Publication: Cape Times Issued: Date: 2007-06-07 Reporter:

So Many Questions About the Arms Deal Still Require Unrehearsed Answers

 

Publication 

Cape Times
Date

2007-06-07

Reporter

Judith February

Web Link

 www.capetimes.co.za

 

When Labour Transport secretary Stephen Byers's spin doctor said that September 11 was a good day "to bury bad news", she was counting on the absence of a slow news day.

There are precious few slow news days in South Africa. Probably not a single day passes without a headline or indeed several stories which are of immense import. And it is because of this that sometimes important stories find themselves slipping beneath the radar.

The story of former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, now based in London, putting several rather weighty questions to arms manufacturer BAe at a shareholders' meeting in London about three weeks ago seems to have passed by with simply a murmur.

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in the United Kingdom is in the process of investigating allegations that BAe paid millions in "commissions" to various entities in a bid to secure the more than R30 billion deal with the South African government.

Feinstein, whose membership of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (Scopa) led to intimate knowledge of the deal, put the pertinent question to BAe chair Dick Olver.

Could Olver provide an "absolute assurance" that "not one penny found its way into the hands of South African government or defence department officials, politicians or political parties" as a result of the arms deal?

Olver's response was well-rehearsed - "You can be assured that every bit of information requested by the SFO is being passed (on) and that help is being offered. What we want is a thorough and rapid review."

Amid the other compelling political issues of the day, it's easy to forget what the arms deal is all about. But it simply keeps rearing its head.

In fact, just on Tuesday the National Prosecuting Authority was granted the right to retrieve documents from Mauritius which relate to ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma's alleged role in the arms deal.

The documents include the diary of former Thint executive Alain Thetard, which allegedly prove a meeting between Zuma, his adviser Schabir Shaik, and Thetard to discuss a R500 000 a year bribe indeed took place. So the political implications of the deal have been far-reaching, to say the least.

It all started in 1999 *1 when arms dealers came a-courting. South Africa seemed only too keen to please.

The deal (whose precise cost is always a question of dispute, but it runs into billions) saw the executive enter into five main contracts for submarines, helicopters, Hawk lead-in fighter trainers (LIFT) and corvettes, as well as advanced light fighter aircraft.

The evaluations of tenders was first considered by four committees looking at technical merits, financial details and two committees dealing with the offset benefits.

The government "sold" the deal to the South African people on the basis that the offsets (in the form of jobs and investments) would outstrip the expenditure.

Whether this is so, remains to be seen.

The present controversy surrounding BAe is interesting for a number of reasons.

Back in 2000, Scopa, with Gavin Woods as chair, had in fact raised several concerns about the procedural regularity of the various arms deal transactions. Ironically, Scopa's concerns related to the LIFT contract, in respect of Hawk jets awarded to BAe.

Why, Scopa wanted to know, was the contract awarded to British Aerospace when clearly it was not the most cost-effective option?

In its report Democracy and the Arms Deal: an interim review: 2001, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) raised similar questions in relation to the LIFT contract for Hawk jets.

Why, for instance, did South Africa settle for a non-costed option in relation to this transaction? Who made the decision to change the basis for the evaluation of the tender and why? And, importantly, what are/were the cost implications for South Africa as a result of those changes?

These questions seem especially relevant today. In addition, the then minister of defence, Joe Modise, was the subject of an investigation by the National Prosecuting Authority before his death in 2001.

Modise was consistently linked to allegations that he intervened to eliminate cost as a criterion in the evaluation process. *2

Modise also allegedly stood to gain from the offsets as he was a shareholder in Conlog, one of the companies set to benefit from the deal with BAe.

And so the web becomes more and more tangled as the arms deal takes on an international strain.

As its ongoing history has shown, if allegations of corruption are not dealt with swiftly, they have a habit of coming around again. Given the uneasy relationship between money and politics, which regularly raises its head in politics around the world, and increasingly in South Africa, Feinstein's questions demand answers.

If not from BAe, then from the South African government and the ruling party.

They cannot continue to "bury bad news".

 • February is head of Idasa's political information and monitoring service.

With acknowledgements to Judith February and Cape Times


*1      It certainly did not started in 1999; the Request for Information were issued to the foreign embassies in September 1997, the cabinet announced the preferred suppliers in November 1998, most important of all and if one reads the final draft reports dated October of the Auditor-General into the Arms Deal, then one would know the BAE and DESO and others came a courting in 1995.


*2      This is not a matter for lingering doubt, it is fact: Modise first gave this instruction at a meeting of the Project Ukhozi Control Council on 30 April 1998.