In this extract from his book ‘After the Party’, former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein recounts how parliament’s oversight of spending on the arms deal was eroded

The hearing with the ministers took place on 26 February in a dark, oppressive room in parliament’s marks building. It was in this very room during the late apartheid years that the National Party held its caucus meetings, where its parliamentary puppets would receive instructions from the leadership.

While the ANC members asked their scripted questions and agreed with every answer supplied by the Ministers, Gavin [Woods], Raenette [Taljaard] and I asked about the substantive issues pertaining to the deal. Trevor Manuel, Alec Erwin and Mosiuoa Lekota were belligerent and arrogant in their responses.

Alec was particularly aggressive and enthusiastic in defence of Chippy Shaik. In response to a question I had asked about the lack of declarations of conflicts of interest he responded: “ … When it was known to us, and it was known at an early stage, that a person in a relatively critical position, the chief of procurement [i.e. Chippy], and that there were now negotiations taking place between a company that his brother was involved in, we took specific steps to ensure that the person recused himself … we were satisfied that we had taken sufficient precautions to deal with that.”

They fudged the issue of what influence Chippy had in the cabinet sub-committee and were joined in their obscurantism by Geoff Doidge and Don Gumede. Gavin was polite and firm in the chair, successfully concealing his growing exasperation with the ANC members.

The ministers continued their self- defence with the view that they had nothing to do with the sub-contracts and were responsible only for the main contracts, which were all above board. Gavin, Raenette and I wearily explained that if, as Chippy had made clear at our hearing, deals were done between the main contractors and the sub-contractors prior to the main contracts being awarded, it was the relationship between the two levels of contractors that was most open to abuse and about which we had received extremely worrying information of state involvement. Revealingly, after claiming initially that government had nothing to do with sub-contractors, Erwin eventually stated that “… at various times … each of us as ministers probably met in one or other way subcontractors”.

On the controversial LIFT deal with BAe/SAAB, Erwin made it clear that the ministers and not the arms acquisition council made the final decision, and did so “for the correct reasons and within the correct procedures”. Creating even more confusion on the issue, he also said that the offsets were not a primary reason for the deal.

The ministers endlessly repeated their mantra that the cost of the deal was R30-billion, even when shown that the treasury’s own budget review released the previous week referred to R43-billion. The defence minister attempted to enlighten the committee: “ [Minister M Lekota] … Let us say that South Africa committed itself to give 30.3 billion giraffes. Those giraffes are living animals and they will remain like that. Now paper money or a coin, which is a symbol of something concrete, its quantities change in relation to the commodity. The commodity does not change. And what we are saying here is that the amount of money South Africa signed that it is going to pay, in real terms, will remain the same, but because the nominal forms change, the quantities change.”

A little befuddled by this bizarre analogy, I attempted to infuse a bit of humour into the proceedings while making a serious point: “[Mr AJ Feinstein] … what would happen if we gave the giraffes in twelve years time. We would have to hand over the offspring that they had in those twelve years as well. The key issue is the cost on the day of signing and the overall cost to the taxpayer. So, there was something that was omitted from the original statement from government on the cost.”

My levity was not shared by the ministers, who, despite all indications that they had misled the public, remained angry that Scopa had raised this issue. They continued to defend their position, tying themselves in knots in the process …

With acknowledgement to The Times.