

It is true that his first contact with Glenn Agliotti was in 1990, when organised crime figures, crooked businessmen and ‘fixers” swarmed around South Africa’s emerging new rulers. Agliotti allegedly gave him R1 200 to pay his children’s medical expenses.

But Selebi’s real entanglement with the bottom-feeders took off a decade later when he became police commissioner on an annual salary of about R800 000. He told McCarthy that Agliotti contacted him again in 2001 as events manager for the South African launch of the Special Olympics, seeking police protection for foreign guest Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Described by an observer as ‘a fish out of water” in the alien world of law enforcement, he appears to have been subverted gradually by feigned friendship and hospitality, promises of crime intelligence and gifts.

‘People never talk of Jackie’s weaknesses; they always talk about his talent, his charm, his gift of the gab,” Barrell said. ‘He is seriously smooth; he can charm the pants off you.

‘What has happened to him now is probably due to his arrogance. He probably thought: ‘These people are not clever enough to see what I’m doing. I’m cleverer than all of them.’”

Stepping into Selebi’s shoes

Intelligent, thoughtful and dislikes being the centre of attention.

That is how Johan Burger, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies and a former colleague, describes former-MK soldier and acting national police commissioner Timothy Charles Williams. Another friend and colleague, John Horak, says Williams is a born-again Christian with an interest in the arts.

Williams was appointed to his new position after President Thabo Mbeki announced that Jackie Selebi had been granted extended leave of absence.

After the democratic elections in 1994 Williams was deployed in the ministry of safety and security with Sydney Mufamadi. He was a member of the interim advisory team that dealt with issues of policy development and advised the minister on how to amalgamate the then-11 police forces.

He was responsible for restructuring crime intelligence, VIP, detective services, evaluations and anti-corruption investigations.

In June 1995 he was appointed assistant commissioner. In 1997 he was transferred to head crime intelligence. He became the divisional commissioner on crime intelligence in 1999.

In 2000 he was promoted to deputy national commissioner responsible for crime intelligence and detection.

Williams was one of the top MK commanders trained in Angola, East Germany and the former Soviet Union. While in exile, he served in the department of intelligence of the ANC.

Sally de Beer, spokesperson for the national commissioner, says: ‘Commissioner Williams is concentrating on his functions as acting national commissioner of the South African Police Service and is determined to ensure that we perform our duties in serving the community.” — Zodidi Mhlana and Nosimilo Ndlovu

Untrue claims

The Mail & Guardian has dismissed as ‘absolutely untrue” police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi’s claim that the newspaper joined a ‘bosberaad” with the Scorpions to discuss a smear campaign against him.

Selebi alleged this in an affidavit as part of a court application last week.

In response, the M&G said the allegations were false, made without a shred of evidence and were deeply damaging to its credibility. ‘We would expect the commissioner to have a better understanding of the sanctity of a sworn statement,” it said.

The M&G emphasised that it did not have a close relationship with the Scorpions or the National Prosecuting Authority, which on one occasion had visited the paper’s offices threatening an interdict and, on another, had unsuccessfully tried to stifle an M&G report by applying for an interdict to the Johannesburg High Court.

The M&G also rejected as a ‘serious distortion” Selebi’s statement that ‘the only logic [sic] conclusion is that the media was provided with information from inside sources within the NPA and DSO.”

It said that since the second half of 2005, when it had started probing the relationship between Selebi and alleged crime boss Glenn Agliotti, it had used on an array of its own sources. — Stefaans Brümmer