Promising career brought sadly low

JACKIE Selebi seemed to become a different person when he put on the blue uniform of a policeman in 2000. Before that, he had been widely respected as a diplomat.

He rose to the top position in the Department of Foreign Affairs as director-general, in 1998 towards the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. He became the first black and ANC member to hold that post.

Selebi was popular with both the old guard and the new guard in the department because of his easy-going manner, several former colleagues said.

As George Nene, his fellow diplomat and friend from their schooldays in Soweto, recalled, Selebi’s biggest challenge as director-general was to manage the successful transformation from the foreign policy pursued by the old apartheid National Party government to the new policy guided by the ANC’s values and alliances.

“He was friendly with a good sense of humour, and that put people at ease and made the job easier,” Nene recalled.

Before that job, Mandela had appointed Selebi as ambassador to the UN in Geneva from 1995 to 1998.

Nene said one of his main achievements there was as chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission. Nene, who was to succeed him in the post of ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said Selebi brought order and punctuality to the inefficient commission.

He also did much to depoliticise it so that it could focus on its proper function of monitoring the observance or otherwise of human rights.

But perhaps Selebi’s greatest achievement while he was ambassador to the UN was to chair the 1997 international Oslo Conference, which negotiated the Ottawa treaty which banned the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines.

Stuart Maslen and Peter Herby, legal experts in the International Committee of the Red Cross, wrote at the time that “the crucial role played by the chairman of the conference, Ambassador Jacob Selebi of South Africa, should not be forgotten”.

“With skill and determination he drove the process forward to a successful conclusion without the need for the full three-week negotiation period. His contribution to the favourable outcome of the Ottawa process should be duly recognised.”

Selebi had not been in the ANC’s international department in exile, as many of his colleagues in the Department of Foreign Affairs had been. He had become an MP in the first democratic parliament in 1994, and before that had been put in charge of the ANC’s welfare department in 1993.

In 1991 he had managed the repatriation of ANC exiles.

He was president of the ANC Youth League from 1987 to 1991, and that gave him an exofficio position on the ANC national executive committee.

Selebi maintained a detached and rather bemused view of some of the eccentric characters he encountered during his career, such as the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Selebi once told journalists that when he was part of the ANC’s youth league in exile he had been invited to Libya to participate in an Africa-wide conference of youth leagues of political parties, which Gaddafi addressed.

He was astounded to hear Gaddafi urging all the youths to rise up against their governments and join him in a march against the US.

That experience and insight were to stand him in good stead when he later encountered Gaddafi as South Africa’s top diplomat.

Nene felt that Selebi’s experience and accomplishments as a diplomat, including his public speaking skills, helped him to get the job of head of Interpol in 2004, when he was national police commissioner.

Nene declined to comment on Selebi’s controversial tenure in that job, save to say that Interpol had “refused to buy into the corruption story”, and had refused “to enter the fray”.