Dare Not Linger

by Nelson Mandela

  10)  Detailed information on the operations of hit squads in the country. According to the Goldstone Report, members of the Vlakplaas Unit were paid between R200,000 and R1 000,000 on [‘dissolution’?] is this correct? What were they paid for?46

  The 1992 report by General Pierre Steyn, to which Mandela refers, had done much to expose the hit squads. While he had been briefed on some of its findings, Mandela hadn’t seen the full report. However, it was on his desk shortly after the briefing meeting.

  While pointing to the depth of collusion of the intelligence agencies in suppressing resistance, the list explains Mandela’s abiding caution – or mistrust – and why resignations from these structures always put him on his guard. In transforming the intelligence agencies, where covert action and corruption were the warp and woof of apartheid functionality, Mandela had to ensure scrupulous enforcement of the constitutional prescript on national security. It holds that national security ‘must reflect the resolve of South Africans, as individuals and as a nation, to live as equals, to live in peace and harmony, to be free from fear and want and to seek a better life’.47

  The first major policy hurdle for the new democratic parliament was the ‘fragmentation of the new state’s intelligence capabilities. Six intelligence organisations – each of which had been subjected to one or other political authorities or parties that were part of the earlier negotiations – had to be brought under one roof and redirected to address a new security agenda.’48

  By the end of 1994, policy and legislation were in place to amalgamate the national and Bantustan intelligence agencies with the intelligence departments of the liberation movements. Domestic intelligence functions resided in the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and foreign intelligence functions resided in the new South African Secret Service (SASS). After some intense negotiations that covered every field from the strategic direction to the technicalities of positions, the ANC showed wisdom in getting its personnel into more strategic positions, unlike what had transpired in the military and crime intelligence agencies.49 And to ensure tight control and supervision, there would be operational oversight by independent inspectors general for each service, ministerial accountability and, importantly, parliamentary oversight by the Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence.

  The new service was formally launched in 1995, with the ANC’s Sizakele Sigxashe as its first director general; an ANC deputy headed the NIA while a deputy from the NIS headed the new SASS. The de facto head of the service was Joe Nhlanhla, from the ANC, who was appointed deputy minister of intelligence services under the minister of justice.

  Yet again, integration looked good on paper but was, in reality, slow and uneven, dogged as it was by persistent mistrust between old and new personnel. It was also hampered by tensions among the ANC personnel. That was perhaps the reason for the low-quality intelligence that landed on Mandela’s desk, leaving him frustrated. According to Jakes Gerwel, the regular intelligence briefings sent to the president’s office were ‘like reading newspapers three days old’.50 Mandela was known to have rejected these reports, sometimes with harsh words, in cabinet meetings or in meetings with intelligence officials. In one instance, he had intelligence officials sent away from a cabinet meeting because their report was short on the information he had requested. On certain international issues, the politicians would be actually be more informed than the intelligence reports produced by officers from the previous administration.

  In one example, when Alfred Nzo, the foreign minister, was handed a report on participants in the Burundi conflict, he trashed the report.* ‘I know these people,’ he said. ‘I lived with some of them in exile in Tanzania.’51

  The new intelligence service was hampered by misinformation, originating from former members, or others with links to the new service, about plots from right and left to destabilise or overthrow the government.52 The Meiring report was one such fabrication and used the work of ‘information peddlers’ concocted by elements in military intelligence. General Nyanda told Mandela, after the Judicial Commission had declared the report as baseless, that military intelligence was ‘one of the most backward and untransformed elements of the Department of Defence’. It displayed ‘bias in favour of the old friends of the SADF in analyses and reports on southern Africa and a preponderance of reports on phantom left-wing threats compared to graver right-wing ones’.53

  At the bottom of all the dirty tricks and chicanery was an intelligence community hidebound by racial prejudice, which could not abide the thought that the new government might succeed – and on its own terms, too.

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  Working most directly with Thabo Mbeki, the SASS operated behind the scenes to support Mandela’s international initiatives. Its work in foreign intelligence veered away from the old regime’s prioritisation of Europe and the United States to a perspective more in keeping with the new foreign policy directions. This shift was seen in action when South Africa began to play a bigger role in conflict resolution. It was often required to act as a backchannel, facilitating initiatives or mending fences. For example, Mandela had sent his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, to Abuja to intercede on behalf of the Ogoni writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his compatriots, who were threatened with execution by the Nigerian military ruler General Sani Abacha in 1995. When General Abacha ignored the request for a stay of execution and hanged the nine activists, Mandela reacted with explosive rage.

