Once upon a time in ANC land, the plot kept on thickening . . .
IN a 2002 interview, the then ANC secretary-general, Kgalema Motlanthe, was dismissive of the coup plot allegations levelled at three senior ANC figures.
The late Steve Tshwete, safety and security minister at the time and a Thabo Mbeki enforcer, had gone on record as saying that Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa were plotting a revolt against the president. National police commissioner Jackie Selebi launched an investigation.
It was big stuff. ANC members and the general population were confused about whether the plot was real. Trade union federation Cosatu and the South African Communist Party weighed in, warning that the three men had been unfairly identified.
Motlanthe cut to the chase and rubbished the conspiracy. ANC processes were such that there was no way anybody could conspire, he argued. If you wanted to remove the leadership and replace it with new faces, you would have to go to the branches, the regions and other party structures and win them over to your position.
The leadership would then be removed through party processes.
The point he was making was that you could not do this in the dark and it therefore could not constitute a plot. That, he argued, was called lobbying and mobilisation — perfectly above-board strategies in a democracy. If the accusation was that the men were planning to remove the president through illegal means, it would be a different story altogether. All evidence at the time was that there was no such nefarious intention on the part of Ramaphosa, Sexwale and Phosa — or anybody else, for that matter.
But such was the appetite for conspiracy theories in the governing party that many were prepared to give Tshwete and Selebi the benefit of the doubt. An obviously ridiculous claim was treated with seriousness and debated by people who were supposed to be engaged in the business of running the country.
There were to be several more supposed plots and conspiracy theories in the run-up to the ANC’s Polokwane conference. Documents drawn up by shadowy individuals in the security world would be circulated and would find their way into the public domain. These documents would embellish real events and add some conspiratorial spin. Again, despite their outrageousness, they would find people in the party willing to believe them.
When President Jacob Zuma came to power, the conspiracy machine continued unabated. A simple meat-munching and liquor-guzzling gathering of ANC leaders on a former Robben Islander’s farm in Estcourt in 2010 was cast as a clandestine meeting to plot the removal of Zuma at the party’s 2012 conference.
A report compiled by intelligence operatives was circulated in the top ranks of the ANC and government, fuelling the paranoia of a president who was at that point unsure whether his party would give him a second term at the helm. Those who were at the munch-and-guzzle fest suddenly found themselves marginalised and had to crawl to the big man and his henchmen to proclaim their undying loyalty.
The latest in this long string of conspiracy theories is the “intelligence” report released by Cosatu’s suspended general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, last week. This report, which outdoes all the previous reports put together in terms of outlandishness, has been the subject of serious discussions in the upper echelons of the ANC-led tripartite alliance.
Like all the other previous reports, it is spiced with references to that big bad devil, the US. What good is a conspiracy if there isn’t a hint of a CIA front organisation that is remote-controlling political players with or without their knowledge?
After all, everyone knows that the Americans spend day and night trying to control the world. So the emergence of new parties, activism by civil society groupings and outspokeness by prominent individuals somehow gets linked to a broader plot by the Americans to turn South Africa into a client state.
The trouble with these plots is that, although most thinking South Africans treat them like amateur comedy scripts, powerful people in the country take them seriously.
Decisions on whom to trust and whom to watch closely are taken on the basis of the garbage contained in these reports. Innocent, law-abiding citizens find themselves under scrutiny by spooky men who lurk in dark corners and listen in on spousal conversations about what’s for dinner tonight. State resources get diverted from real challenges to chasing ghosts. The distrust sown by these ghost stories leads to the removal or “redeployment” of key officials, thus disrupting delivery and development.
The only way to get out of this endless ghost-chasing is to wean the ANC off its addiction to conspiracies. We cannot afford a situation in which the world’s 27th-biggest economy and an influential member of multilateral organisations is led by people who believe in fairytales.
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