Publication: Sunday Independent Issued: Date: 2007-11-18 Reporter: Maureen Isaacson

You Can Never Be Too Clean in Arms-deal Land

 

Publication 

Sunday Independent

Date

2007-11-18
Reporter Maureen Isaacson

Web Link

www.sundayindependent.co.za

 

Talking to "Mister Clean" is as pleasing as reading his book, After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC (Jonathan Ball). In this riveting account, Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP, details the run-up to his resignation from parliament after seven years - in protest against the government's handling of an investigation into the multibillion-rand arms deal.

To put it politely, the government allowed itself to be taken for a ride by the arms industry, he writes. And "even the clever" were blinded with "economic nonsense about offset benefits".

Feinstein recorded in faithful detail - on a Psion computer - the furtive attempts to quash the investigation into the irregularities of the deal by the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa).

Post-1994, Scopa's brief was to keep an eye on the government's decisions on public spending. Feinstein sat on parliament's finance and public accounts committees and he took the brief of non-partisanship seriously. For his stand against corruption, he was dubbed "Mr Clean" by the media. Inside the movement he once revered, his name was mud. His spill-all runaway bestseller has done him few favours in these circles.

Feinstein had been honoured by his election to parliament in 1994 when "the politics of hope" bloomed briefly, before the backstabbing set in. He believes this hope will return and insists that the "current dire state of the ANC" is by no means an indictment. He deplores the bigoted and sweeping generalisation which would have it that the country is declining into "the chaos of Africa".

He makes it plain that corruption in the arms industry is a global phenomenon.

He says democracy's moral compass went awry with the arms deal. At the book launch, he said that British and German investigators are examining more than $200 million (R1,4 billion) in bribes that were paid by just three of the successful companies in the deal. He also alleged that the cases against Chippy Shaik - of soliciting and receiving $3 million - and Fana Hlongwane, who received £3 million "are clear-cut, and there is so much more, involving Joe Modise and the ANC itself".

Feinstein's account is replete with spicy cameos: Essop Pahad swears and blusters; Frene Ginwala "flip flops"'; so does Jeremy Cronin; Mosiuoa Lekota talks bunk. The ANC big guns, from President Thabo Mbeki downwards, are complicit in the arms deal.

With its irregularities came a lack of accountability, but the real tragedy is "the years we prevaricated on dealing with HIV and Aids, due to the president and health minister's denialism". He says he was outraged by Mbeki's statements about Aids in parliament, "an insult to intelligence, crass conspiracy theories, and Aids denialism".

Yet, "... in the beginning, I had not engaged with the issue really, to be honest with you. Why was I not speaking out on this? Why was nobody speaking out on this? I felt quite conflicted as a result".

Feinstein describes "the strange sense of shame" he felt for spilling the beans about how the movement had compromised its principles to loyalty. In the murky world of politics, you can never be too scrupulous, or too clean. And, although it's easy to shine when those about you are wallowing in muck, Feinstein looks like the genuine article.

In After the Party, he emerges as an innocent. He is sincere and his greatest sin appears to be his exposure of high-powered folly. He leaked information about Mbeki's Aids scepticism to the Mail & Guardian: another conflict. But he wanted the truth to come out.

Feinstein remains an activist, absorbed by HIV/Aids and corruption in relation to the arms trade. He never gave up on these issues in parliament and he went as far as he felt he could in that context but: "I had no constituency and no support base *1 - it says something about my own limitations as a politician".

Feinstein's account is compelling, not only for the necessary dirt it dishes but also because it provides a context for many of the arms deal players and for himself.

Feinstein has a string of degrees - an MPhil in politics and economics from King's College in Cambridge and from the University of California at Berkeley, a degree in economics and finance and a degree in clinical psychology from UCT.

His father, a second-generation Lithuanian Jew, was an itinerant advertising man who earned his living in a variety of countries and who moved the family home 29 times in 32 years of marriage. He died of a heart attack at 59. Feinstein's mother was a first-generation Austrian Jew, a puppet-maker.

Her grandfather, Sam Pick, and more than 20 members of her immediate family died in Nazi death camps, mainly in Auschwitz. In a speech to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Month in parliament in May 2000, Feinstein read Pick's last letter of January 22 1943: "My dearest children, I have received your letter and thank you for your best wishes on my journey, to which I am not looking forward. May God have mercy on the Jews and send us the long hoped for peace. In my thoughts I embrace and kiss you. May you all stay well. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Your father."

Pick's last journey was made by cattle truck to Theresienstadt, from which he never returned.

Feinstein's parents were supporters of the Progressive Federal Party and the living history in his home surely contributed to his easy identification with oppression. The Nuremberg laws that defined Jews as inferior and placed restrictions on their lives were echoed in the South African population registration act, the immorality act and the mixed marriages act.

With this knowledge came a set of values he will no doubt pass on to Misha and Maya, the progeny of his marriage to Simone, his Muslim Bengali wife. The connections Feinstein makes are by no means reductionist. He makes it clear that not all Jews - and, in fact, not all in his own family - were politically aware. Not everybody was a Joe Slovo, a Ruth First or a Gill Marcus.

"A minority [of Jews] were involved in the liberation struggle, while a grouping was openly committed to the apartheid state and the majority remained detached bystanders," he writes.

Feinstein was no such bystander. In 1983, he headed up education and welfare at Shawco, the welfare agency attached to UCT. He currently chairs the Friends of the Treatment Action Campaign in London.

His political credo is based on the definition by Václav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, of "politics as selfless service to oneself and one's fellow human beings, as morality in practice, based on consciousness and truth".

In After the Party, he cites the novel Seeing, by José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel laureate. This novel, writes Feinstein, is set in an unknown capital city at election time. Seventy-three percent of the city's voters return blank ballots. The country's leaders, flummoxed, call for a re-vote. This time, 83 percent leave their ballots blank.

The politicians conjure up an imaginary insurrectionary force that they claim is the enemy of civilisation and abandon the capital before ordering a crackdown on a small innocent group of people - an act that is immoral and based on lies and innuendo, Feintstein writes.

Seeing is "a telling allegory of global politics", he says. Our political choices have narrowed "to an unappetising centrist mulch". He is currently working on on a new book, about the global arms trade.

After the Party is unlikely to affect those who go to vote on a new ANC president in Polokwane, he says.

But it does what he set out to do, what Victor Serge - "a good anarchist" - has called truth-telling. He says that the Holocaust has shown us that we cannot afford to be silent.

With acknowledgements to Maureen Isaacson and Sunday Independent.


*1       At least Andrew is now world famous.

Good on ya.