ALMOST two years ago, on the eve of the 2009
election, then acting National Prosecuting Authority
(NPA) head Mokotedi Mpshe announced that fraud and
corruption charges against African National Congress
(ANC) president
Jacob Zuma were being withdrawn. It is now a
matter of record that, relieved of the burden of
having to face trial in a public court for his
alleged part in corrupt
transactions arising from the arms deal, Mr
Zuma went on to become president of SA.
Mr Mpshe justified his controversial decision by
asserting that secret recordings of phone
conversations between his predecessor at the NPA,
Bulelani Ngcuka, and then Scorpions investigative
unit head Leonard McCarthy, amounted to "intolerable
abuse" of the legal process and rendered a fair
trial impossible. Selected transcripts of the
conversations, released by Mr Mpshe, seemed to
suggest that the two had colluded to time the
introduction of charges against Mr Zuma in such a
way that they would do maximum political damage.
The decision to withdraw the charges was
controversial for two main reasons: the taped
conversations appeared on the face of it to have
come into the possession of Mr Zuma’s lawyers
illegally before being passed on to Mr Mpshe, and no
adequate explanation was provided for why the
decision on whether the trial had been fatally
compromised was not left to the courts to make.
The Democratic Alliance subsequently challenged Mr
Mpshe’s decision in court, and the matter is still
pending. Mr Mpshe, in turn, asked then
inspector-general for intelligence Zolile Ngcakani
to investigate the origin of the tapes and how they
came to be in the possession of Mr Zuma’s legal
team.
This investigation was completed more than a year
ago and the report was handed over to Parliament’s
joint standing committee on intelligence. Since
then, nothing. The ANC-dominated committee refuses
to make the report public, with chairman Cecil
Burgess maintaining that the committee has fulfilled
its oversight role and no further action is
therefore necessary.
This is completely
unacceptable in a constitutional democracy
that claims to value transparency and freedom of
information. If senior state employees were indeed
abusing their public office for political ends, we
have a right to know. And they should be prosecuted.
By the same token, if the president of the country
or his agents broke the law by gaining possession of
classified information, we have the right to know
that too.
Former Special Investigating Unit deputy head Faiek
Davids has now claimed in papers filed with the
Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and
Arbitration, where he is contesting his suspension
arising from allegations made in the same set of
recordings, that unit head Willie Hofmeyr told him
the tapes were made illegally by police crime
intelligence during the criminal investigation
against former national police commissioner Jackie
Selebi.
All of this remains untested, of course, and that is
precisely the point. It may well be that Mr Davids
deserves to lose his job, but he surely can’t be
fired on the basis of supposedly top-secret
evidence. And nor should Mr Zuma have been let off
the hook on the basis of information that has been
selectively declassified for that purpose.
The fact that no action has been taken to ensure
those responsible for leaking and accepting such
classified information are brought to book exposes
the Zuma administration’s bid to push through the
Protection of Information Bill, which would impose
severe penalties on those found guilty of this in
future, as a
self-serving outrage. What’s good for the
goose must surely be good for the gander.
With acknowledgements to Business
Day.
Like Thomson-CSF, Zuma doesn't have any standards,
single double or otherwise.
Politics is the art of the possible and this one is
the Leonardo of this dubious art.
The reason that McCarthy has not been charged is
because he was in on the act.
The reason why the ANC-dominated Parliamentary Joint
Standing Committee on Intelligence Chairman Cecil
Burgess who used to be Patricia de Lille's attorney
and one time ID member, refuse to make the report
public is because they know that this will lead to
an investigation involving first Mbeki and them
Mandela.