ANC’s dirty war on Cope

Luthuli House has a ‘war room” tasked specifically with gathering damaging information on the Congress of the People’s (Cope) leaders in the run-up to the election, well-placed sources have told the Mail & Guardian.

Three sources said the ANC itself uses the term ‘war room” and that its tasks also include keeping ANC members from defecting by threatening to expose their past misdeeds.

This week a Cope national committee member, who asked not to be named, leaked the M&G a partial document which is allegedly the war room’s property.

The document contains lists of Cope’s leaders and their allegedly dubious political dealings in the past 10 years. The irony is that almost all of these occurred while they were ANC members.

The document appears to rely on open source rather than ANC-insider information, meaning that it was probably commissioned from an outsider.

A source loyal to Cope, but with access to Luthuli House, provided further details of the operation.

Two ANC-aligned sources with knowledge of the war room confirmed and elaborated on this account.
According to the source, the war room was set up at the end of last year with three functions:

• To discredit Cope’s leaders and reclaim the moral high ground for the ANC. ANC leaders are known to be anxious about the graft charges hanging over the party’s presidential candidate, Jacob Zuma, in a context where Cope has made clean government the central plank of its election platform;
• To contain ANC infighting by holding potential defectors to Cope in check. The war room allegedly ordered details to be compiled of fraud and other shady dealings involving perceived unreliable elements; and
• To identify ANC members who might pose a threat to Zuma’s position as South Africa’s future president.

Two of the sources said South African Communist Party general secretary Blade Nzimande is considered ‘in charge of the war room”.

Said to be linked to the structure are ANC national treasurer Mathews Phosa, national spokesperson Jesse Duarte and Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.

Duarte scoffed at the allegation, saying ‘this is Cope’s propaganda — there’s no such thing as a war room”.

‘The ANC has a strategic management team meeting every morning to discuss issues around the election. We never ever discuss Cope. I’ve never attended a war room meeting — it doesn’t exist.”

Phosa said: ‘I know nothing about the war room and I’m not part of it and therefore I can’t comment.”

The Cope leaders identified in the leaked document, titled Elections Programme Assessment Document, are Mosiuoa Lekota, Mbhazima Shilowa, Peter Marais and Allan Boesak.

The M&G‘s main source, who said the document came from inside Luthuli House, said the plan was for the war room ‘to identify media outlets and then leak information to selected journalists so that the Cope leaders could be discredited in the weeks leading up to the election”.

‘The ANC is very threatened by Cope’s strategy of claiming the moral high ground.”

The document’s damning picture of Cope leaders suggests it is authentic. It highlights the fact that Lekota was defence minister ‘at the time that the arms deal was concluded — Lekota is deeply implicated in the scandal.”

It quotes former public enterprises minister Alec Erwin saying in 2007 that ministers, rather than the arms acquisition council, made the final arms deal decisions — implying that Lekota’s consistent denial of his own involvement is false.

‘It is hard to avoid the obvious lines of involvement,” the document says.

Under the heading ‘Minister of Defence” the document lists incidents illustrating Lekota’s alleged ineptitude:

• In 2003 he faced internal charges relating to negligence in not complying with the code of conduct for MPs by failing to fully disclose his business interests to Parliament;
• During his ministerial tenure South African National Defence Force (SANDF) generals and soldiers became increasingly dissatisfied and disaffected after a series of deadly incidents within the force in 2007;
• He left the department and the SANDF in a desperate state, with the defence department receiving qualified audit opinions since 2002-03.

Under the heading ‘Delivery track record” the document lists numerous alleged instances of Shilowa’s mismanagement, policy failures and morally reprehensible actions.

It says that in 2007 he denied the paternity of his child from a previous marriage until the results of a court-ordered blood test confirmed him as the father, adding that ‘despite that, he still failed to pay maintenance fees until the court ordered him to”.

It adds: ‘Shilowa’s other child from the same marriage accused him of failing to pay his varsity fees — which prompted him to drop out from the University of Limpopo.”

In the document Shilowa is identified as a ‘founder member of the ANC’s national deployment committee constituted in 1997 and tasked with deploying ANC cadres to head up all key centres of power in society”.

‘Cope now argues that the best ­people for the job should be appointed,” the document reads.

Much is made of Boesak’s 1999 fraud trial where he was convicted of fraud and theft. ‘Media reports have frequently made quite a mess of calculating just how much Boesak was found to have stolen,” the document states: ‘… he was found to have stolen a total of about R406 000.”

Under ‘range of excuses” the document mentions Boesak’s ‘outlandish” claim that ‘he will do it all again” and that he had simply ‘never understood accounts”.

‘Though Boesak claimed he had joined Cope to ‘serve my country again’, it is clear from documents leaked by the ANC that he had simply had certain untenable requests to the ANC turned down by Zuma.”

Under former Cape Town mayor Peter Marais’s name, the document lists 13 cases of ‘political idiocy”, alleged sexual harassment and fraud.