Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The ANC committee set up in January to report on the notorious multibillion-rand arms deal appears to have made as little headway as German prosecutors.

The Dusseldorf public prosecutor’s office this week closed its investigation into whether former employees of ThyssenKrupp, the giant steel and arms manufacturing group, had paid any bribes to South Africans in connection with the sale of four corvettes to the South African navy.

Among those negatively implicated in the German segment of the arms deal – these connections were not made by German prosecutors but by Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, and some South African newspapers – were President Thabo Mbeki and Chippy Shaik, the SANDF head of arms acquisition in the late 1990s.

“We found that some former employees had been involved in wrongdoing, but this had nothing to do with the sale of corvettes to South Africa,” prosecutor Arno Neukirchen said on Wednesday, “and we have ended our investigation”.

The ANC panel was set up in the days immediately following the Polokwane conference, at which Jacob Zuma was elected party president, with the mandate of drawing up a “detailed factual report” on the arms deal. Zuma and certain senior ANC leaders had previously complained about being unfairly targeted, saying they believed the arms deal tainted other leaders in the party.

Damp squib

The committee is chaired by Kgalema Motlanthe, the ANC deputy president, and includes Mathews Phosa, treasurer-general; Jeremy Cronin, national executive committee (NEC) member and deputy general secretary of the communist party; former national defence force general Siphiwe Nyanda; Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, an NEC member; Naledi Pandor, the education minister; Cyril Ramaphosa, an NEC member; and Lindiwe Sisulu, the housing minister.

On Friday, ANC spokesman Jessie Duarte said the committee was “still working”. It had issued an interim report recently, but the arms deal had not been “properly discussed”. The party had no comment on the German prosecutors’ decision.

One committee member said not much seemed to have happened. “There’s been one report, but it didn’t contain much”.

A senior ANC member, who did not want to be named, said the committee seemed to be a damp squib. “It was formed in a hurry following Polokwane. So its mandate was not very clear. It seems to have been put in place to find Zuma not guilty. But the ANC is not an official investigative body anyway.”

Patricia de Lille, leader of the Independent Democrats, who was among those who first raised a hue and cry about the arms deal in the late 90s, said she intended soldiering on to reach the truth. “We still don’t know how ThyssenKrupp suddenly won first place in the tender process and we know Mbeki met the Germans. What happened at that meeting?”

De Lille said the German prosecutors had clearly not received assistance from the South African authorities. This was why they had been stymied.

Helmoed Römer Heitman, a defence analyst and the local correspondent of the authoritative Jane’s Defence Weekly, said he was not surprised the German prosecutors had come up with nothing.

“There was an arms deal worth about R30 billion. Obviously there was some greasing of palms and bribery. But I insist that this took place in the off-set deals and the lower levels. At top level nothing happened.

“If it did, where is the smoking gun? It’s all babble. All we’ve been presented with is Tony Yengeni – who got a discount on his car. Is this multimillion-rand arms deal corruption?”

Heitman said Shaik had done “first-class work” when he was in charge of defence acquisitions. “Chippy Shaik really drove a hard bargain, and we profited from it.”

Heitman remained convinced that the corruption allegations on major aspects of the arms deal came from “bitter contractors who lost out, politicians looking to remind the public they are there, and old-style whiteys who can’t accept this government actually scored a good deal.”