Partly prompted by Andrew Feinstein, there appears to be influential support for an amnesty-based approach to dealing with the unresolved questions of the arms deal. Last Sunday, for example, the leader writers of the Sunday Times were seduced into supporting the proposal of a “[Truth and Reconciliation Commission] for all players in the arms deal”.
This idea should be nipped in the bud. It has a superficial attraction, but it is ill-conceived. This country has had enough amnesty; it is time for some justice.
The amnesty proposal comes from the following thought process: the arms deal is a festering sore; it must be dealt with finally so that we can “move on”; there is no way that the most powerful players — the African National Congress (ANC) included — will accept a full judicial inquiry; so let’s have a compromise, a controlled and manageable solution that will draw out “the truth” by drawing on South Africa’s mythical prowess at reconciliatory process and so avoid the bloodbath of blaming and shaming.
Among the six top officials of the ANC’s newly elected national executive committee, the majority are genuinely committed to cleaning up the party’s act: Kgalema Motlanthe, Gwede Mantashe, Thandi Modise and Mathews Phosa all have tough, independent-minded probity.
But there is a serious danger of selective justice. To a greater or lesser degree all of the new leadership were excluded victims of Thabo Mbeki’s reign. To a greater or lesser degree they now search for redemption, if not revenge, both for themselves and their organisation.
One of the remarkable features of the current transition is the discovery that so much was hidden from the wider ANC, including its full national executive committee. Only an inner circle, centred on Mbeki, knew details of the various streams of funding that have sustained the ANC since 1994, of which the corrupt payments that accompanied the arms deal were major sources.
Now the growing clamour for answers threatens to pierce that inner sanctum. And the stakes get higher by the day, threatening to escalate out of control.
The worst-case scenario for the ANC is that not only does its new president, Jacob Zuma, face a three-year battle in the courts, but that the battle culminates with the arraignment of his predecessor.
In its search for political equilibrium, this is the dilemma that faces the new ANC leadership. They want to clean things up, but they are also devotees of their own project of political engineering, in which Motlanthe emerges as the “third way” candidate who eluded Polokwane but who can assume the presidency next year once a suitable accommodation is reached for Zuma and his corruption charges.
An amnesty process might just be a solution to this — one in which Zuma and Mbeki, and other key players, swap their sanitised versions of the truth in return for criminal exoneration. This could leave the former free to plead guilty — as part of a carefully arranged plea bargain — to a relatively modest charge of, say, tax evasion, which will permit him to remain ANC president while excluding him from the Union Buildings, while the latter can head off into retirement with reputation reasonably intact.
But it would be an institutional elision. In the end the best and probably the only way to establish the truth is a comprehensive judicial inquiry, with full powers to call witnesses and subject them to exacting cross-examination. The United Kingdom’s Scott inquiry into illegal arms sales to Iraq in the 1980s searched for the truth and established responsibility, but its primary task was diagnostic: to identify the lessons from the failure in governance and to strengthen accountability for the long term.
The 2001 joint investigation into the arms deal here began that job, but its wings were clipped and Parliament was neutered so that the necessary remedial follow-up work was never done.
The sore has festered ever since. South Africans deserve not a politically convenient device for the negotiation of accountability, but to see justice done — the most effective deterrent for a future repetition.
A line in the sand should be drawn; a new standard in public integrity must be set. It will be hard, but it is the only way, and in the longer term we will all be grateful. But it will take bold as well as principled leadership to establish such an inquiry.