Arthur Fraser’s fight for cold facts
A NEW parliament, a new president and a new promise. These are the direct results of the democratic elections held earlier this month.
Yet with the new legislature and new executive, democracy once again affords us the opportunity to correct the errors of the past and address those issues that need attention.
It is probably with this in mind that before the elections former president Thabo Mbeki could point out the lingering legacy of apartheid 25 years into democracy.
While this legacy may well pertain to racialised poverty, unemployment and inequality, the legacy of apartheid could also exist within the state. We must understand this if we were to move forward as a country.
Recently, South Africa had the privilege of hosting the American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama. In his book, Political Order and Political Decay,
Fukuyama reminds us that in order to understand the current political economy within a particular country, society or organ, one has to investigate the political history of that country, society or organ.
Fukuyama points out that institutions may be understood as “rules of the game” that are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour” that persist “beyond individual leaders”. They are “persistent rules which shape, limit and channel human behaviour”.
As a result, it may be useful to consider two elements of institutions. First, they may be either formal or informal.
For example, while the law, as a formal institution, protects sexual orientation, homophobia, an informal institution, persists.
Second, their strength or test comes in their longevity.
As a result, according to Fukuyama, in order to understand institutions, the bulwark of the social sciences, one cannot ignore history.
If Arthur Fraser, the former head of the State Security Agency, is flabbergasted that two former intelligence professionals could be party to producing a High Level Review/Advisory Panel on the State Security Agency, then as an academic one joins him in being flabbergasted that there were no less than five academics, all with a social sciences background, who completely ignored the idea of institutions in their report.
In his response to the report, Fraser pokes holes in the methodological as well as conceptual framework on which the report is based.
One is distressed to think that senior academics could have accounted for half the panel’s membership.
The politicisation of the intelligence services in South Africa today, if it were to exist as an institution, albeit informally, did not come about in 2005 as the High Level Report wishes to portray.
This institutionalisation of the politicisation of the service would have come about during the days of the apartheid regime and, as Fraser correctly points out, would have perpetuated itself primarily through the structures and agents, pun intended, brought from the old regime into the democratic dispensation.
Fraser is correct when he says that this High Level Panel has done our country a high level of disservice.
The High Level Panel, with its five academics, was ahistorical in its approach and as a result one cannot disagree with Fraser when he suggests that these academics were also party to a factional battle within the ANC.
On May8, South Africa was given a new chance. The new president must seize the opportunity to interrogate this High Level Report and judge whether it passes the test of the basic pillars of social science.
If not, as we can assure him it will not, he must give South Africa another chance and seek an alternative way to address the issues within our security cluster.