Click here to read the version of this article published in the Cape Argus as ‘Rule by fist is ruining out democratic dream’ on 27 October 2009.

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=148248&sn=Detail

The professor and the police minister
Paul Trewhela
25 October 2009

Paul Trewhela writes on the clash between Kader Asmal and Fikile Mbalula

When the tensions and conflicts within civil society grow too great, and law and parliament and other agencies of civil society are not able to find a resolution for them, then the state grows into a bludgeon, or club, with which to batter down civil society.

It is as if all the energies within the society, which can no longer find a means of co-existence, become concentrated instead into a fist, which tries to force some kind of unity or coherence upon the whole ungovernable mass of warring interests.

This appears to be taking place in South Africa today.

A state of force was the traditional means by which South Africa was governed until the end of the apartheid period. In this sense, it is by far the most deeply grounded, historical and “native” form of government of the society: in a sense, its true face, or most profound reality. Parliament was confined to a small minority of the society, and this determined the nature of the legal system. Over this long and formative period of South Africa’s history, the state was quite explicitly the instrument of a minority interest, acting as the controller of the whole. This is what South Africa was used to, irrespective of the manner in which this state power was used, or the resistance which it summoned up, and which eventually overwhelmed it and brought about its end.

In that sense, as in Russia, or China, despotism has a long historic logic in South Africa, and the constitutional form – attempting to represent the interests of a much wider remit of society, reflected in agreement upon a Constitution – is historically much less securely grounded: even, perhaps, an aberration. Despotism is the dominant historical practice in South Africa, while constitutional government remains a recent and still relatively untested experiment, no more than 15 years old. There is a utopian side to the Constitution of 1994 and its institutions: an element of wishful thinking, or prayer, or belief. On the one side, the historic brutal reality. On the other side, hope – but hope with no ancient groundwork in the historic practice of the society.

This hope was embodied between 1990 and 1994, and for some years afterwards, in the promise of the African National Congress, with its call to “we, the people of South Africa, black and white together equals, countrymen and brothers.”

That promise, which suggests the promise of constitutional government, now appears to be in question, and from within the ANC itself. It is given sharp reflection in the altercation – one cannot call it a debate – between two important representatives of that promise, which came into government (and authority in the state) in 1994, a promise that is now falling apart.

Appropriately, this falling apart of the ANC as it represented itself in 1994 is now personified, at one end, by a draughtsman and founding father of the Constitution, a man of law, and at the other end: by a minister of police.

South Africa has a long history of falling apart between the men of law – the Chaskalsons, the Ismail Mohammeds, the Dumisa Ntsebezas – and the police power, so to some extent this falling apart feels like…old times.

Professor Kader Asmal is 75, while Fikile Mbalula (the deputy minister of police) is 38, so it is appropriate to acknowledge that Professor Asmal has been a member of the Congress Movement of the ANC for longer than Mr Mbalula has been alive.

It was an extraordinary and telling moment for the ANC when Asmal – a former professor of law, and drafter of the Constitution – told the Cape Town Press Club on 19 October: “The new administration [of President Jacob Zuma] is referring to the militarisation of the police.” Referring to the Deputy Minister of Police and former ANC Youth League leader, Professor Asmal noted that Mbalula had “said we must militarise the police. We spent days and days in 1991 to get away from the idea of a militarised police force. Extraordinary.”

Mbalula’s project would mean, Asmal continued, that the national commissioner of police is “going to be ‘Generalissimo’ or ‘Il Duce’ or Field Marshal”, should the ranking system of the police become re-militarised, as it was in the apartheid period.

“Il Duce” was, of course, the founder and leader of the first fascist state, Benito Mussolini. “Generalissimo” was an accolade of the not significantly less fascist Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain as a one-party state for 35 years after his victory in the civil war, which had culminated in mass executions.

Asmal’s concern here is clearly that he believes that government in South Africa is drifting towards a more despotic form of rule. He could not have been more plain. According to The Star, he said it was “remarkable how the administration’s ‘political memory’ had failed, hinting it was showing signs of re-establishing apartheid-era security organisations.

