JAUNDICED EYE
All is not well in South Africa’s security establishment. The question to be asked is whether the fault lies with that well-known malaise — public service indolence, disinterest, and lack of training and application — or whether there is something more sinister in play.
Recent events have shown that our national intelligence gathering structures — the State Intelligence Agency (SIA), the military, the police, and the Financial Intelligence Centre— collectively appear to be in an abysmal state of dysfunction and malfunction. At least as worrying, if the problem proves not to be a system failure, then the most likely other explanation is that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has been playing dangerous political games.___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Last week, the absence of meaningful border control by SIA, the SA Police Service (SAPS), and the first-line security checks conducted by Home Affairs were exposed in a bizarre incident.
A group of 95 Libyan nationals, allegedly working for one of the numerous renegade groups battling for control of that country’s unstable unity government, were arrested in Mpumalanga at what SAPS describe as an illegal military training base. Media reports link the men to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, who is working with Wagner Group — the private military group that operates as a surrogate for the Russian government in Africa — to protect Russian commercial interests while maintaining plausible deniability in public.
Libyan and British reports say that the men were training to be deployed as elite “special forces” for Haftar’s militia. Haftar’s men have been accused by human rights organisations of war atrocities against civilians in Libya: unlawful killings, torture, sexual violence, and forced displacements. Wagner Group, on its part, not only has its finger in the juicy pie of Libya’s oil and gold deposits, the largest in Africa, but uses Haftar’s networks to smuggle narcotics and to traffic migrants, including in our southern African neck of the woods.
The base, just outside White River, is legally registered as a private security training facility. However, according to the police, it had been operating undetected for four months as a military training camp for the Libyan group, which had entered South Africa on genuine visas.
To be hosting a group of mercenaries who are in cahoots with a foreign power which is rampaging through the continent and destabilising fellow African Union member states, is a diplomatic embarrassment for the South African government. Almost as embarrassing is the fact that the exposure of the clandestine training camp was inadvertent. It had nothing to do with good intelligence gathering at home or abroad, or an alert SAPS noticing the unexplained presence in the neighbourhood of armed, swarthy men speaking a foreign language and behaving suspiciously.
The camp was exposed when White River residents complained to SAPS that the men were swaggering about the taverns causing trouble, including alleged sexual molestation. Since then, the Mpumalanga police have stated that robbery and rape cases had increased in the policing area where the camp is situated. Some of the crime victims had stated that their attackers looked like “Asian or Indian” men.
There are two explanations for what happened here, the first being a cascade of intelligence failures.
It’s common knowledge that the SIA has been floundering for many years. Instead of directing its energies against South Africa’s foreign foes, the agency has reportedly been riven by competing African National Congress factions spying on one another and undermining each other. SAPS criminal intelligence, too, is in dire straits. Once, during the National Party years, a fearsomely efficient information-gathering network relying on a massive web of informants, it has since collapsed.
The other explanation is more ominous, that this was an approved covert project, sanctioned at the highest level by the ANC government and occurring with the full knowledge and cooperation of the SIA, military intelligence, police criminal intelligence, and the Department of Home Affairs. It became public accidentally, through the actions of Mpumalanga police officers who were ignorant of the wider, embarrassing ramifications of their well-intentioned actions.
What lends credence to this scenario are media reports and photos of the raid on the camp. This was not the kind of textbook operation by the Public Order section of SAPS backed up by the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) that one would expect when taking on almost 100 armed mercenaries. Instead, it was carried out by a squad of lightly armed SAPS officers, who one suspects rocked up to the camp’s front gates to question a gaggle of wannabe rent-a-cops.
As pertinently, how plausible is it that SIA and SANDF intelligence were unaware that a local, legally registered private security company was negotiating with military groups in one of Africa’s most fractured yet important countries? Negotiating, nogal, with a group linked to the controversial Wagner Group, Russia’s ruthless cat’s paw and the scourge of Western interests in Africa.
And could it really be that the vetting procedures of Home Affairs are so inadequate that an application by 95 young Libyan men for entry visas, containing what the department now describes as “misrepresentations”, rang no alarm bells? As improbably, that the final decision on this mass application was never referred up the executive food chain to the director-general of the department and the Minister of Home Affairs, as well as sideways to the SIA and SAPS.
Let’s put it another way. If 95 strapping, young American men turned up at our consulate in Washington DC purporting to want to travel to White River to spend six months learning the finer points of security training, what chance in hell would they have had of getting permission without there being an exhaustive investigation involving every branch of the South African security establishment, into their potential motives?
Furthermore, permission would not be forthcoming — given the potential diplomatic fallout of providing such paramilitary training — without the matter being canvassed at the Cabinet level and, most likely, informally with the ANC’s alliance partners, the SA Communist Party and union federation Cosatu.
Militating against an intelligence failure is the fact that the security establishment is a very active political player on the home political stage, with its loyalties divided between the pro- and anti-Ramaphosa factions. In 2021, despite many warning signs, the SIA and its satellites managed to remain studiously oblivious to the impending riots that broke out in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng in July that year, triggered by the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma. The riots, which Ramaphosa described as an insurrection masterminded from within the ANC, left at least 354 people dead and caused R35 billion in direct property damage.
Lindiwe Sisulu, a former Minister of Intelligence for three years under President Thabo Mbeki and, despite her unconcealed hostility to Ramaphosa a member of his Cabinet until March, dropped a further SIA-related bomb this week. She nonchalantly told a press conference that while she was in office there was wholesale surveillance of journalists.
“We were responsible for ensuring that the integrity of information and the individual’s information was dealt with. We had very regular meetings with the media and we, ourselves, were exposed to a lot of information. We bugged everybody, essentially.”
It was a startling admission that the government is illegally conducting wholesale surveillance on the entire media and, presumably, politicians and other citizens. However, our media, obsessed as it is at present with exposing cabals of supposedly racist schoolchildren, took the news in its stride. They’re probably painfully aware that aside from a dwindling band of investigative journalists who rely on foreign philanthropy to survive, the pickings for the SIA spies will likely be very thin in most newsrooms.
Equally disinterested was Ramaphosa’s office. Responding to half-hearted calls for an inquiry, Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya emphasised there was nothing to be seen here. “With respect to claims of ‘bugging of everybody’, such actions would have been unconstitutional and illegal. Perhaps the former minister will take some time to reflect on the veracity and implications of her comments.”
Well, that’s okay then, sighed the media with relief. Our government would never do anything illegal.
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