Commenting acidly on the make-up of Jacob Zuma’s new cabinet in the winter of 2009, Julius Malema expressed strong disapproval of the appointment of Indians, coloureds and whites to the economic cluster.
“Minister of police, minister of intelligence, minister of justice, they are all Africans, but we cannot just be reduced to security and the very important issue of economy is given to minorities,” he argued.
His words sparked a spat, but Malema had missed the whole point; the focus of the Zuma administration was the security cluster, which he would use to secure a second term, and he appointed his key loyalists to the strategic posts very early on.
Richard Mdluli, who the president appointed to head the crime intelligence unit in the SAPS, was the odd man out. He was key, but not necessarily loyal. Mdluli had a similar opinion of the president; useful, but could be problematic.
Mdluli, who joined the apartheid-era police force in 1979, is linked to the 1999 murder of his former lover’s husband, something he managed to keep buried for 20 years. He is also accused of looting the state’s secret slush fund and faces fraud, corruption and money laundering allegations.
Yet despite hard evidence, an aborted investigation and a shrill public outcry, between Mdluli and his prosecutors is wedged high-level political interference.
In a court challenge that was launched this week on behalf of Freedom Under Law, Mamphela Ramphele recounted death threats against investigators, witnesses being placed in witness protection programmes and ANC involvement. The court papers also revealed how the head of the Specialised Commercial Crimes Unit, Lawrence Mrwebi, a renowned Zuma backer, unilaterally and unlawfully withdrew Mdluli’s charges last December, arguing: “Whether there was evidence or not is, in my view, not important for my decision in the matter.”
The file is now with the National Prosecuting Authority and despite new evidence that has been added in recent weeks, no action is being taken. Ramphele has filed an urgent application to have Mdluli released from public service and his file thoroughly investigated. That case will be heard on June 5.
Until then, we are left to fathom who is really shielding Mdluli, and why.
It has been widely speculated that it is Zuma, because of the role Mdluli played in Zuma’s rape trial. On November 2, 2005, Zuma spent the night with a 31-year-old woman, who claimed the following morning he had raped her.
On November 4, she opened a case against him at the local police station. That same day, Mdluli was transferred from North West, where he was stationed as a deputy provincial commissioner, to Gauteng, and would have overseen the two senior detectives assigned to the case. Their evidence was later dismissed in court due to inconsistencies and Zuma was acquitted.
Could Mdluli have played a part? It’s possible, though he was a junior then to Jackie Selebi, who was the national police commissioner at the time and an out-and-out Mbeki man.
According to police insiders, Mdluli is protecting himself through the intelligence he has gathered not only about Zuma, but apparently about the cabinet, and with it he is effectively holding the government to ransom. If Mdluli is convicted, the fear is he will begin to release whatever it is he is sitting with. Even if he is cleared and paid to leave the police force, he will still carry that ammunition with him wherever he goes.
The government had hoped to make the case against Mdluli go away, but Ramphele’s intervention has put a stop to that.
Perhaps that is why Mdluli decided to write to Zuma last November telling him he was the victim of a sordid plot that was being run by his peers who wanted to get rid of him.
“It is alleged that I support the minister of police and the president of the country,” Mdluli wrote. “In the event that I come back to work, I will assist the president to succeed next year.”
As a long-standing intelligence man, Mdluli would have known that anything committed to paper has a good change of eventually surfacing. It eventually came to light months later, but it took Zuma until May to deny that he ever received it. If it was Mdluli’s attempt to shame the president, it wouldn’t be the only time he had used such tactics.
Last November he penned the 22-page so-called Ground Cover Intelligence Report in which he alleged that police chief Bheki Cele was being investigated for fraud.
The previous year, in August 2010, the Sunday Times exposed Cele’s involvement in a R500 million property lease scandal. The allegations were later investigated by the public protector and in February of the following year, she found against Cele. Mdluli’s November report was released less than two months later.
In the report, Mdluli also named a string of ANC seniors who he claimed were plotting to oust Zuma, among them Tokyo Sexwale, Malema, Fikile Mbalula, Paul Mashatile and Zweli Mkhize. When it was later raised at a party executive meeting, Zuma told the men not to fear reprisals.
Yet Cele is now on suspension, and by most accounts is likely to be fired. Mbalula was later caught up in an extra-marital affair in which he was alleged to have fathered a child, while Malema is expelled and reportedly the subject of a massive investigation into alleged fraud. Sexwale has been linked to a multibillion-rand government contract that made its way into the public domain shortly before becoming the subject of a court case.
Might these events have happened without Mdluli? Most likely. But the story that now stands out in the wake of the Mdluli saga is the one about Gugu Mtshali, the partner of Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe. In March, the Sunday Times exposed her plotting to buy government support for a R2 billion sanctions-busting deal with Iran in return for a R104m kickback.
The newspaper was working off a taped recording of the meeting that was given to them by the sanctions buster Barry Oberholzer. What was most odd was that he allowed himself to be named in the story.
I’m not questioning the veracity of the story, just the timing of it and the intelligence links at a time when we are knee-deep in Mdluli, which police investigators say is the biggest scandal they have dealt with since 1994 and which has the potential to rock this country to the core.
Did Zuma not foresee what might happen by placing Mdluli in such a key position, or was he really as powerless as police insiders suggest? Mdluli was plucked by Zuma from his post as provincial deputy commissioner into the crime intelligence unit in the early days of his presidency and started work on July 1.
Ten days later, the Sowetan newspaper ran a story about the 1999 murder case, which opened up the old wound and led to the current investigation.
Mdluli is adamant it was Cele who forced the story out. Others suggest it was Selebi, but that is unlikely, as he and Mdluli were still keeping company this time last year.
It doesn’t really matter who it was so long as it serves to show that the Hawks will never be able to function as they should within the police force. As ruled by the Constitutional Court last year, the unit can only be “vulnerable to political interference and inimical to genuine independence”, as the Mdluli case has shown.
Of course, the tragedy would be to look back on this saga at some point in the future and identify it as the moment when the ANC crisis became irreversible.
Weekend Argus