  According to Lansana Gberie, an academic journalist from Sierra Leone, on 27 November 1995, he heard a calm voice issuing a statement on the BBC. It was Mandela saying: ‘Abacha is sitting on a volcano. And I’m going to explode it underneath him.’ Mandela had great faith in human nature and was driven by a sense of nationalism, which he hoped would permeate the rest of the continent. Abacha might have been corrupt and obdurate, but he was still an African leader and – possibly – not a monster.54

  When his plea – in the name of quiet diplomacy – for the men to be reprieved fell on deaf ears, Mandela felt thwarted and lashed out, in the same way he had rebuked De Klerk in front of TV cameras. This was not an act aimed at humiliating an adversary, as has been pointed out by Graça Machel. Trust – albeit one that hadn’t been consecrated by any formal accord in Abacha’s case – had been broken. It took hard work by intelligence officials for any interaction to happen between South Africa and Nigeria.

  Another case was the easing of tensions with Egypt after a falling out between Mandela and President Hosni Mubarak after the latter misled him in 1992 with a false commitment to donate funds for the ANC.55

  At the official opening of the new intelligence agencies’ combined headquarters in 1997, Mandela spoke of the ‘challenges facing democratic South Africa [that] are without doubt different from the challenges of yesterday. In the past, the single biggest threat to the security of our people came not from outside but from our law-enforcement agencies, including the intelligence services …

  ‘In this regard, we have started the difficult but necessary task of changing the state, and the intelligence community in particular, into structures that serve the people rather than terrorise them; structures that protect the integrity of our country rather than destabilise our neighbours; structures that protect democracy rather than undermine it.’

  Turning to the work of the services, he described their primary task as becoming ‘the eyes and ears of the nation’. He expected both the NIA and SASS to help ‘create the environment conducive for reconstruction and development, nation building and reconciliation’, warning that ‘without a better life for all, any hope for national security would be a pipe dream’. He emphasised the glaring fact that this had not been so in South Africa’s recent past, observing that the history of the country ‘has confirmed that none can enjoy long-term security while the majority are denied the basic amenities of life’. He asked the intelligence services to ‘continue to give valuable support to the police in the combating of crime, particularly organised crime’.


  Speaking of which, there had been a spate of thefts from the offices of the intelligence service. ‘It is quite clear from the nature of these thefts,’ he said, that there are elements within your structures, linked to others outside, who are working with sinister forces, including possibly crime syndicates and foreign intelligence agencies to undermine our democracy …

  ‘These are forces that are bent on reversing our democratic gains, forces who have chosen to spurn the hand of friendship that has been extended to them, forces that do not want reconciliation, indeed forces that wish of us to apologise for destroying apartheid and establishing democracy.’

  Mandela was, however, confident that there was a solution to the problems. He said: ‘The official opening of the joint headquarters of the National Intelligence Agency and the South African Secret Service symbolises another giant step away from an era when intelligence structures were at the centre of division and conflict in our country. It also symbolises the coming together of the different strands of our divided past into a united service working towards a common good.’56

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  With regard to the public service both the ANC and the apartheid government were open to the criticism that they lacked the imperative to transform it. Skweyiya, who was minister of public service and administration from 1994 to 1999, alludes to the ‘nightmare’, which must have kept Mandela awake for nights on end, of devising formulas for driving the different tiers of government, especially, at the granular level of governance – local government. He says, ‘One of the first things that we did was to set up the civil service, create nine provinces of a unitary South Africa, and ensure that there is a bureaucracy that exists there, appoint people to those positions, and ensure that all those provinces and the eleven administrations that existed are rationalised into one, which has been really a nightmare.’57 The apartheid government, which splurged on planning and preparation for the security forces, economy and international affairs, never gave the civil service much thought.58 No wonder he had concerns that the new administration was going to cause some problems.59

  The difficulties that beset transformation in particular areas, such as the public service, had their origins in the architecture of the negotiated transition, most notably the so-called sunset clauses championed by Joe Slovo. Built into the Constitution to deal with the first five years of the transition, the clauses provided, among other things, for the protection of civil service pensions. This served to ensure stability through the retention of staff with institutional memory who would, in turn, ensure capacity for the civil service to fulfil its mandate. But the urgent need to make the civil service more representative resulted in an uncomfortable mix of what Allister Sparks described as ‘an ossified old guard and inexperienced newcomers’, which rendered the government’s mandate more cumbersome and slower than had been planned.60 Furthermore, when factoring in the cost of voluntary severance pension packages to ease the exit of officials from the previous administrations, it proved too expensive. Advertising the posts of incumbent civil servants from the old order led to the first rift in the Government of National Unity.61

  One of the problems arose from an ANC oversight in negotiating the interim constitution: the old Commission for Public Administration (CPA) still retained its powers over control of all appointments to the public service. It was only when the final constitution was signed that this anomaly was rectified, with the CPA being replaced in 1996 by the Public Service Commission.

