Auditor-General Terence Nombembe
Picture: Puxley Makgatho

DEPARTING Auditor-General Terence Nombembe has defended the outcome of the first investigation into the arms deal that was undertaken by his predecessor, Shauket Fakie, saying the Seriti commission of inquiry is likely to come to the same conclusion.

Mr Nombembe was replying to questions by reporters at the University of the Witwatersrand on Friday*1 during an event to observe Black Wednesday (October 19 1977), when the former apartheid regime banned some newspapers and arrested journalists. His comments came as the Seriti commission’s public hearings resume today after they were postponed last week to give Lawyers for Human Rights time to prepare for the cross-examination of Armscor’s Rob Vermeulen.

The rights body is representing Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren, authors of The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything, and Andrew Feinstein, a former African National Congress (ANC) MP and author of two books ­ After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, and The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.

Mr Nombembe said it was unfortunate that the Joint Investigation Team Arms Deal Report, compiled by Mr Fakie, then public protector Selby Baqwa and former national director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka, was queried and discredited the way it was.

During a hearing by the standing committee on public accounts, Mr Fakie was questioned on claims that the final report of the inquiry into the arms deal had been "heavily edited" and "doctored".

In a special report tabled in parliament in 2000*2, Mr Fakie had said his audit into the prime contracts of the arms deal had revealed several material deviations from generally accepted practices.

"Mr Fakie tried to explain the procedures of the auditor-general’s office when conducting its business and then draws its independent conclusion but no one listened … (the report) remains a credible document that would soon be proven as such because the (Seriti) commission will come to the same conclusion," Mr Nombembe said.

He said his office had responded to the commission’s inquiries and had submitted all the information it required long before the public hearings started.

Also attending Friday’s commemoration was former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils. He urged journalists to continue campaigning against the enactment of the "secrecy bill", saying that no South African should trust anything going on within the state security apparatus until it had been overhauled.

"We have a lot to worry about considering the calibre of people that the president appointed since taking office to administer the security services of the country," he said.

Mr Kasrils took the Zuma administration to task for shelving the Matthews report ­ officially known as the Ministerial Review Commission on Intelligence ­ on reforming the functions of the intelligence services. It made recommendations on transforming the intelligence agencies and state security.

Its recommendations have not been implemented, because as it was tabled, Mr Kasrils and several other ministers left the government after former president Thabo Mbeki was removed from office.

Mr Kasrils called for the report to be revisited and for the state security establishment to be transformed to include proper accounting procedures and for checks and balances to be properly structured before the "secrecy bill" becomes law. Otherwise the office of the auditor-general would be unable to audit the intelligence units properly, he said.

Mr Nombembe bemoaned South Africa’s high levels of tolerance for audit disclaimers against most municipalities and some departments, saying due to the lack of public outcry and activism the government was not dealing decisively with guilty parties. He said audit disclaimers should never be tolerated, and pressure should be placed on institutions such as Parliament to ensure serious consequences for people who could not explain expenditures to auditors.

"We should not have a situation whereby there is no knowledge of where money was spent by any government entity or departments," Mr Nombembe said.

Deputy auditor-general Kimi Makwetu is to replace Mr Nombembe later this year.

With acknowledgement to Hopewell Radebe and Business Day.

Terence Nombembe did a fairly good job since Stooge Shauket Fakie CA(SA) vacated this hot spot.

Then he cocks up the whole things in a couple of seconds of ANC arse-licking madness at the University of the Witwatersrand on Black Friday.

It is true that the investigators of the Office of the Auditor-General did a reasonably good job with their Arms Deal Audit Report.

But that one was dated 2001-10-04 and a distant and partial draft of the final JIT Report.

The final JIT Report was dated 2001-11-14 and completely rewritten by Advocates Lionel van Tonder and Christoffel Fourie, probably with a whole lot of guidance in disassembly and reassembly by one Tony Heard of the GCIS and previously editor of esteemed newspapers like the Cape Times, but fell on lean financial times. This was after the three agency draft dated 2001-10-04 were sent to MINCOM and discussed at a meeting dated 2001-10-17.

The changing of the report reduced the length of the combined reports from about 950 pages to 384 pages (there may well have been one longer draft of the AG's report of some 1 200 pages which has been hidden from me.

The final report combined the extremely weak Public Protector's Report which effectively watered down the final joint product to just about nothing - which is exactly what Mbeki et al wanted and told the JIT to do.

