Smash the State Security Agency piggy bank – and its apartheid roots

It’s been more than two years since the Zondo Commission into State Capture heard evidence that bags of cash containing millions of rands were carried off by members of the State Security Agency (SSA). Some of that money, the commission heard, was delivered to former state security minister David Mahlobo, and possibly earmarked to buy favours from select judges in support of then president Jacob Zuma’s interests.

There was also evidence before the commission that SSA money was used to advance the interests of factions within the ANC, rather than for national security. Accountability for the use of these funds, the commission heard, was often reduced to a single line on a temporary advance form stating which project or operation the funds were used for, such as “Operation Commitment” or “Project Justice”.

While Chief Justice Raymond Zondo did not make findings in his final report on all of the specific incidents he heard, he did find that the capture of the SSA contributed toward the overall project of State Capture. In doing so, he also acknowledged the evidence from the Inspector-General of Intelligence (IGI) revealing that funds had been “looted” from the Secret Services Account by “officials”.

In addition, the Chief Justice found that such looting was allowed to continue because the Auditor-General of South Africa could not fully execute its duties. Ultimately, this enabled vast amounts of money to be siphoned through the Secret Services Account for corrupt purposes.

Join the Daily Maverick webinar on Thursday, 6 July 2023: Covert Funds and Public Money One Year After Zondo.

But abuse of the national intelligence service is not a new problem in South Africa. Neither is the abuse of taxpayer money allocated for those services. In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) found that secret funding was used during the apartheid era “to promote a political climate that led directly and indirectly to gross human rights violations”. The TRC also raised concerns about the inadequate auditing and administration of secret services funding.

Two pieces of apartheid-era legislation – the Security Services Special Account Act 81 of 1969 and the Secret Services Act 56 of 1978 – created the Security Services Special Account and Secret Services Account, respectively, to fund SA’s intelligence services.

Together, these two pieces of legislation allowed the apartheid intelligence services to draw on these accounts in a manner that bypassed the oversight and controls that Parliament and the AG provided to other government departments. In short, the intelligence services could spend unknown quantities of taxpayer money on secret projects in pursuit of what the government of the day considered to be “national security” – with no fear of independent scrutiny. Often those projects involved gross human rights violations.

New role for intelligence community

Insufficient oversight mechanisms