Hain’s ‘poisonous letter’ on the Guptas screams of opportunism
Anti-apartheid activist has taken up SA baton again in bid to breathe life into flagging political career
DEATH, they say, often brings people together. It was the death of Mme Albertina Sisulu which caused the paths of pro-sanctions activist and former member of the British cabinet, Peter Hain, and mine to cross.
We met at the entry to the St Martin-in-the-Fields church that summer morning. We had come for Mme Sisulu’s memorial service. Closely associated with anti-apartheid cleric, the Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, St Martins was to London’s anti-apartheid activists what St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town was to the Struggle stalwarts in South Africa. It neighbours the South African High Commission on Trafalgar Square.
The year was 2011 and Hain was in the opposition benches. I was a student at Sussex ending my coursework and preparing for my dissertation.
I followed up our encounter with an e-mail requesting that, as an upcoming activist in South Africa, it would be great to volunteer my services in Hain’s office. But he had no time for me. His days in contributing to South Africa had ended, at least I thought. His response was dismissive.
While I would not want to be arrogant and suggest Hain should have taken me seriously, his latest attempts to being relevant in British politics went noticed. What did surprise me was his inclusion of the name of Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma in the letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Hammond. In it, Hain links several individuals to the Gupta business empire and requests the chancellor to launch an investigation into these individuals.
Hain, it would seem, has taken up the South African baton again and sees himself once again as a champion for the South African cause. This time not against apartheid but against President Jacob Zuma.
Hain has awoken from his slumber with respect to South Africa as he tries to cling to his political career and create a legacy.
Born in Kenya, the Hain family moved to South Africa when he was a toddler. At the age of 16, the family moved to the UK. They had had enough of the colonies. His parents had been members of the now defunct Liberal Party and had been harassed by the notorious apartheid security police, known as Boss.
In the UK, Hain led sport boycotts against South African teams, especially in cricket and rugby. While he contested both the 1983 and 1987 general elections in the UK, he was only elected to Parliament in 1991 as the member for Neath.
In recent time, Hain has been as controversial as the Guptas. He had to resign his position in the Gordon Brown government as Secretary of State for Wales because of his failure to declare donations to the deputy leader of the Labour Party campaign in 2007. In spite of these donations, worth nearly R2 million at today’s value, Hain was so unpopular in his party that he came fifth out of a race of six for the deputy leadership position, losing to Harriet Harman. Notably, a long-time funder of the former apartheid ruling National Party, Isaac Kaye donated to Hain’s campaign.
As important as the idea is that Hain’s letter is an attempt of the formal colonial master to continue playing a role in the politics of the now liberated colony, as the French continue to do in Francophone Africa, we may suggest two other reasons why it is important:
Firstly, there has been no link established between Dlamini Zuma and the Guptas. As the FBI sullied Democratic Party presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton’s campaign on the eve of the US election, so too Hain’s letter is an attempt to throw international mud at Dlamini Zuma on the eve of the ANC’s elective conference. Not even the Gupta-leaked e-mails, material for much of the expose done by South African media against the family and their associates, could link the former AU Commission chairperson to this family. Yet Hain desperately attempts to do so.
Given that white monopoly capital could not rely on its allies in the local media, it had to rely on its international friends in London to start a campaign to delegitimise Dlamini Zuma, whose credentials speak far louder than her marriage to Zuma.
She is a medical doctor and had served the ANC in London and abroad while in exile. She was appointed as the first minister of health in a free South Africa under Nelson Mandela. During the Thabo Mbeki administration she served a double term as foreign minister while playing a key role in the establishment of the AU. Before going on to become the AU commission chairperson, she turned around the Department of Home Affairs and has yet to be linked to a corruption scandal. Yet the blemished Hain sees fit to link her to the Gupta family.
The second reason Hain’s letter is to be noted is that it clearly identifies the camp in which he’s in. In throwing mud at Dr Dlamini Zuma, he has identified himself with a faction of the ANC that seems to be out of touch with the reality of the majority of South Africans.
The likes of Hain are much more comfortable in the company of Johan Rupert, who dismiss radical economic transformation which the majority of South Africans are demanding, as a mere code word for theft. Hain does not have his finger on the pulse of the South African populace.
But then his career in British politics ends on just that note. He is out of touch with his own party and the British people. In 2007, he lost touch with Labour when he was eliminated in the first round of elections in the deputy leadership race.
Today, he forms part of a clique in the Labour Party longing for the days of Tony Blair when Brits want more of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Hain voted remain and stubbornly refuses to vote for Brexit, defying his own party.
Asked whether she had any response to Hain’s letter to the chancellor, Dlamini Zuma had no idea about the issue. That is how irrelevant Hain has become.
What his letter does is prompt one to ask: when will the British take responsibility for corruption in Africa? For if anything, it is their theft and colonialism, not Bell Pottinger, that gave them the worst PR on the continent.