“‘We have a minister of intelligence now called the minister of state security. Sjoe! Bureau of State Security. BOSS it was known as,’ said Asmal. ‘It is remarkable how political memory totally recedes into the background.'”

In a subsequent interview with Sello M Alcock of the Mail & Guardian Asmal acknowledged that the government’s proposed militarisation of the police, as articulated by Mbalula, was because of the government’s “inability to answer this legitimate public demand to deal with robbery and acts of violence”, but that its response was “very dangerous”. The ANC had “spent hours, and days and days, in 1991 and 1992 on this issue and in the Constitution we tried to make a disjuncture from the past. Names and titles and appearance must come into that because the police were an army of occupation.”

Mbalula’s response to this critique coming from a fellow party member and former minister in ANC government was no less extraordinary, and no less telling (see here).

Asmal’s comments, he retorted, were the “rumblings of a raving lunatic” coming from the “rubbish-bin of history”: the “doomsday theory” of a “disgruntled individual”, a “messiah”, a “latter-day Don Quixote whose ravings do nothing for our movement and our country, but rather make us wonder if he is really not doing others’ bidding.”

There, in that last phrase, were the undertones of what in the ANC camps in exile used to be known as the “internal-enemy-danger-psychosis”, with its menacing assaults on the bearers of a different opinion as if they were “enemy agents”. Doing others’ bidding? Which others? Who, in this extravagant language, is the deputy minister – a minister of government, a minister of police, no less – actually talking about? Does it not suggest that the professor’s concern about a climate in government, in which Il Duce might have felt a little bit…at home.., might have perhaps some justification?

In this context, one must disagree with Setumo Stone (see here), for whom “this particular squabble…only represents the tendencies of a generational clash….”

That is too bland. It is worth mentioning here that while Professor Asmal earned his own living over decades in the real world of work as a teacher of law, Mr Mbalula is a professional rhetorician, with minimal life experience of independent employment. Almost his whole adult formation has been that of a member of a political elite, which generally earns its living in a manner similar to that of the beneficiaries of Black Economic Empowerment, as described by Moeletsi Mbeki in his book Architects of Poverty (Pan Macmillan, 2009) – that is, at a remove from the creation of real wealth for the society.

For this elite, an ever-enlarged state, with its scope for the feeding of political clients and dependents (as in the former Soviet Union), is its dream. Political cronyism is its lifeblood.

One recalls it was the government in which Professor Asmal was a minister which appointed its own political crony to the post of national commissioner of police, and shielded him for years, only for the commissioner eventually to be charged with corruption. Evidence revealed he had shown a subsequently convicted drugs baron a confidential file on the said drugs baron from the Metropolitan Police in London. There is no surety that public appointees of the Mbalula administration are any less likely to be its political cronies. There is something systemic in operation.

Neither member of the ANC – whether the former Minister of Education and drafter of the Constitution (Asmal) or the serving Deputy Minister of Police (Mbalula) – made reference in this fracas to a recent little fact, reported at some length on Politicsweb: that the leaders of the major Christian churches in South Africa have expressed their horror at an attack on a peaceful settlement of the poorest of the poor which left four people dead and numerous homes wrecked, carried out by local political authorities of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, while the police (for whom Mbalula is responsible) not only stood idly by, but arrested, charged and detained the victims while they let the murderers go hide.

Here, in the assault on the shackdwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, was a political action worthy of Il Duce. And not a word from the politicians of the governing party, whether from the worthy professor or from his wordy antagonist, the deputy minister of police.

Another step in the historical metamorphosis of the state, as it issues from the constitutional dreams of 1994….

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=145446&sn=Detail

A bad week for South Africa
Paul Trewhela
04 October 2009

Paul Trewhela on the continuing degradation of the state in South Africa

This was a bad, bad week for South Africa. It began badly and it ended badly, with ominous import for the future.

