Publication: Sunday Independent Issued: Date: 2006-08-27 Reporter: Chiara Carter Reporter: Moshoeshoe Monare Reporter:

From Gucci Socialist to Arms-Deal Fall Guy

 

Publication 

Sunday Independent
Date

2006-08-27

Reporter

 Chiara Carter, Moshoeshoe Monare

Web Link

www.sundayindependent.co.za

 

Has Yengeni been betrayed and sold out by his comrades, as he claims? Despite a criminal conviction, he remains a member of the ANC's executive

In the past 20 years Tony Yengeni has been called a hero of the struggle, a populist, a hack, a Kebble-ite and even a Gucci socialist, but this week as he went into the feared Pollsmoor Prison amid a show of support from ANC leaders, Yengeni looked an awful lot like a fall guy.

Yengeni has been jailed after admitting that he deceived parliament about a massive discount that he received on a luxury 4x4 vehicle from a company linked to the country's controversial arms deal.

Despite the hullabaloo that has resounded through the years about alleged corruption relating to the arms deal, and numerous revelations involving far more than a discount on a car, Yengeni is the first politician or state official to be jailed.

He is also the first ANC MP who has been imprisoned after admitting to fraud, unlike several of his former colleagues who admitted to defrauding parliament materially in the Travelgate scandal, but escaped a prison term.

All of which goes to explain why Yengeni and his supporters claim they have been betrayed by their comrades.

On the other side of the political divide, the opposition parties have expressed concern that Yengeni received support at the prison gates from senior ANC figures, both provincial and national.

Yengeni, a former liberation army commander who grew up in the Gugulethu-Nyanga area of Cape Town, is no stranger to controversy, or to the vicissitudes of political life, where he has won not only admirers but also foes.

Despite his high profile, strong struggle credentials and membership of the ANC's highest decision-making body, the national executive committee, the top position in the provincial ANC always eluded Yengeni.

He has zigzagged in and out of favour with the ANC leadership through the years and has blamed the media for many of his woes.

Yengeni's bid for regional leadership of the ANC when he was elected regional secretary in the Western Cape in 1992 saw him ousted the following year by Lerumo Kalako, a fellow communist leader.

Yengeni placed much of the blame for his downfall on the press, which he said had attacked him repeatedly and caricatured him as a hot-headed militant. Indeed, such militancy is part and parcel of the Yengeni mystique.

After matriculating in 1976, Yengeni went into exile for nearly a decade before returning to work underground in the Cape. He spent time in Lesotho, Botswana and the Soviet Union and developed a close relationship with Chris Hani.

He was arrested with 13 others in 1987 and charged with terrorism. The trial dragged on until after the ANC was unbanned and the trialists indemnified.

Yengeni was one of the last ANC leaders to accept that the ANC would lay down its arms in favour of negotiation, but later went on to irritate some in the ranks of Umkhonto weSizwe when he developed a corps of bodyguards composed of high-school students.

Hani's death hit Yengeni hard. Close associates recall not only how deeply he grieved, but also how bitter he was at what he felt was a lack of emotion on the part of the man who would later become president, Thabo Mbeki.

Yengeni himself came in for criticism at the time after he was reported to be wandering around the Nyanga area with a 9mm pistol and spreading inflammatory rhetoric in the aftermath of Hani's death.

Indeed, diplomacy has not been a strong point and many a Yengeni quote ended up as a headline, often alienating more moderate or subtle members of the ANC. Yengeni once said he intended having former National Party politician Peter Marais "for breakfast".

After being sidelined in provincial politics, Yengeni concentrated on the national stage - both as a member of the NEC and as an MP. He was appointed the chairperson of parliament's joint standing committee on defence. Meanwhile, he was labelled a populist alongside the likes of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Peter Mokaba and Bantu Holomisa.

He became part of a task team sent by the ANC to the Free State to mend rifts within the ANC over the redeployment of Mosiuoa Lekota, the provincial premier, to national parliament.

Instead of being given a post abroad, Yengeni became the ANC chief whip.

His stint in this top post saw him put a decisive stamp on parliamentary proceedings. For one thing, more than a few backbenchers attempted to emulate his penchant for elegance - both ethnic and western. For another, he cracked the whip in terms of party discipline and did not allow either slackness or free thinking by MPs who, in the first heady years of democracy, had used the parliamentary committee system to question the executive.

The chief whip's dislike of the media became even stronger after the first news reports about his car discount, provoking an atmosphere of paranoia.

While the luxury cars, Armani suits and Kebble links all earned Yengeni the reputation of "Gucci socialism", there's another side to the tale. He was the last big-name comrade to move out of the Gugulethu area.

Since then he has continued to live in the same relatively modest suburban home and to maintain close links with his old Gugulethu crowd.