If Terence Nombembe told his listeners on Black Friday that the Arms Deal Audit Report.dated 2001-10-04 was worth the more than a year and some R15 million (in 2001 Rands) of taxpayer's money, then I would recommended to them that they believe him.

Instead in the six weeks between the final AG draft and the final JIT Report allowed Shauket Fakie at the behest of Mbeki and his MINCOM to substantially change the report in every single way - from a fully footnoted and cross-referenced forensic audit report with clear and hard-hitting findings of wrong doing to a urine sodden douche rag.

Fakie and Baqwa, with Ngcuka listening, told parliament on more than one occasion that the draft report was subject to change concerning only matters of national strategic security, of which there were none, and some editing to make the report more user friendly.

This is simple perjury.

They removed the draft key findings of irregular involvement by the likes of Joe Modise and insetted one that the Government and in paricular MINCOM and Cabinet were clear of any wrongdoing.

Indeed one aspect which cause Nombembe to wish he'd kept his trap shut on Black Friday is the latest stunning revelations by Armscor witnesses at the APC that the SDPs were conducted outside of its standard acquisition standards and processes which are founded in the statue being the Armscor Act of 1977, therefore probably rendering the SDPs irregular and unlawful.

This was done by Minister of Defence Joe Modise issuing a Ministerial Directive No. 4/147 effectively instructing the selection process to be made at three different levels and thereby both over-riding Armscor standard processes and at the same time providing every opportunity for selections based on stipulated value systems and formulae to be over-ridden at the higher levels (that is SOFCOM controlled by Chippy Shaik) and MINCOM controlled by Mbeki, Modise and Erwin).

And this did happen.

In the LIFT case the selection of the Aermacchi MB338 was over-ruled by MINCOM to become the British Aerospace Hawk.

In the submarine case the selection of the Fincantieri boat was over-ruled by SOFCOM to the HDW Type 209.

In the patrol corvette case the selection of the Bazan 590B was over-ruled by SOFCOM to become the Blohm+Voss MEKO 200AS .

In each case either massive bribes and/or covert commissions can be proven or are prima facie.

That, dear countrypeople, is (part of) the big picture - the big theory.

If Seriti J brings you the same picture as Fakie, Finks & Co then he's going the same way.


*1      A Black Friday for Terence Nombembe and the Office of the Auditor-General


*2      That was the special report prior to the JIT investigation.

There was an even more important special report tabled in parliament in 2003.

I know, I caused it.

Shauket Fakie failed that test and should now be languishing in the penitentiary.

Shaky Fakie's problem was that he had very little idea of the import of the AG's special Report in 2000. Indeed this whole thing had been initiated when Henri Kleuver was AG and Fakie was a deployed cadre as deputy AG in charge of auditing the bent paper clips in the 4th secretary's waste paper basket. Then affirmative action and transformation elevated him to The Chief Stooge in the OAG.

A year later Fakie, along with Fellow Stooges, Baqwa and Ngcuka, with great fawning fanfare, issued the final JIT Report to parliament.

Whatever misgivings he and they may have had a year previously had effectively evaporated.

The SDPs and their perpetrators, MINCOM and the SA Government, now had a clean bill of health.

Any deviations from statutory acquisition processes were sanitised by concluding that this was allowed and justified that the Arms Deal was strategic, allowing almost anything to happen.

The JIT found Chief of Acquisitions Chippy Shaik to have a material conflict of interest and that his recusal "was no recusal at all". Despite mountains of evidence they did not report that there actually was a formal and recorded recusal, but actually that Shaik acted in contravention of his recusal - which is probably conduct of a criminal nature. The Three Stooges offer no recommendation in this regarding rendering their report effectively useless.

Regarding the corvette combat suite and IMS in particular, The Stooges are cannot offer any conclusions nor recommendations despite spending R6 million and a whole year on this aspect alone. This was because it was too complicated for them. Well not surprising for three deployed cadres.

Indeed Mr Nombembe, the travesty of what is the JIT Report is in itself going to come under scrutiny at the Seriti APC.

As I have told the APC researchers and evidence leaders, if Fakie and Finks Co had done their job properly in 2001, there would be no need to appoint the Seriti APC a dozen years later at a cost of R102 million. Not one of them has ever disagreed with me.

Make no mistake, if Seriti arrives at the same conclusion as Fakie in his inquiry, they are two peas in a pod.