I do understand that Jeremy Gordin (see ‘Moe Shaik and I' (here), where he has some uncomplimentary things to say about me) is a friend of Moe Shaik, and that it's generally a good thing to stick up for one's friends when they come in for criticism, especially in public. That is normal and understandable.

A different criterion comes into the matter, though, when what is at stake is the appropriateness of one's friend for public office as a minister of state, and particularly in such a sensitive and potentially abusive office as the Minister for Secret Services.

Does the candidate have clean hands? Would the candidate bring to the post a baggage of prejudicial self-interest - whether personal, factional, political, or all three - that would negate the public interest? Does the appointment tend to threaten the criterion that the public good must take precedence always over the personal in such an appointment?

In his article, which begins with a critique of me, Jeremy Gordin, the journalist, comes to the defence of his friend, Moe Shaik, the spy chief (and a spy chief, let us remember, trained in the erstwhile East Germany, a totalitarian state, by the Stasi).

Here I evaluate Gordin's defence of Shaik, as a journalist, writing on a matter of public policy, in terms of my working memory of Ruth First. I think Ruth would have responded to the events of last week in a very different way.

I worked with Ruth in Johannesburg in 1962-63 doing underground journalism for Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC and the South African Communist Party, up to the time of her arrest and detention for 117 days, following the Special Branch raid on the MK headquarters at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia in June 1963. 

When she emerged from her ordeal, and before leaving the country with her three daughters, she looked terrible - ashen, white-faced, having attempted to kill herself in her cell, rather than face the possibility of giving information to the police under interrogation.

Ruth arranged that after her release I would be contacted following her departure by Hilda Bernstein, whose husband Rusty was one of the Rivonia accused, facing the death penalty. Under Hilda's direction, I edited the underground journal of MK, Freedom Fighter, during the trial. We ran to four issues before arrests in July 1964, my own included, finished us off.

That was a different age, and that was a different journalism too.

I have no doubt that Ruth was murdered by the state in 1982, in the final instance, because of her pen: her journalism. Her writing on the deportation of phthisis-ravaged mineworkers to Mozambique, packed off to die - as with her writing on the brutal conditions of prison labour on the farms at Bethal, or the tyranny of South African rule in Namibia - all this was fired by a fierce hatred of injustice, to which she responded with all the passion of her being. In the end, she was killed for it. It would not have surprised her.

I have no doubt that Ruth would have been appalled...horrified...outraged at the brutal trampling on the lives and homes of innocent shackdwellers at Kennedy Road in Durban at the beginning of last week, the dereliction of the police, their effective collusion with the murderers, as revealed most fully here.

How this barbaric act would have struck a chord of anger in her! It would have been no different than if the same act had been perpetrated by the functionaries or auxiliaries of the apartheid regime, whether 20 years, or 50 years, ago.

Now the wheel has turned full circle.

Then, it was the power-men of the racist state who would attack and kill the poor and downtrodden. Now, it is the power-men of the party-state.

In a Comment at the foot of my article on Politicsweb, ‘A bad week in South Africa ' (which was reprinted in The Witness as  ‘The crude excesses of power'), Gordin writes: ‘You should keep quasi-hysterical gigantic claims of the end of the world for really serious issues.' He writes of ‘This attack, appalling though it might be...'.

Appalling though it might be? Really serious issues...?

The whole passage from Gordin reads:

‘What then are you going to write when the pope is assassinated? - as the old journalist's rhetorical question goes. You should keep quasi-hysterical gigantic claims of the end of the world for really serious issues. This attack, appalling though it might be, and the  appointment of M Shaik to a minor agency, do not signal the end of the world. (And btw you should not publicly find Chippy Shaik guilty until actual evidence exists; it is just as anti-democratic as attacking helpless people in the middle of the night.) The problem with all this wolf crying is that (as you know) when the wolf comes, no one is going to listen to you. I for one have already begun to stop listening. PS Our state is not Engels's body of armed men - it's a body of fat, greedy men.'

‘Quasi-hysterical'? And a strange phrase, ‘wolf crying', when innocent shack-dwellers are hunted down by the wolf pack.

In his further critique of my article in ‘Moe Shaik and I' there is a single reference to the attacks at Kennedy Road in Durban: ‘inter alia'. Not a word more.

On the matter of Moe Shaik, no-one has ever tried to deny the exceptionally close connection between the four Shaik brothers during well over two decades of public life, nor of their historic relationship to Jacob Zuma. This has a bearing on the appointment of Moe Shaik to head the Secret Services.

The point of the matter is the seemliness of Shaik's relationship with the law and with the President, appointed by his friend to a state position not in any way ‘a minor agency', as Gordin claims.

One of Moe Shaik's three brothers, Schabir, has been found guilty and sentenced, under ‘actual evidence', of a ‘corrupt' relationship with the President. That judgement has not been set aside. It retains the force of law.

Yet as I quoted in my article from an undisputed interview with their brother Yunus, Moe ‘agreed...that he [Schabir] should have done what he did. He honoured the bonds of friendship [with Jacob Zuma]. We are proud of our brother.'

This places the head of Secret Services in conflict with a judgement of the courts in a matter of criminal law concerning a ‘corrupt' relationship involving both his brother and the head of state. On those grounds alone, this is not a tenable appointment in a parliamentary state. Such an appointment was normal in the past under the absolute monarchy, and remains normal in countries governed by a tyranny; but not in a parliamentary state.

A further taint to the appointment is added by the report of the Joint Investigation Team of  15 November 2001, which noted the irregular character of the non-recusal of himself of Chippy Shaik, a third brother, as Chief of Acquisitions in the Department of Defence, from meetings involving the award of state contracts to their brother Schabir.

I quote the former ANC MP, Andrew Feinstein, whom I trust. In his superb first-hand study of the Arms Deal, Feinstein wrote that the Joint Investigation Team report revealed that ‘Chippy Shaik had a massive conflict of interest and didn't recuse himself from relevant meetings. So he had lied to Parliament.' (After the Party, Jonathan Ball, 2007. p.210)

Over the same period, Feinstein continues, ‘Mo Shaik (with no diplomatic expertise whatsoever) was appointed South Africa's consul-general in Hamburg, the headquarters of the German Frigate Consortium [during the Arms Deal, in July 1997]. A few months later it was announced that the contract had been awarded to the GFC. Our consulate in Hamburg was closed down and Mo moved on...' (p.226).

A journalist with the moral tenacity of a Ruth First would have made it a point of honour to inquire further into such a prime matter of public interest as the Arms Deal, with its anti-democratic and corrupting effect on public life.

Might she not have wondered whether Shaik's appointment could have had the ulterior purpose of shielding the Zuma state (and the Mbeki state) from any untoward fall-out from the forthcoming trial of British Aerospace (BAE Systems), in the biggest fraud trial in British history, with its likely revelations about corrupt dealings with South African official personnel?

Gordin writes: ‘there must thus be some satisfaction for Zuma in being able to "thank" the Shaiks. But is it not a travesty that the Shaiks be thanked via an appointment to a government position? I don't think so.'

That is just shameful. From a Ruth First we have come to this.

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