Once a demo, now a hero
Reviled by white SA 50 years ago, he’s gunning for the global players who helped bring South Africa to its knees. Peter Hain tells Nadine Dreyer why he tried to stop a Springbok rugby tour and why state-capture crooks must go to jail
Many anti-apartheid activists might have expressed their revulsion at the Springbok rugby tour of Britain in 1969/1970 and then stuck their noses back into Althusser or one of the other Marxist philosophers who were fashionable at the time. Similarly, many British peers of the realm might have voiced their outrage at the looting of the South African state by Jacob Zuma and his chums and then sunk back into their comfy chairs for a snooze amid wood panels and privilege.
But not the Right Honourable Lord Hain of Neath.
The anti-apartheid activist who 50 years ago fought for a democratic government in SA by lighting a firecracker under whites-only sport is now part of the fightback movement working to save our democracy.
Hain, more patrician than political hell-raiser these days, chuckles when I remark: “You’re clearly a doer.”
He was in SA this week to testify at the Zondo commission into state capture. He has used his stature as a peer and former Labour Party cabinet minister to raise international awareness of the plunder. His submission focuses on the global network of consultants, lawyers, accountants and banks who colluded with the culprits to enable grand larceny.
“They present themselves as global icons of high standards and paragons of business virtue, but here they were actually either acting as financial pipelines for money laundering or conniving for fat fees in what the Guptas and Zumas were doing.”
In 2017 Hain used parliamentary privilege to torpedo Bell Pottinger, the toxic masters of spin who were paid a large monthly fee to work with Duduzane Zuma et al to poison race relations in SA.
Before his verbal testimony this week, Hain submitted a 10,000-word written report estimating the direct and indirect costs of state capture to SA at around a mind-boggling R1.5-trillion.
The first thing Hain does when photographer Alon Skuy and I meet him is to dispense with all that lord stuff: “Call me Peter.”
With all protocols observed, I ask him if Zuma will ever go to jail.
“Let me put it this way. The people responsible for state capture have to end up in jail, whether it’s the politicians from the top or whether it’s the Guptas themselves. Otherwise the rule of law is undermined. You can’t have this having happened; having been exposed in all its grisly, gruesome details and nothing happened to anybody.”
Shamelessness, from Zuma down
Where would he rate SA on an international scale of corruption?
He replies that there’s corruption everywhere and lists Azerbaijan, Nigeria and Russia as examples. What distinguishes SA is the shamelessness, from former president Zuma downwards.
“It was just amazing to me that they just continued looting … they were being exposed almost daily for what was going on and they just continued as if it was business as usual, politics as usual.
“The former president didn’t care that everybody knew what he was up to, whereas other corruption is more covert, less blatant.”
Yikes, worse marks than some of the beauts who have ruled the aforementioned countries? That would be some achievement if it wasn’t so horrendous.
In February 2018, the Hawks swooped on the Gupta compound in Saxonwold, looking to arrest the brothers but instead finding a “warm bed”. It’s difficult not to deduce that they had been alerted from inside the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation of the raid.
Currently the Guptas reside in a mansion in Dubai complete with Gupta gold crest at the entrance gates. Address: Villa L35, Lailak Street, Emirates Hills.
Why have no authorities arrested them? Why have they not been extradited to SA? Why have no monies been repatriated to SA? (Why were they allowed to leave in the first place?)
In the meantime, the brothers are haemorrhaging billions belonging to the South African taxpayer. Hain’s report notes that they have commissioned the building of the R200m Shiva Dham temple. In June they splashed out R427m for a double wedding for the sons of Atul and Ajay.
The story of three brothers from India who began their safari in the 1990s by selling goods from the boots of their cars and ended up adding the entire country to their shopping trolley is astonishing, but by no means the whole picture. The rot extends way beyond Saharanpur. Hain cites a top businessman and friend explaining that the Guptas were the biggest iceberg in this lake, “but there are lots of icebergs and most of it is underwater because of the nature of icebergs”.
South Africans are getting impatient at the slow pace of justice and want to see the state capture crooks behind bars.
I ask Hain if he thinks the legal process has been slow. “Painfully,” he replies. But adds that this is partly due to a titanic power struggle going on at almost every institution of the country at every level.
“Good guys don’t go into politics for their personal enrichment … it was actually to change the country for the better. But the bad guys started the looting, then they became dependent; their lifestyles become dependent and supporting their families becomes dependent on it, so they’ve got a lot to lose. It spills over from something called politics to something called criminality.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher and the threats witnesses face from the guilty are real. The testimony of former crime intelligence officer Col Dhanajaya Naidoo — currently in witness protection — at the Zondo commission was in camera and held at a different location. Hain says some of the whistleblowers who supplied him with information were terrified that the bad guys would come after them.
“When you have criminality interfacing with politics in this obscene way, it becomes very high stakes.
“We’re all impatient. I’m impatient that change hasn’t been quick enough. I don’t think decisions … I don’t think there’s decisive enough action from the presidency downwards on a whole lot of issues.”
