On the face of it, the new African National Congress national executive committee’s (NEC’s) brief to reinvestigate the arms deal and produce “a detailed structural report”, if not simply a politically motivated exercise, could suggest an honest search for truth or a calculated ploy to achieve certain political ends. Or it could even just suggest a disappointing naivete on the NEC’s part.

After seven tough years defending the integrity of the arms deal against the strong circumstantial probability of poor judgment and dishonesty, and using the manipulated and fraudulent 2001 arms-deal investigation to vindicate its position, the moral posturing and false indignation of the outgoing NEC is now revealed for what it was.

The sudden, albeit implicit, admission that there are unanswered questions about the arms deal, and which, in turn, inadvertently challenges the credibility of the 2001 investigation, strongly contradicts, and in so doing deeply embarrasses, President Thabo Mbeki and individuals such as Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin, who have so adamantly rejected the need for any such probe.

Whether the new investigation is contrived to try to “get Mbeki” — as it was he who presided over the controversial arms deal — or to discredit the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and its case against Jacob Zuma, or in some other way to rescue Zuma’s public image, the motivation is best left to the media’s political commentators to speculate on. But whatever the reason, it might prove somewhat disingenuous of the NEC to suggest that it can conduct an investigation that is sufficiently credible, given the secretive and complex nature of the deal.

Having attempted what is possibly the only comprehensive case study of the structural and procedural aspects of the arms deal, I believe the NEC’s investigation will fall far short of establishing the “bigger picture” of how this huge procurement exercise was put together and of understanding its inherent flaws.

As such, it will fail to explain the profitable opportunities that the flawed procedures offered to certain players within, and connected to, the decision-making structures, and more so to those experienced and cunning operators from the corruption-ridden international arms industry. Without this big picture to work from, like so many other “arms-deal observers”, the NEC could be left with narrow and speculative views that would not serve whatever its real motives for the investigation are.

Further, it must be asked how the NEC, with no special legal powers and even less investigative expertise, hopes to get its hands on the arms deal-related information that is critical to knowing the truth, especially considering that even Parliament and the auditor-general have been denied access to such information. This is the information that would most likely reveal to whom most of the arms deal-related business was given and the criteria against which this took place. This information, in the main, concerns the government-private sector transacting interface — which, as we know, is internationally recognised as where much bribery and corruption occurs.

But, notwithstanding the NEC’s motives, and the practical difficulties of the new investigation, discovering the truth about the arms deal is in the public interest and the NEC should be encouraged to do as honest and thorough a job as possible. In this spirit, I would like to offer the NEC a few pointers that might just help its investigation.

The arms deal consisted of business and financial transactions at three different levels of government-private sector interface. First, there was the prime contract level, which attended to the jet fighters, corvettes, submarines etc. Then there was the subcontractor level, which saw to the allocation of key component suppliers to the prime contractors. Finally, there was the offsets level, where the prime contractors had to undertake contractual obligations to create small and medium-size business opportunities in SA. It is at these latter two levels that the NEC should focus its investigative attention, for it is here that the Schabir Shaik types were gifted with lucrative opportunities.

I would like to point the NEC in the direction of Erwin, the former trade and industry minister, as the individual who not only was the most aggressive defender of the arms deal, but who, probably more than anyone , directly prevented the information mentioned above from being independently examined. It will be remembered how Erwin publicly insisted the government had played no role whatsoever in awarding the subcontracts and therefore had no information on the awarding of this multibillion-rand area of business. It was subsequently proven that he misled Parliament and the auditor-general on this score, and that the government had in fact been directly involved in allocating subcontract business. This area of government information remains uninvestigated.

Regarding the offsets, Erwin refused to allow anyone access to the documentation pertaining to those individuals who secured offset opportunities. He did this on the dubious basis of something he called “commercial confidentiality”. Even I, as chairman of Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts at the time, was refused sight of this information. While the NEC might not be legally entitled to this documentation , it has the power to arrange for it to be made available to Parliament or to the new auditor-general. This would provide the public with very important information — and give the NEC some credible content for its report, assuming such factual detail is what the NEC seeks.

However, in announcing the investigation, the NEC has at times linked it to Zuma’s predicament and to its obvious wish to exonerate him of the NPA charges. In this regard, it is difficult to see how any NEC investigation into the arms deal stands to help Zuma. If this is the prime reason for the investigation, it is unlikely to succeed in producing arms deal-relevant information that could convincingly refute the circumstances of the very peripheral involvement that Zuma is alleged to have had — that is, a bribe, facilitated by an arms deal subcontractor, the payback being for Zuma to discourage the 2001 investigation.

Whether the arms deal was corrupt or not would have no bearing on the basis of the charges the NPA has brought against Zuma. This would remain the case, even if the NEC’s thinking was to try to gain an understanding of the Shaik involvement, and through this to somehow try to cast doubt on the Zuma charges. Zuma is simply too far removed from any of the real substance of the deal, and the charges against him, and the legal testing of those charges, rest on quite independent information.

Gavin Woods, a member of the National Democratic Convention, is a former chairman, as an Inkatha Freedom Party MP, of Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts.

With acknowledgements to Gavin Woods and Business Day.