Fodder - A blog from the heart of zaLand: Is the ANC abusing intelligence?

What the heck is happening with our intelligence community in South Africa? At parliament's safety and security portfolio committee meeting this week National Police Commissioner, Jackie Selebi, stated that the police had broken up an al-Qaeda network in South Africa just days before the election.

Now my first though is what the heck is al-Qaeda doing in South Africa? But then reflecting on it just because they are here does not mean they are planning an attack on our country, they could well be using South Africa as a base to later attack some other country around the world. So maybe that’s what they’re doing here, but this just raises further issues.

The DA have asked …was Mr Selebi 'grandstanding' to get some publicity, or is someone not telling the truth? and some deeper digging suggests that his statement certainly contradicts other statements made by senior police officials.

On 17 March Minister Nqakula was quoted in the press as saying that there were no al-Qaeda cells operating in South Africa. Further SANDF's Captain Edward Ratala said on April 10 that there was no real threat for the election. Both these statements directly contradict what Selebi has said.

Now was the government just saying these things before the election to keep the populace happy and content and to ensure that there was no fear of voting? If so this runs slap bang into our concern about what the government tells us, and what they keep secret. In fact we wrote on this subject on 7 May, in a different light but the same concept of what a government keeps from the populace.

But now we have other concerns about the state of this countries intelligence services and abuse of them by the government.

In a court case this week lawyers for the 70 alleged mercenaries under arrest in Zimbabwe were suing the South African government to get them to request their extradition back to South Africa as they wouldn’t get a fair trial in Equatorial Guinea and would also face the death penalty. In their defense the South African government lawyers said that the government (nor any of its agencies) knew nothing about the alleged coup before they left South Africa.

This statement (that the government knew nothing) flies directly in the face of many many other statements made by senior government officials. In fact on Monday Defense Minster Lekota was quoted as saying that we did pass information onto Zimbabwe before the alleged mercenaries left South Africa. Further in the months since the arrest of the 70 men the government has on many occasions claimed that they’d had a hand in the arrest by passing on information to Zimbabwe before the 70 left South Africa.

So which is it? Did we or didn’t we? Or don’t we know what we knew?

Then digging way back into our memory remember some two years ago when the then Minster of Safety and Security, Steve Tshwete announced that three senior ANC members were plotting against Mbeki. Not just plotting for his position but also plotting his death? The three accused were Tokyo Sexwale, Mathews Phosa and Cyril Ramaphosa and all three were cleared in fairly record time and it is generally agreed that the statement was completely false and rather an attempt to reduce their potential threat to stand against Mbeki for the position as leader of the ANC.

So the bottom line seems to be that senior ANC government officials have no problem lying to the populace to further their gains, whatever those gains may be.

Whatever the reason this sucks and the ANC needs to understand double quick that this is not acceptable and is a gross abuse of power, they can’t run around throwing false statements out about this countries security. Sure they may want to keep some information to themselves, but to spread disinformation is a crime in my view.