Again he qualifies this remark with his experience as a cabinet minister in Britain. Even that system, with its history of democracy and a professionalised civil service, is sclerotic.
In white SA in 1969 the name Peter Hain was guaranteed to provoke fury. He was the unhinged young commie who had gone into exile with his troublemaker parents three years earlier. Now he was unleashing hell to sabotage the Springbok tour, mixing sport with politics. Unbelievable.
“I became the devil incarnate, labelled in South African newspapers as public enemy
No 1. It seems absurd with Mandela in jail … those were the real heroes … but I was public enemy No 1 for stopping white sport. Because that’s what it did.”
In 2017 Hain was amused at the mountain of e-mails he received in his parliamentary inbox after he raised the scourge of state capture in the House of Lords. “They were mostly from white guys of a certain age saying, ‘Fantastic job, but we hated what you did to the Springboks’.
“And I replied back saying, ‘Thank you very much, but actually it’s exactly the same values that propelled me to do something about the Springboks that is propelling me to help those fighting corruption in SA. It’s the same values of integrity, equality and human rights’.”
Dangerous agitator
To my grandmother, the outrage around Peter Hain was intensified by the fact that he had gone to Pretoria Boys High.
Pretoria Boys High was my uncle’s alma mater. That this dangerous agitator had hidden in plain sight at a school that embodied respectable, middle-class white SA was beyond the pale.
Hain chuckles. “I think it’s the best school in the world. I was very fortunate there was an ethos in the school … my parents were notorious in Pretoria … absolutely notorious, for their anti-apartheid activities.”
Soon after he enrolled at the school in 1963 his mother was banned. His dad was banned a year later.
“I had a fantastic experience, the teachers were very understanding, some privately sympathetic. One in particular. My English teacher was teaching us the phrase persona non grata. He told the boys, ‘Hain’s parents are persona non grata because they stand up for what is good’.”
Only once did he experience antagonism from a fellow pupil. It was during a break and he was playing soccer with a tennis ball. “I had one boy come up to me and say, ‘you’re a bloody communist’.
“My parents were extraordinary. They had been jailed, banned, had the Special Branch camped outside our house the whole time, following me to school, following them wherever they went. Our telephone was tapped. But they still found time to teach us sport, to marshal at our bike races. Our friends saw them as normal parents. The family was accepted.”
He was, however, the only kid at school who lived in a house where black people came through the front door and not the back door.
Ironically, his only rebellion at school involved rugby.
“I was called into the head teacher’s study and he said to me, ‘Boy, I hear you are refusing to play rugby and you’re going to play soccer instead for a private club, Arcadia Shepherds’. He almost spat the word out.
“I replied, ‘Well, I’m sorry sir, but I played a year of rugby, which my dad told me I had to do, but I prefer soccer’.”
The family were hounded into exile in 1966 and three years later 19-year-old Hain became the force behind the Stop the Seventies Tour. This was a heady time to be a young activist. Radical youths were on the march. In 1968 students had clashed with riot police in the streets of Paris, there were huge anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and protests against Ian Smith’s declaration of independence in Rhodesia.
Target of security police
It was the era of nonviolent direct action. Hain imagined he would be dishing out leaflets. He had never spoken in public before, nor even appeared in a school play, but was nominated as leader of the protest movement. He soon found himself speaking to huge crowds about the evils of apartheid.
He became a target for the South African security police. One day, in June 1972, his younger sister opened a parcel on their breakfast table in Putney. Inside was a wired contraption, one of the bombs the Bureau of State Security posted around the world, the type that assassinated activist Ruth First in Mozambique in 1982. If the bomb had been correctly wired, it would have killed the Hain family and blown up their house.
The bomb squad, formed in the wake of IRA attacks, descended on the house in record time.
“Normally I was evading the police, not calling them.”
I ask Hain if he watched the 2019 Rugby World Cup and who he supported.
He says he backed the Springboks, “with enthusiasm and gusto”.
Hain has been a Welsh MP for a quarter of a century. “Wales is my adopted country, so I support Wales first. But when they were knocked out by the Springboks, I supported the Springboks.
“I thought, in a way, that victory and the way it was done, and those amazing electric tries, and then Siya Kolisi lifting the world champions cup … I just thought, well, this is what we campaigned for 50 years ago. It was very moving for me and a lot of people, and actually even a lot of England supporters … real England rugby fanatics … they had to admire both the way the team played and the symbolism of it.
“Now I think it’s important not to get too Hollywood soft-soapy about it because the country’s got big inequality problems.
“I always point out that Kolisi wouldn’t have lifted that World Cup and led the team to such a famous victory, and led it so brilliantly, if he hadn’t been plucked out of poverty and his rugby potential recognised and put into Grey High School in Port Elizabeth. So there must be lots of Kolisis around in SA who won’t make the system.
“See it as a fantastic milestone, but the struggle goes on.”
It’s important not to get too Hollywood about it because the country’s got big inequality problems