The perceived danger is that the state — that great organ of coercion, Friedrich Engels’s ‘bodies of armed men’ — is being degraded into an instrument of brutality and self-enrichment to the advantage of certain selfish sectional interests, as a kind of Mafia. One has every reason to fear this.

If this were so, it would amount to a betrayal of the anti-tribalist heritage of the African National Congress from the time of its foundation as the Native National Congress in 1912, and prior to that, of the ethics of Mahatma Gandhi’s initiation of modern liberation politics in southern Africa in the years between 1906 and 1914. It would be a betrayal also of the – at least formally – internationalist principles of the South African Communist Party, from the time of its formation as the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921.

The events of the past week suggest that the ANC which opposed the anti-Indian pogroms in Durban in 1949 is no more, or at least is morally decayed. The spirit of Gandhi, and its further development in the spirit of the ‘Doctors’ Pact’ of 1947 betweeen Dr AB Xuma, Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Dr Monty Naicker, has suffered a severe wounding.

Local ANC political bosses in Durban have endorsed and shielded, even if there were to be proof that they had indeed not initiated, a xenophobic and murderous pogrom launched on the nights of Sunday 27 and Monday 28 September against a peaceable community of shackdwellers, the Abahlali baseMjondolo, who quite properly include a number of isiXhosa-speaking residents, at Kennedy Road in the Durban area, as reported last week (see here).

There is no excuse for anyone who claims to be a democrat in South Africa not to condemn the local ANC state authorities in KwaZulu-Natal for their brutalist support for the pogromists, and there is no excuse not to provide support to the victims. Local state authorities arrested and traduced the innocent, and permitted the guilty to escape.

In a statement issued on October 1, Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, supported the brave and principled condemnation of this outrage by Bishop Rubin Phillip, the Anglican Bishop of KwaZulu-Natal, who has provided an outstanding example. Archbishop Makgoba said: ‘I share Bishop Rubin Phillip’s view that it is a profound disgrace to democracy, that militia have been allowed to drive out the leaders of the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, and many hundreds of families with them.’

He continued: ‘When we remember how much we suffered, and how hard we struggled, in order to ensure that an armed minority could no longer exert oppression and deny freedom of speech, of opinions and of dissent, it is completely unacceptable that such intolerance should rear its head again in a different political guise.’ He added: ‘I too shall be making political representations,’ inviting others to take up Bishop Phillips’ proposals for supporting the displaced, whether through political action, through material support, or through prayer for all those injured or bereaved.

‘The people of our country deserve better than this,’ he stated. ‘Political leaders and the police must ensure that democracy and the rule of law are upheld.’

It was bad enough that the week began with a pogrom endorsed and shielded by local political and state authorities.

What followed at the end of the week made clear, however, how certain narrow, private and sectional interests now dominate the state in its most crucial department for actual and potential political control of the population, its secret intelligence services. On Friday 2 October, President Jacob Zuma promoted Moe Shaik – brother of the more famous Schabir, released by Zuma on alleged health grounds from a 15-year prison sentence for corruption – as head of Secret Services in a re-organised, centralised and more powerful State Security Agency (see here).

The worthiness of Moe Shaik for control over the secret services of the state may be judged from his political and family connections.

Paul Holden provides an easily accessible profile in The Arms Deal in your Pocket (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2008), which states:

‘Shaik, Mo: former head of ANC intelligence in SA, Shaik claimed in 2003 that Bulelani Ngcuka had acted as an apartheid spy, a charge later dismissed by the Hefer Commission of Enquiry. He admitted under testimony during the Hefer hearings that he had made the allegations against Ngcuka in order to protect the honour of Jacob Zuma. He is brother to Schabir, Chippy and Yunus Shaik.’ (pp.272-73, Appendix A).

Holden’s biographical note on Moe Shaik’s brother Chippy reads as follows:

‘Shaik, Shamin “Chippy”: A key mover-and-shaker in the Arms Deal. Chippy Shaik was appointed as the Chief of Acquisitions for the Department of Defence in 1998, and was a key player in the evaluation process that led to the eventual selection of the preferred suppliers in the Arms Deal.

