Analysis: Breaking the ANC Omertà – Gordhan, Pillay, Dramat, McBride, only the tip of the iceberg

It usually takes about 20 years, or at least one generation, for a country, particularly one with a violent and traumatic history, to confront the ghosts of its past. It took Germans a quarter of a century to begin unpicking the wounds of the Second World War. Now, 27 years after apartheid, some of the secrets, lies and skeletons that have been safeguarded – thanks to the ANC’s notion that a “loyal and disciplined member” will never speak out in public – are clattering out of the closet. And it is not a pretty picture.

The public statement issued on Tuesday by former SARS deputy commissioner Ivan Pillay, suspended IPID head Robert McBride, and former Hawks head, Anwa Dramat, is an unprecedented move in post-apartheid South Africa. The three men, who have all been strategically and deliberately removed from their positions and are facing criminal charges, said the cancer of corruption in South Africa had turned “former comrades against each other”.

The statement by McBride, Dramat and Pillay was followed a short while later by one issued from the office of the Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, responding to rumours at the weekend that he was about to be arrested by the Hawks, who have been accused, along with Ministers of Police and State Security, Nathi Nhleko and David Mahlobo, of acting as President Jacob Zuma’s team of heavies.

Gordhan on Tuesday pleaded with South Africans to “protect the National Treasury staff” and added that “it is particularly painful to me, and I’m sure to many earnest democrats, to witness this unrestrained attack on honest and hardworking people and the institutions meant to strengthen our democracy. Millions of people will pay the price (there will be less money to relieve poverty and support job creation programmes) if this subversion of democracy is left unrestrained and unchallenged”.

McBride, Pillay and Dramat reportedly secretly briefed ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe a few weeks ago while President Zuma was out of the country, alerting the SG to concerns that they were being maliciously prosecuted and hounded because they were investigating “sensitive cases” – all of which loop back to President Zuma or those who are believed to be “close” to No 1.

If the leadership of the ruling party does not see or recognise the enormity of the political crisis it currently faces with Jacob Zuma as leader, it will pay a bitter and irrevocable price. Unless this ethical and moral lacuna is resolved, the ANC will go the way of UNIP, Kenneth Kaunda’s United Independence Party which governed Zambia for 27 years between 1964 and 1991 before it was ousted by the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy. But we shall leave that one to the polls.

For the first part of its life as a liberation-party-turned-government the ANC was willing, “in the interests of enforcing the hegemony of the party to rewrite its own history”, according to scholar Padraig O’Malley, author of Shades of Difference – Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa published in 2007 (Viking) and one of the most authoritative studies of the ANC in exile.

“Being a loyal and disciplined member of the ANC became an ideology in its own right, perhaps to fill the void that opened when the movement that had been the voice of the people’s victimhood became the ruling party, the government, with all the instruments of state power in its possession,” writes O’Malley.

More than 18 years in the making, the author interviewed thousands of key political players (leaving a treasure trove of research) and also decrypted extensive secret ANC communications. The book remains required reading for anyone seeking a road map to the current political impasse that has seen a brewing behind-the-scenes war spill painfully out into the public domain, pitting Pravin Gordhan against his former comrade-in-arms Jacob Zuma.

Almost all of the names – Gordhan, Pillay, Mo and Yunis Shaik, Mac Maharaj, Ronnie Kasrils and a few others – now making headlines were once part of Operation Vula, a clandestine operation to infiltrate senior ANC leadership into South Africa in 1989/1990.

Echoes of another action, Operation Bible, which had a mandate to identify apartheid spies and agents in the ANC and which was headed by Jacob Zuma, still reverberate today. The ANC in exile was riddled with spies and double agents but after 1994 some of the apartheid security forces began to work with former ANC intelligence operatives and much of the “spy-vs-spy” fallout now is because of this history.

Another book vital to understanding the current political landscape is Stephen Ellis’ External Mission – The ANC in Exile (Jonathan Ball). Ellis writes that security forces from both sides “had developed habits of unaccountability that had spun out of control. When these operatives began working together, whether in the security agencies run by a new South African government or in the private sector, they shared a culture of cynicism and contempt for the law”, writes Ellis.

