A DOOR LEFT OPEN
With the findings of the Seriti commission having been set aside last week, questions about accountability related to SA’S infamous arms deal have resurfaced
Had it not been for the multibillionrand arms deal in the late 1990s, democratic SA may have taken a very different trajectory. This is according to former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, who believes the arms deal constituted the first instance of state capture in post-apartheid SA, and that the subsequent commission of inquiry, whose findings were set aside last week, laid some of the groundwork for the looting of the state.
“Let me take it a step further back,” says Feinstein, who resigned from parliament in 2001 over government’s handling of the matter. “I think the Truth & Reconciliation Commission [TRC] could have saved [us] the trauma of the arms commission. If the TRC had done its work on business and corruption, as it did on human rights abuses, I am not convinced that the arms deal would have run the course that it did.”
Back in 1999, Patricia de Lille, then an MP with the PAC, raised flags about the defence upgrade — the largest such deal in postapartheid SA. Under the deal, the governwash.
ARMS DEAL: Selected events
1998 ment acquired, among other things, 26 Gripen fighter aircraft and 24 Hawk lead-in fighter-trainer aircraft for the air force, and frigates and submarines for the navy. But De Lille claimed the process was tainted, and raised allegations of corruption centred on kickbacks that international arms companies were said to have paid to ANC officials in exchange for contracts — or, in the case of Jacob Zuma, for protection.
Despite calls by De Lille to investigate the matter, and a recommendation to that effect by parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), then president Thabo Mbeki took no action. Then, in 2011, arms deal critic Terry Crawford-browne approached the Constitutional Court in a bid to force Zuma, who was by then president, to institute such a commission. Zuma, against whom corruption charges had been withdrawn just two years before, established the commission, appointing Supreme Court of Appeal judge Willie Seriti to oversee it.
From the outset there were suggestions that the Seriti commission could be a whiteThe inquiry was plagued by resignations and claims that its integrity might be compromised. Three evidence leaders resigned — including the chief evidence leader. So, too, did two judges appointed to the commission by Zuma: Willem van der Merwe and Francis Legodi. In the end, just two commissioners heard evidence: Seriti and Free State judge president Hendrick Musi.
Then senior commission investigator Norman Moabi quit. He alleged in a letter, leaked to the media at the time, that the commission was not being transparent and was concealing what he called a “second agenda”.
Moabi alleged that Seriti ruled the commission with an iron fist, and that facts had been manipulated or withheld from commissioners. Contri