However, the relationship between Yengeni and another one-time Gugulethu resident, Bulelani Ngcuka, the former national director of public prosecutions, has been frosty for years, according to Yengeni's friends.

More recently that relationship turned icy. In 2002, Yengeni appeared in the Pretoria commercial criminal court on charges of corruption, fraud, perjury and forgery. The following year, he pleaded guilty to a charge of fraud, saying "he misled parliament about the benefits he received in connection with the multimillion-rand arms deal".

Despite censure from the ANC for bringing the organisation into disrepute, Yengeni still has his supporters in the upper echelons, among them Baleka Mbete, the speaker of the national assembly, as well as Essop Pahad, the minister in the presidency.

However, according to one ANC NEC member, Yengeni's biggest worry is what he believes to be a betrayal by his comrades. "He believes Bulelani [Ngcuka] sold him out," the NEC member said.

In an affidavit filed in the Pretoria high court in February last year, Yengeni accused Ngcuka of reneging on a deal in which he would pay R5 000 in exchange for a guilty plea.

He alleged in the affidavit that the deal was struck in the presence of, and at the home of, Penuell Maduna *1, the former justice minister, in January 2003. According to Yengeni, Maduna suggested that the matter be withdrawn. Ngcuka denied there was such a deal and the courts agreed.

It is interesting, according to the NEC member who, in the broader succession picture, could be placed in the Jacob Zuma camp, that "the same Maduna is now muddied in another prosecutions mess in a case [against the French arms company Thint]".

A senior Cosatu leader said this week that the botched plea-bargaining "trick" was also tried on Zuma through his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik.

Yengeni becomes the first ANC bigwig to fall as a result of the arms deal and it is ironic that, in terms of the alleged corruption related to the deal, he had little influence in directing which contract went where *2 .

Yengeni is also not alone in having omitted to mention all his financial details in parliament's register of member's interests. Several senior politicians have been lax in this regard through the years. They range from Lekota through to Mbulelo Goniwe, the current chief whip.

An ANC Youth League NEC member said that Yengeni was not the only ANC leader to have failed to disclose his interests: "But why him? Why is he made an example?"

For instance, the ANCYL member said, it was revealed that Lekota had interests in fuel and wine businesses that he did not declare to parliament. But he "got away with a slap in the wrist" after he was fined by the ANC.

The difference, however, is that Lekota admitted he was wrong. Unlike Yengeni, Lekota did not lie to parliament in a special statement in the house, nor did he take out expensive newspaper advertisements declaring his innocence.

Lekota was the man who stood up at an ANC NEC meeting recently and questioned why people such as Yengeni were still members of the NEC, despite their criminal cases.

It was a statement which led to a heated quarrel, prompting Lekota to apologise when he was reminded of the 2003 disciplinary hearing in which Yengeni had received a suspended "sentence".

Pahad said on Thursday that Yengeni would remain a member of the NEC: "The NEC has not discussed the matter. It would be a matter for the disciplinary committee to make a decision, and as far as I am aware they have made no such decision," he said.

But Yengeni's four-year jail term poses a legal hurdle for a career in parliament or government, while a criminal record makes it hard for him to forge ahead in business.

A presidential pardon - as was accorded to another comrade convicted of fraud, the cleric and former ANC provincial leader Allan Boesak - could throw him a lifeline. But that is way down the line.

Returning to prison cannot but bring back bitter memories for Yengeni. He and his fellow accused in the terrorism trial were tortured, psychologically terrorised and driven to attempted suicide by the apartheid police. Yengeni's wife, Lumka, did not recognise him, so badly was he assaulted by police.

The detainees were held in solitary confinement with no access to the outside world or even reading material.

Jeff Benzien, a notorious former Western Cape security policeman, who employed the "wet bag" torture method in the mid-1980s, horrified the audience at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing when he demonstrated the technique at Yengeni's request.

While Yengeni does not face the apartheid system's horror on his return to prison, South African prisons are harsh places, haunted by gangsterism, overcrowding and a high rate of HIV infection.

Yengeni will doubtless be protected from the worst of these horrors and faces a relatively short term. However, he certainly has time to wonder how it is that he alone is back behind bars.

With acknowledgements to Chiara Carter, Moshoeshoe Monare and Sunday Independent.


Good article.

*1      A doctor of laws with a penchant for making law deals at his home.


*2      This is not the point. The Joint Standing Committee on Defence had to open the way for the Arms Deal to happen at all, including its facilitation and approval of the Defence Review, Force Design, budget approval, etc. which gave birth to the deal itself.

Without this there would have been no large Arms Deal, but piece-meal acquisitions of equipment as the SANDF's needs arose and became defined and formalised (just as it should have been).

But there was an election pending in mid-1999 and the ANC was broke. It desperately needed money and what better way to get a deal where there was "one for you, one for me and one for the ANC"?