In Eight Days in September, a book that narrates an insider’s version of events during former president Thabo Mbeki’s recall in September 2008, Frank Chikane paints a frightening picture of how an intra-ANC factional power struggle, which also plays itself out within our intelligence services, poses a national security threat.
“The reality is that these elements could corrupt our intelligence services to an extent that foreign entities or their agents or national proxies could take over [the] government,” he wrote, referring to self-serving ANC factions.
While writing the book, published about four years after Mbeki’s recall, which amounted to a bloodless coup carried out by his own comrades as part of the intra-party factional power struggle, Chikane says he feared more for our future and urges us to ask ourselves: “[W]here are we going and where we are [we] likely to end up?” With a former chief of defence intelligence, Maomela ‘Mojo’ Motau, having invited current and retired SA National Defence Force (SANDF) generals to an ANC Cadres’ Assembly to take stock of the governing party, we must indeed ask ourselves these questions.
The invitation, which smacks of a recipe for a coup, begs the question as to whether Motau was among the corrupted elements in our intelligence services. As the last chief of military intelligence of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), the ANC's military wing, he must have reported to and/or worked with former president Jacob Zuma as the ANC’s intelligence chief.
After a transition from an apartheid regime into a democratic order in 1994, Motau and other MK members were integrated into the SANDF. Therefore, Motau is inviting former MK combatants within the SANDF and the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA).
A dominant faction within the MKMVA, led by its president Kebby Maphatsoe, treasurer-general David van Rooyen, and spokesperson Carl Niehaus, is in a cross-organisational alliance with an oppositional faction within the ANC, led by Zuma and ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule.
. Having retired in 2009, Motau should have long called the ANC Cadres’ Assembly. Like many among his fellow former MK combatants, he is just a patronage seeker who wages an anti-Ramaphosa factional scrimmage.
Within the SANDF, a report emerged that some among the former MK combatants wanted to revolt against Zuma’s forced resignation in February 2018, but they were defeated.
By only instituting an investigation into the rot within the State Security Agency (SSA), Ramaphosa has failed to inoculate our intelligence services against intra-ANC factionalism.
The failure might lead to his dislodgment through a coup. More so given that he and his scandal-ridden minister of defence and military veterans, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, don't seem to be in full control of the soldiers, if the controversy over the brutal death of Collins Khoza at the hands of SANDF members is anything to go by.
Using the ‘High-Level Review Panel on the State Security Agency’ report, according to which the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) was transmuted into the SSA to serve Zuma’s intra-party factional interests, Ramaphosa should have instituted investigations into the two other bodies of our intelligence services within the SA Police Service (SAPS) and the SANDF.
In particular, the intra-ANC factionalism within the SANDF, as our last line of defence, must be of greatest concern to South Africans, especially when it has to protect the country against Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama, an extremist terrorist group that is waging an insurgency in the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique. With close ties to the Islamic State, the group has warned SA not to interfere in its insurgency in Mozambique, where it has killed more than 1,400 people and displaced more than 210,000 since October 2017.
• Tshabalala is a political analyst
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