NEWS & ANALYSIS

Who is Kebby Maphatsoe? (part 2)

Paul Trewhela says the rhetoric being employed by the Deputy Minister against the PP has a deadly history

Who is Kebby Maphatsoe? (part 2)

The reported accusation by the deputy minister of Defence, Kebby Maphatsoe, that the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, is a "CIA agent" marks a return by the government to the worst behaviour of the ANC towards its own members in exile, condemned by the late President Nelson Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by three internal ANC commissions of inquiry. These were the Stuart Commission (1984), the Skweyiya Commission (1992) and the Motsuenyane Commission (1993). (See here and here).

"uThuli umele asitshele ukuthi ubani ihandler yakhe (Thuli must tell us who her handler is)," Maphatsoe told Umkhonto weSizwe [MK] veterans at the tombstone unveiling of MK combatant Linda 'Lion of Chiawelo' Jabane in Soweto on Saturday.

"They are even using our institution now," the Star reported Maphatsoe as having stated. "These Chapter Nine institutions were created by the ANC but are now being used against us, and if you ask why, it is the Central Intelligence Agency. Ama (the) Americans want their own CEO in South Africa and we must not allow that."

He repeated the same allegation yesterday.

"She thinks she is God," Maphatsoe said. "Her actions leave us with no choice but to say her actions are that of enemy agents."

Enemy agents! This was the most deadly charge levelled against any loyal ANC member in exile, if for any reason that person happened to cross the tracks of a member of Mbokodo ("the grindstone"), the ANC's political police. Jacob Zuma was its chief of counter-intelligence from 1987.

No one was safe from that charge, whether in exile or within the country.

Not even Steve Biko.

In Biko, A Biography, published by Tafelberg in 2012, Dr Xolela Mangcu reports being told by the former Robben Island prisoner, the late Dr Neville Alexander, that Mac Maharaj - then a leader of MK and the SACP, and now spokesperson for President Zuma - spoke to him while on a visit to Europe just before Biko's murder in exactly the same language. Neville Alexander told Dr Mangcu "how contemptuous Maharaj was of the Black Consciousness Movement, describing Biko as ‘CIA'." (p.289)

Dr Mangcu recalls from first-hand experience this shameful period, when "UDF crowds would in their hundreds go and sing in front of Steve Biko's house: U-Steve Biko, I-CIA - alleging Steve had worked for the CIA. We would confront the crowds to defend Steve's name, at the risk of our lives." (p.295)

It was in this period, also, just before Biko's murder by the security police of the apartheid state, that young troops in the June 16th and Moncada detachments of MK report being instructed at Novo Katengue camp in southern Angola by the late Dr Francis Meli (a member of the SACP, and then a political commissar), that Biko was a "CIA agent."

This was normal, sanctioned from the top, just as - one should assume - is Mr Maphatsoe's current threat against Thuli Madonsela, a brave and able representative of the Constitution.

The phrase "enemy agent" was used indiscriminately in exile, and often carried a death sentence.

It was used in the so-called Shishita Report put together by the SACP and the ANC in exile in 1980, in a passage directed against one of their most senior and most revered leaders, Mark Shope, former president of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), who together with Professor Jack Simons was the principal commmissar in charge of political education of the young MK recruits from the 1976 generation at Nova Katengue in Angola.

Both teachers encouraged the young people to ask questions.

The Shishita Report attacked Mark Shope and a colleague, Albert Dhlomo, in the following crazy words:

"Objectively these comrades are playing the role of enemy agents or provocateurs despite the fact that they were never formally recruited."

(This sentence appears in the first lengthy exposition of the Shishita Report, in Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren, The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything, Jonathan Ball, 2011. p.53).

When it comes to this charge, "enemy agent", the truth has nothing to do with it! As the Shishita Report makes clear, anyone on earth can be called an enemy agent, "despite the fact that they were never formally recruited."

This is the mind of Kebby Maphatsoe, now levitated to power in command of the armed forces of the state as deputy minister of Defence. The attack by Maphatsoe on Thuli Madonsela is a dangerous attack on South African democracy.

I would ask readers interested in the career of this man to read my article on Politicsweb of 1 May last year, posted here, which set the questions of questions: "Who is Kebby Maphatsoe?"

The political context of his slander against the Public Protector is examined in a very recent article, which I published in the Daily Dispatch in East London on 30 August, "Shadow of Mbokodo darkens democracy."

The country is in danger.

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