/ 25 July 2008

ANC: No link between Zuma and arms-deal processes

There is ”no link” between African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma and the arms-deal processes, an ANC task team has found.

This was announced in a progress report delivered verbally at an ANC national executive committee (NEC) meeting, ANC spokesperson Jessie Duarte said on Friday.

The task team had been charged with establishing whether Zuma ”was in any way linked to any of the processes leading up to an arms deal being procured”.

”The task team reported that in their research they had found there was no direct link or indirect link,” she said.

Duarte dismissed reports that, as a result of the finding, Zuma will now receive the full support of the NEC. The party had decided when it elected Zuma at Polokwane that he was the president of the ANC and had the party’s full support. There had been no interim measure where the ANC said it would first look at the report and then decide whether Zuma had the ANC’s support, she said.

Duarte said ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe’s verbal report is ”the only report the NEC of the ANC ever received” from the task team on the matter.

”We do not know this report the Star refers to,” she said. ”The ANC does not have such a report in its possession, nor was it discussed at any NEC or national working committee meeting.”

On Friday, the Star reported that the NEC task team had questioned President Thabo Mbeki’s role in the arms deal in an ”explosive report”.

The newspaper called the 17-page report a ”working document” that had not been adopted by the NEC, and was ”understood to have no official status within the ANC”.

It reported that advisers to the task team had questioned Mbeki’s ”seriously compromising secret meetings” with the French arms company accused of bribing Zuma. At the time, Mbeki was the country’s deputy president and chairperson of the inter-departmental committee overseeing the arms deal.

According to the Star, the document reportedly advised that Zuma be given amnesty for his alleged arms-deal corruption offences.

”The bottom line: the ANC is putting it on the record that no such document or report as referred to exists,” said Duarte.

The task team consists of Motlanthe, treasurer general Mathews Phosa and NEC members Jeremy Cronin, Siphiwe Nyanda, Naledi Pandor, Cyril Ramaphosa and Lindiwe Sisulu.

”The ANC warns those individuals, whether in the ANC or outside, who peddle documents in the media and claim these as ANC documents to desist,” Duarte said in a statement earlier on Friday. — Sapa