As always, Russia will meddle in our elections

Without doubt and without leaving any evidence, Russian intelligence is working to influence the outcome of the May 29 elections in SA. It is what they do. They may not even be that interested in the immediate result — the goal is to weaken our democracy and the confidence we have in it.

All superpowers play versions of this game. The Americans will be interested in the elections, but have no obvious assets on the ground with which to manipulate it. The Chinese will too, though the long game they play defies editorialising.

This is a busy year for democracy. There’s us, the British, the Americans, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, Senegal and India holding elections among many others. In all of them the big foreign intelligence agencies will be on the ground. But where the Americans would once simply overthrow elected governments in what they regarded as their backyard in

Latin America if they didn’t approve of them, Iraq and Afghanistan have taught them hard lessons.

The Chinese are less direct in the West, but the Russians always meddle. I listened to an excellent edition of The Rest Is Politics podcast the other day in which the two guests, former heads of Britain’s MI6 and of MI5, were frank about the world they once worked in and the mistakes they had made.

Do not, warned, John Sawers, MI6 head from 2009 to

2014, underestimate Russian intelligence. “The Russians have got a first class intelligence service,” he said. “They’re very sophisticated ... and ... they have sought to interfere in elections in Europe over the last 50 or 60 years.”

In Europe they infiltrated communist parties in France, Italy and

Spain, the trades union movement in the UK and the peace movements in

Germany.

Penetration of our political establishment by sophisticated agencies, such as the Russians have, would be absurdly easy.

They and other foreign intelligence agencies would have been all over the ANC in its miserable and alcohol-fuelled exile, and some of those ties are still strong. Even the SA security police were in there. American, British and Russian intelligence would all at one stage have regarded former president Jacob Zuma as an asset.

When he was fired by Thabo Mbeki in 2005 the Western agencies may have dropped him but the Russians hung in there, with great reward. He almost won them a massive nuclear power tender in 2014 and has been in and out of Russia, mostly under the guise of seeking medical attention, on many occasions. While there, his movements have been entirely hidden from view. I’m fully persuaded by the view that Moscow has supported the creation of his new “party”, MK. Zuma always has a paymaster. He openly condoned the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The Russians would have been late getting to President Cyril Ramaphosa, if in fact they have. And pitting the two men against each other as is now the case would be perfectly in consonance with the way they operate. They know Zuma won’t win and they won’t care. What they want is confusion and for our constitution to falter.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 between 2002 and 2005, said election interference was “long-standing behaviour” by the Russians. They worked to distort information and confuse the electorate. In the GRU, the Russian military intelligence arm most active abroad, these are called “active measures”. They’ll be working on the US election to get Donald Trump back into office. Here, anything they can do to bump Zuma along will help.

Is Ramaphosa compromised? He may well be, to a degree. He fawns over Vladimir Putin in public. He did keep the Russian leader away from the last Brics summit in Johannesburg and he did talk bluntly to him during his Ukraine peace mission a year ago. But the object may not be to depose Ramaphosa — for one, the Chinese approve of him

— but getting Zuma into a position where he can dictate some terms to Ramaphosa would be a big prize.

“The liberal idea is obsolete,” Putin told former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber in 2019, a view clearly pitched at constitutions like ours and echoed constantly now by Zuma and MK, and many inside the ANC as well.

The only way to protect our very real freedoms here is to take a lot of what you read on social media with a pinch of salt. Just assume you’re being manipulated all the time and then get out and vote on May 29. There’s nothing the

Russians or anyone else can do to stop you.

They may not even be that interested in the immediate result — the goal is to weaken our democracy and the confidence we have in it