‘In 2001, the Joint Investigation Report slammed Shaik for failing to recuse himself from meetings at which the selection of [his brother] Schabir Shaik’s African Defence System as a subcontractor to supply the information management system for the corvettes was discussed.

‘He has subsequently been alleged to have received $3m from a successful bidder in the Arms Deal, but has never been charged on any count of corruption. In 2008 Shaik’s PhD degree was withdrawn by the University of KwaZulu-Natal after it emerged that he had substantially plagiarised from other sources in writing his thesis.’ (p.273, Appendix A).

It is public knowledge that Moe, Shamin, Schabir and Yunus Shaik were part of Jacob Zuma’s underground military and intelligence apparatus within Umkhonto we Sizwe in the Natal/KwaZulu area in the late 1980s, during the last years of the apartheid regime, known as ‘Operation Bible’. At this time Zuma was head of counter-intelligence in the ANC’s feared Department of Intelligence and Security, known as iMbokodo, the grindstone. Schabir Shaik subsequently became Zuma’s personal financial adviser, extending to him significant unpaid loans.

The appointment of Moe Shaik to such a crucial position in the state inevitably recalls the judgement of Judge Hillary Squires in the Durban High Court in June 2005, when he found that the “payments [Schabir] Shaik admitted to having made to Zuma – and Zuma admitted to having received – were made ‘corruptly’, that his [Zuma’s] intention was to ‘use the weight of his political offices to protect or further [Schabir] Shaik’s business interests'” (Padraig O’Malley, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, Viking/Penguin, 2007. pp.434-35).

O’Malley goes on to quote a commment by Yunus Shaik immediately following the conviction of Schabir. The passage states: “The Shaik brothers are unrepentant. ‘After the verdict’, says Yunus, ‘Moe and I discussed among ourselves whether Schabir could have done things differently. And we agreed…that he should have done what he did. He honoured the bonds of friendship. We are proud of our brother’.” (p.435)

This appointment inevitably recalls also Zuma’s own aborted trial for corruption. It suggests that an improper degree of personal loyalty attaches this new spy chief to the old spy chief of the 1980s, for perceived reasons of factional self-interest and in defiance of the criterion of the public interest. All semblance of civil service impartiality has been abandoned in this most partial and self-serving of appointments.

At the same time, the pogrom attacks at Kennedy Road, and the mendacious, menacing and insulting official responses from the local ANC authorities, cannot fail to suggest the possibility of a state programme of actual or implicit Zulu hegemony, carried out by means of brutal force and institutionalised corruption, to the benefit of President Zuma’s intimate supporters. There is an exceptional weighting in this administration to political loyalties rooted in KwaZulu-Natal, and grounded in a noxious regional power apparatus, as the fate of Abahlali baseMjondolo shows.

In a country of historically fractious racial and ethnic divisions, this is a recipe for disaster that would make the late Mbeki administration – for all its entrenched self-interest – look by comparison like a haven of civil security.

If there was one matter which it was essential for President Zuma to have made clear from the first days of his presidency, it was that there would be no ethnic favouritism in his administration. The entire political and constitutional fabric of South Africa is now threatened. So too are the traditional foundations of the two parties of government since 1994, the ANC and the SACP. The promise of racial peace and reconciliation, exemplified by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is in tatters.

A recent comment by Richard Pithouse, of Abahlali baseMjondolo, is worth considering. In an article ‘Apartheid under a new guise’, on Times Live, Pithouse writes: ‘When society is very weak in relation to political elites, the point can be reached where politics, in its debased sense, no longer sees any need to hide its crude excesses. On the contrary, it tries to legitimate itself precisely via the public spectacle of its own power. There are occasions when we’ve come very close to this point in recent years.’

Shaik’s appointment as controller of the secret services would seem a further indication of this.

One applauds the example set by the leaders of the Anglican church in KwaZulu-Natal and in Cape Town, in opposing spiritual and moral principle to the conduct of this government. Any decent person should follow their lead.