  Another hitch, meant to bypass restrictions in making appointments, could be sourced to the placing of senior members of the liberation movement into management positions, with some starting as ministerial advisers, leading to the creation of parallel centres of authority. Added to this were the clashes of cultures between the old and new regimes and an absence of a shared vision, necessitating the granting of more powers to ministers with regard to senior appointments. This unplanned measure became entrenched, with negative implications in later years on the professionalisation of the public service.62

  Five-year targets were set for the composition of the civil service management. The desired outcomes were that black people, that is, coloured, Indian and African, would comprise 50 per cent; at least 30 per cent of new recruits would be women; and, in ten years, at least 2 per cent would be people with disabilities. Only the level of the latter remained below target.63

  Less than a month after the start of the new government, Mandela wrote to his ministers, reflecting the urgency with which he regarded the matter of the appointment of women in particular.

  ‘Our country,’ he wrote, ‘has reached the point where the representation of women is accepted as essential for the success of our policy of building a just and equitable society.

  ‘The Government has to lead in this process by providing visible evidence of the presence of women at all levels of Government.

  ‘I would, therefore, like to request you to prioritise the appointment of women to positions in Government departments, the Civil Service and standing committees.

  ‘I would also like to remind you that the services your Department will provide should bring improvement to the conditions of women as well as men.’64

  Another hurdle in the public service was the need to rationalise and pare it down to the minimum needed to run efficiently. This couldn’t be done through ministerial fiat behind closed doors, but had to involve negotiations with the trade unions, which, until 1993, had been banned from the apartheid public service altogether. There was added pressure from the macroeconomic crisis currently gripping the country, which made matters worse. The minister of finance proposed cutting down the number of civil servants from 1.3 million to a million. This figure was politically unviable, given the level of unemployment and the concomitant impact on the poorest of the poor.65

  Corruption, too, played a big role in consuming resources and impairing the new government’s legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. It was particularly endemic in, but not isolated to, the former Bantustan areas where patronage and lax oversight greased the wheels of apartheid survival. Starting in the Eastern Cape, and later extended throughout the country, the government mounted action to deal with the problem. It identified ‘ghost workers’ and investigated abuse of pension funds and state financial resources.

  In addition, where there had previously been four provinces and ten Bantustans, there were now nine provincial administrations. The former Bantustan officials, now integrated into the new civil service, brought with them institutional legacies with long-lasting adverse consequences.66

  While Mandela’s engagement with the transformation of the civil service was less direct than it was with the security forces, he did, however, involve himself in selling the new and more representative civil service to the public. For him, the civil service was to be a resource for society as a whole.67

  For that to happen, however, there had to be give and take between the public service and the government. In his second State of the Nation Address in February 1995, Mandela commended the dedicated work of the public service and spoke directly to South Africa’s civil servants:

  ‘We are committed to the motivation of all public sector workers so that they become a conscious, willing and skilled agent for the transformation of our society according to the objectives spelt out in the Reconstruction and Development Programme.

  ‘As part of this process, Cabinet has given instructions to all Ministers to interact continuously with all members of their ministries and departments to brief them about their tasks, to report on progress achieved, to agree on how to overcome obstacles to the process of transformation and generally to be involved in the struggle for change.

  ‘We have also invited the public sector unions to participate as fully as possible in the budgeting processes so that they make their own contribution to the difficult task of deciding the best possible allocation of the limited resources available to government.’

  However, Mandela warned against an adver
sarial relationship between the executive and the administration, which ‘would impact negatively on the common task … of serving the people of South Africa.

  ‘Accordingly,’ he went on, ‘we have been available and willing to address all matters of concern to the public service workers, including questions of salaries, promotions, pensions and other issues relevant to working conditions.’

  He called on the public service workers to ‘join hands with the government to address other important matters such as the racial and gender imbalances within this service’, while observing that the public service ‘will never be fully acceptable to the people as a whole and can never be truly responsive to the needs of the people unless it is composed in all its ranks in a manner that reflects the composition of our population.

  ‘To speed up this process, the government will continue to implement measures and programmes aiming at ensuring that those who were disadvantaged by apartheid in the past are given the capacity to catch up with those who were given the opportunity to develop and advance themselves in terms of management and other skills.’

  After spelling out the meaning of the affirmative action programme, which aimed to redress the inequalities of the past, Mandela called upon the people ‘to refuse to listen to the false prophets who seek to perpetuate the apartheid divisions and imbalances of the past by presenting affirmative action as a programme to advantage some and disadvantage others on the basis of race and colour’.68

  However, Mandela had to be candid when spelling out both the setbacks and the planned remedial action. He explained to Parliament in February 1996 that although government had meant to stick to its mandate of establishing a ‘single, streamlined, efficient and transparent Public Service and to allocate more public resources to capital expenditure’, it was time to be ‘frank and say that the current service is too large, and it has to be rationalised. There is no other option.