After The Party

Andrew Feinstein has deserted the ANC and therefore could not be allowed the right of reply to a veiled attack on his political memoir After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC.

In an indication of just how deeply Feinstein's claims of his intensely personal, yet chillingly detailed account of a cover-up of corruption in South Africa's R60 billion arms deal had shaken up the ruling party, the ANC has made clear it won't engage him directly in their challenge of the book's contents.

Feinstein, the former deputy chair of Parliament's prime watchdog, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), which tried in vain to launch a full-scale investigation into allegations of arms deal graft, received little response from the ANC while he was in South Africa last month to launch the book.

Yet, having returned to London where he now runs his own consultancy, the ANC Today online letter has layed into him twice. Two weeks in a row it launched challenges to two different journalists who reported on After the Part for evidence of the "deliberate lies".

Feinstein has challenged the ANC to sue him or appoint a judicial inquiry.

"Everything that appeared in the book was either something that I experienced ... and for which I have at least two highly reliable sources for", Feinstein said. "And secondly, if anybody sued me it would be an opportunity for all of these matters to be placed before a court of law and I think an enormous amount of information in the public interest would find itself into the public domain which would be an extremely good thing for the country."

Six years after his resignation as an ANC MP in August 2001 in protest of the executive interference in Scopa's probe, he is now called an "opponent" of the party of which he is still a member.

Far from abandoning the ANC or politics, Feinstein is on a crusade to open up every nook and cranny of the arms deal and for that matter, all crooked arms deals worldwide and believes the ruling party can still be rescued from moral decline.

After the Party hardly needs promotion, with 13 000 copies sold in less than three weeks and a reprint running. But if anybody still wondered why it is a must-read, well, they just have to look at the bewilderment around them as Jacob Zuma is suddenly imminently poised to wrestle power from President Thabo Mbeki.

Feinstein's spellbinding story about the events around the turn of the millennium that cost him his career as a politician reads like a detective novel that for once give a comprehensive political context for the intrigue between Mbeki and Zuma, against whom corruption charges may still be pending.

The author not only explains why he believes the top candidate for ANC president should be charged, but the book gives a rationale for why the incumbent, Mbeki, is ultimately accountable for what went wrong with massive public spending on not-so-useful armaments. The "corrupt relationship" between Zuma and his former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, already behind bars for arms deal corruption, was just the tip of the iceberg.

"I don't think he was involved in any personal corruption", Feinstein says of Mbeki. "I think he either solicited directly or condoned the solicitation of money from contractors prior to award of contracts for the ANC (party coffers).

"In addition, Mbeki chaired the sub-committee that made all of the arms deal contract decisions "and those decisions were fundamentally flawed".

"And it will come out, these things always do!"

Privy to the inside information, Feinstein believes neither Mbeki nor Zuma "has the moral integrity" to lead the ANC. In the book, he does not spare the rod: "It is the President himself who is among the most manipulative and scheming politicians in his party, far more at home in smoke-filled rooms than in open discussion and debate.

"This struggle for power has rent the ANC and its allies asunder… The party is now an agglomeration of factions, defined not so much by ideological or policy difference, but by personality and the pursuit of power and patronage. Far more time is currently spent by the ANC plotting against each other than dealing with the challenges facing the country. And when it is convenient, regulations and laws are used to clip the wings of political opponents. The most obvious case is that of Jacob Zuma, whose misdemeanours had been known for years but were only brought to light by Mbeki supporters when it suited the President's ends."

At the Cape Town launch an extremely emotional Feinstein called for investigations to continue because he sees it as the "beginning of the moral decline in the ANC … which led to a situation where our institutions of democracy are being undermined in favour of the interests of the party".

Feinstein's own personal and moral journey is finely woven through the compelling argument for further corruption probes - from his upbringing in a Jewish immigrant household that frequently upped roots, his political awakening as a student in Cape Town, coming face to face with the terrible conditions in 1980s townships, to studies in the UK, marrying a Jewish Bangladeshi, campaigning for the ANC before 1994, working as adviser to former Gauteng premier turned businessman and presidential candidate Tokyo Sexwale, and his journey to the first democratic parliament where he soon became ANC leader of the Scopa. He was in his element in the oversight body, which first did not shirk to tackle controversial decisions over public squandering of money.

This all changed when the committee was provided with substantial allegations of high-level political graft in the arms acquisition programme and bravely called for full-scale investigations. Just how insidious the executive clampdown was is for the first time revealed in a blow-by-blow account of how Scopa was effectively strangled and Parliament's teeth pulled, complete with intimidation, paranoia, secret meetings and the truth being dismissed as "myths".

This month the ANC again called it "concocted shameless fabrications … to invent corrupt practices around the so-called arms deal".

Apart from writing and consulting, Feinstein's politics is now geared towards activism, among others creating awareness of HIV/Aids as London chair of the Friends of the Treatment Action Campaign and on issues around the arms trade, corruption and the undermining of democracy.

After the Party is concluded by a number of suggestions for democratic reform such as the need to abolish floor crossing, and Feinstein is particularly passionate about complete transparency in party funding, something the ANC has just started grappling with and which is also rocking the British Labour governing at the moment.

"I suppose it is all informed by the view that we deserve a much better politics than we have everywhere."

Feinstein believes the ANC can still recover. "But while Thabo or Jacob have an influence on SA politics, the truth will never come out," he says.

"Inevitably the truth will come from the international investigations (on the SA arms deal, currently pursued in Germany and Britain) and if Zuma lands up being re-trailed, certain things may come out unintentionally and unavoidably.

"And it will be a sort of moral cleansing which could lead to a sort of revitalisation of our politics.

"But … not while the two of them are around."

He was overwhelmed by the response to his book in South Africa: "I really get the impression that the country is desperate to get some inside information on what is really going on in the ANC, which just reiterates how opaque, how secretive it has become, and I think it is not a particularly good thing for our democracy, because it is such a dominant party and will remain so in the future."

Feinstein is already working on another book on the relationship between - a major beneficiary of our arms deal - and its relationship with the British government, a view on "how the global arms trade undermines democracy".

Having discovered a passion for writing in penning his traumatic story as one of a few lone MPs battling against the odds of a proud liberation movement that had lost its moral compass, he is also planning to pen a crime novel, an auto-biography of an as yet unidentified jazz musician and yet another on why wicketkeepers tend to commit suicide more often than other cricketers.

With acknowledgement to Christelle Terreblanche and Cape Times.