Minister Dlodlo gambling with the SSA and SA's integrity
9 October 2019
It may have slipped the new Minister of Intelligence, Ayanda Dlodlo’s mind that she actually needs a Judge’s permission to bug people’s phones. A report by News24 today accuses the Minister of instructing the Head of the State Security Agency (SSA)'s domestic branch, Adv Sam Muofhe, to allegedly intercept telephone calls of a man who was thought to have been behind the flareup in xenophobic violence in Gauteng last month.
While it is paramount that our intelligence agencies perform their functions in detecting and preventing these heinous acts - one would think that obtaining a Judge’s permission would have been foremost on Minister Dlodlo’s mind. It has been just three weeks since her department’s humiliating loss in the High Court, which declared mass surveillance and the interception of foreign signals by the National Communications Centre to be "unlawful and invalid”.
The paint on her office door is barely dry and already the new Minister seems to have stumbled at the first hurdle.
Difficult questions are being asked, and the Minister must be held accountable for her actions. However, since the May 8th Elections, Parliament has been unable to hold the Minister and her department to account as the ANC is rowing backwards as fast as it can in terms of setting up the Joint Standing Committee of Intelligence, months after all other committees began work.