Shocking testimony evidence of pain whistle-blowers endure
Those who can expose the malfeasance that has infested state institutions and corporate entities need support
Almost all of the journalists who listened to Phumla Williams’s testimony at the state capture inquiry on Monday had interviewed the acting government communications head at one time or another. She is known to be calm and unflappable, a consummate professional who is always polite, prepared and kind.
So when Williams broke down while describing how she had been stripped of 70% of her duties by then communications minister Faith Muthambi, in an apparent effort to remove her oversight of her department’s procurement and finances, shock reverberated through the media benches. As they typed, some journalists had their hands over their mouths. Two shook their heads. Another appeared to be crying.
“Minister Muthambi had ripped my scars of torture, completely, completely,” Williams said, as she described how her mistreatment at the hands of Muthambi reawakened the trauma she suffered while being tortured by the apartheid police.
As she testified, words tumbled from her like a pent-up flood. Her pain seemed, at points, to overwhelm and drown her.
“I was no longer sleeping, I had nightmares. I was reliving my situation … I had panic attacks. I saw torture going through my body again. I never thought in this government, people can do such things. I was tortured for weeks, and Muthambi did the same thing to my body.”
And then, a specific and heartbreaking detail. While she was imprisoned and tortured by the police over months in the late 1980s, Williams developed facial twitches. Perhaps these were the result of her injuries, but most likely they were her body’s silent reaction to being violently abused, again and again.
In the period before Muthambi entered her life, Williams said, those twitches had disappeared. When the minister began a campaign seemingly aimed at forcing her out of her post, the twitches — dormant for decades — returned.
Williams, a survivor of apartheid brutality who refused to be tortured into turning against her comrades, was being psychologically broken in a democracy whose government she had faithfully served since 1994.
She had written to Muthambi about the stripping of her responsibilities, she said, “as a way of trying to get her to understand what she is doing … she wanted that procurement at all costs. She wanted to steal at all costs. That removing of all those functions, it was a ploy to remove the finance and procurement away from me. They knew that they have removed me from doing cabinet work, I was going to be a nuisance and they decided that the procurement and the finances must be removed from this woman. And that’s basically what they did.”
Her voice cracking, she said: “I couldn’t say to anyone what I was going through…. My sister had to move into my house because at that point I was scared of going to bed, because I thought the nightmares would come back. I started hearing those keys of my torture.”
Williams’s distress was so apparent at this point in her evidence that deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo adjourned the hearing so she could compose herself.
As Zondo exited the room there was a brief and powerful silence. Like an intake of breath after being hit in the stomach.
After the conclusion of her evidence, Williams told Business Day she had considered backing out of testifying before the commission.
“At one point I wanted to pull out, because I couldn’t imagine myself just reliving the whole thing because at night, I wake up and shake, and I was thinking to myself: will I come here and not break down?
“I tried my best to tell my story without breaking down. But I still have those nightmares.”
Williams’s evidence, perhaps more than any of the testimony already led in this infant commission, powerfully demonstrated how the lives of committed citizens and public servants were collateral damage in the alleged project of state capture. Amid the revelations about billions of rand in alleged kickbacks, lucrative and corrupt contracts and accusations that the Zuma government was deliberately making decisions aimed at furthering one family’s business empire, Williams arguably demonstrated that state capture is not a monolith, imposed blatantly from above. Rather, it is a cancer, where healthy cells are deliberately killed so the disease may spread.
Her evidence had followed that of her former Government Communication and Information System head Themba Maseko, who testified that he was removed from his post after he twice defied the Gupta family – and refused an “instruction” from Ajay Gupta to channel R600m in government advertising to his family’s media organisations.
Williams spoke about how the news of Maseko’s removal and replacement hours later by Mzwanele Manyi had left her department reeling. She went to Maseko’s office to seek answers and found the public servant of 17 years “banging his head against his desk”. Maseko left government months later and never returned. When his claims against the Guptas and then president Jacob Zuma, who he said told him to “help” the family, were published, the Hawks began investigating Maseko over a tender concluded 13 years ago.
He told Business Day the case was baseless, and said the timing of the investigation was deeply suspicious. While it seems very likely that the Hawks’ case against him will not go anywhere, the fact that Maseko was investigated at all points to an unavoidable truth: those who have spoken out against state capture — or been seen as obstacles to its workings — have been victimised, targeted and ostracised.
So then, is it any wonder that so few people have responded to Zondo’s call for those who have evidence of state capture to come forward?
When whistle-blowers in government and the corporate sector are deemed “untouchables”, face legal action and struggle to get jobs, what possible incentive is there to come forward? Maseko knows that challenging a problematic or corrupt political status quo comes at a very high price. He told Business Day the “human cost” of speaking out was “quite huge”.
“People lose their jobs and families. When the political elite decide you’re an enemy of the state, their tentacles are everywhere, so even the private sector is going to be reluctant to touch you. We as a country need to change our culture, so that those who do come forward are not ostracised or victimised, and we need to structurally protect and support whistle-blowers. Otherwise, no-one will consider speaking out”.
We routinely hear cries of “send them to jail” in response to the evidence of alleged state capture, and such calls for accountability are completely reasonable and justified. But if we are truly going to ensure the apparent malfeasance at the SA Revenue Service, Transnet, Eskom, the Passenger Rail Agency of SA, Steinhoff, Denel, SAA, KPMG, McKinsey and a host of other state and corporate institutions is not repeated, we need to start supporting and rewarding those who expose that evidence in the first place.
At the end of their evidence both Williams and Maseko told Business Day that, despite what they had endured, they did not regret speaking out. Both have arguably suffered far more than those they implicated and exposed.
The terrible reality is this: for Williams and Maseko, revealing the truth has not been something for which they were rewarded, or celebrated. Speaking out – like torture – has been something they had to survive.
Maughan is a Tiso Blackstar Group contributor