Opinion Reporter

As Alice might put it, the Zuma-Ngcuka affair is becoming curiouser and curiouser. Two months ago President Thabo Mbeki appointed the Hefer Commission to investigate allegations published in City Press newspaper that the director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, was a spy for the apartheid government.

Now, after much huffing and puffing in the courts and the commission about whether the national intelligence agencies could be subpoenaed to tell whether Ngcuka's name is on the list of agents who served the apartheid regime, the director-general of Mbeki's office, Frank Chikane, has written to commissioner Joos Hefer telling him there is no need for the agencies to testify because the president already has access to the information they have got.

"There would be no point in Mbeki appointing a commission to pursue information to which the president already has access, in as much as the commission's mandate is to report to the same president," writes Chikane.

Huh? So the president appointed a judicial commission to investigate something to which he already knew the answer. So why the commission?

One possible explanation is that he wants to put the accusers to the test in public, to end what Steven Friedman referred to in a recent Business Day column as "the politics of the back alley".

There has been a disturbing trend in South Africa of politicians and rival competitors for jobs using the tactic of the undeniable smear. Playing the race card is one; playing the apartheid spy card is another. There is no way either charge can be convincingly denied, so some of the mud will always stick.

Thus Helena Dolny lost her job as director of the Land Bank when a rival in the organisation accused her of racism, offering no evidence whatsoever to substantiate the charge. But how can anyone ever "prove" they are not a racist? It has become a stock-in-trade weapon for the ambitious and the vengeful.

Now we have a newspaper publishing an allegation that the ANC investigated Ngcuka as a suspected spy for the apartheid regime. Although the reporter concerned continues to insist on her rights not to disclose her sources, it is no secret that the former Transport Minister, Mac Maharaj, has made these allegations and that a former National Intelligence operative, Mo Shaik, appeared on television waving documents he said supported the accusation against Ngcuka.

At the same time Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who headed the ANC's intelligence arm at the time of the alleged investigation, has accused Ngcuka of abusing his position by "spreading malicious and untruthful information" about him while giving editors and other senior journalists an off-the-record briefing about cases under investigation by the Scorpions unit, which Ngcuka heads.

The Hefer Commission is also charged with investigating whether Ngcuka did abuse his position.

The one thing the three accusers have in common is that all are being investigated by the Scorpions in cases involving possible corruption. So on the face of it all three have grounds for resenting Ngcuka and possibly wanting to discredit him.

As Friedman notes, the value of the commission is that it puts the onus of substantiating the spy charges on the accusers, and if they fail to meet the test it is they rather than the target of their accusations who will be publicly discredited.

But was this really Mbeki's motive in appointing the commission? Is he too not perhaps playing a back-alley game of his own?

There are factions and cliques within the ANC, and as it prepares to enter the second and last term of Mbeki's presidency, there is already some early jostling for pole position in the race to choose his successor.

The ANC's 2007 congress will be the key moment. That is when the ruling party will choose its own next president, who will then be in line to take over as national president after the 2009 general election - assuming that the ANC wins again.

If things take their normal course, Zuma will again be deputy president in the second Mbeki administration and therefore obviously a strong contender to assume the successor role at the 2007 congress. But there is a widely held view that Mbeki does not want Zuma to succeed him, that he would prefer someone else from within his own loyalist group. Retiring presidents often like a close loyalist to succeed them so that they can continue to exert influence.

No obvious candidates are identifiable yet, although one hears the name of Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma mentioned as a possible favourite. But whoever it may be, there is a perception in some alliance quarters that Zuma is the target of a manoeuvre to discredit him and others in his camp, who include Maharaj and the Shaik brothers, to put him out of the running.

I do not know whether this is true, but Mbeki has enough of a reputation as a manipulative politician to give the perception currency.

Meanwhile, this whole affair has revealed once again the extent to which our media are prone to being used as vehicles for back-alley politics. It is far too easy for someone wishing to smear a rival to whisper some scandalous allegation to a reporter and have it appear in print.

This is not new. It is the continuation of a malaise that began during the apartheid era, as the dirty tricksters of that era have since reminded us.

Two members of the Strategic Communications unit of the old State Security Council, Craig Williamson and Paul Erasmus, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how they had planted stories in The Star, the Weekly Mail and The Citizen smearing opponents of the apartheid regime.

Williamson recounted how Stratcom, as the dirty-tricks unit was called, planted a story in The Star claiming that Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party at the time, had assassinated his wife, Ruth First, because of ideological differences between them. That by the very organisation which had itself killed First with a letter bomb sent to her in Maputo.

A nod, a wink and a hint from a single source who should by definition have been suspect, and this appalling libel was in the paper.

There are structural weaknesses in our media that make them vulnerable to this kind of abuse. Largely as a result of our linguistically and racially segmented marketplace, we have an over-traded media industry.

There are too many newspapers and broadcasting stations feeding off a limited advertising revenue cake. Tight operating budgets mean newsrooms are understaffed with lowly paid junior staff. Reporters work under tremendous pressure, sometimes having to produce four or five news reports a day.

The result is too many single-source reports based on a quick telephone interview. The competitive pressure for circulation also results in reports being hyped to catch public attention.

So in the final analysis, perhaps the only good that can come out of this whole sorry business is an awareness on the part of all concerned that back-alley politics is a corrosive and mutually destructive way to conduct our national affairs, and that it is time for all branches of our new democracy to clean up their acts.

Sparks is a veteran journalist and political commentator.

With acknowledgements to Allister Sparks and the Cape Times.