Revelations of widespread corruption, violence, intimidation, paranoia and extrajudicial executions in ANC camps in Angola, Tanzania, Zambia and elsewhere are not new but were overshadowed by an early post-apartheid “sheen” cast by its elder statesmen and women such as Mandela, Walter and Albertina Sisulu and others who had been shielded from the particular vagaries of exile. These leaders offered a public view of a “glorious” 104-year-old liberation movement, and indeed parts of it were (and still are).

It was Chris Hani who risked his life penning, with six others in 1969, what has come to be known as the Hani Memorandum, highlighting widespread corruption and nepotism and abuses of human rights in ANC camps.

“We are disturbed by the careerism of the ANC leadership abroad who have, in every sense, become professional politicians rather than professional revolutionaries. We have been forced to draw the conclusion that the payment of salaries to people working in offices is very detrimental to the revolutionary outlook of those who receive such monies. It is without doubt that such payments corrupt cadres at any level and have the effect of making people perform their duties or fill offices because of money inducement rather than dedication to the cause – they become in effect merely salaried employees of the movement,” wrote Hani.

Hani and the others were accused of treason and sentenced to death. They were saved only by the intervention of Oliver Tambo.

As the majority party in government, the ANC has, in the first 20 years, been able to rewrite history, casting itself as triumphant liberators like Robert Mugabe’s Zanu. But the reality is that the ANC in exile, and particularly MK – though there were many committed and dedicated cadres – was riddled with petty criminals and leaders, such as Joe Modise (the country’s first post-apartheid Minster of Defence who was deeply implicated in the Arms deal), who were useless.

Recalling this history, Ivan Pillay, who was a senior member of the SACP, told O’Malley that while the ANC NEC in exile dithered for years, the struggle inside South Africa, spearheaded by the Mass Democratic Movement – which included the United Democratic Front and about 700 affiliates – “was forging ahead without the ANC’s direct guidance – it [the ANC] was, you might say, a distant inspiration”.

Pillay’s historical opinion was that “by the time we got that leadership inside the country, it was actually a little bit too late... The fact of the matter is that the situation had managed very well without us.”

O’Malley writes that the ANC in exile “snatched victory from the jaws of the internal mass movements” and that when the “real history” is written, “Vula’s greatest contribution will be seen to have been its contribution to the ease with which the ANC returned from exile and simply appropriated the machinery of the mass democratic movement”.

The ANC in exile, he writes, “developed a self-perpetuating inability to deliver on any aspect of its internal struggle against the apartheid government; the ANC in government continues to use the paradigm of exile to govern and transform South Africa, thus reinventing the exigencies of exile in a post-liberation South Africa and similar incapacities on the pledges it makes to the people.”

It is a leadership, he writes, that is “immune to external criticism and responsive only to itself”.

Other recently published titles that are an attempt to recover a more holistic account of the history of the ANC are Jacob Dlamini’s searing Askari, Amin Cajee’s devastating Fordsburg Fighter and Stanley Moneng’s uncompromising If We Must Die.

While Jacob Zuma is the elected president of South Africa and his government is by no means a “rogue state”, there are elements in his orbit who have clearly gone “rogue” and who have turned on members of the movement/party.

The tragedy of this fallout is that South Africa is a country desperately in need of leadership. We have a road map in the National Development Plan (NDP) but it appears, for now, we have a leadership locked in a new inward-looking struggle relating to palace politics and not the good of the country.

Developments in the past week, with more and more members of the ANC speaking out publicly, is an indication that the once inviolable rule of Omertà (the Mafia code of silence) in the ANC no longer holds its members hostage. There are many who are prepared to be seen to be doing the right thing.

O’Malley concludes his more than 600-page tome with these words, “There is a new terrain of struggle. The struggle for power, and in this struggle for what the pundits call a battle for the soul of the ANC is increasingly becoming a battle for a large empty space.” DM

Photo: South African President Jacob Zuma attends the China - South Africa Economy Forum at a hotel in Beijing, China, 05 December 2014. EPA/DIEGO AZUBEL