Intrigued by ex-spy chief’s somersault

‘I DON’T have the stomach or the taste to serve any more at this level,” said former minister of intelligence Ronnie Kasrils, as he quit after 14 years of service to the government. It was late September 2008, just after Thabo Mbeki was palace-couped.

His intelligence service was by then an international laughing stock, with spy-versus-spy intrigue spilling out wide across the political landscape, and unending, ungovernable, internecine battles using hoax e-mails, other disinformation and political contortions unknown in even the ugliest Stalinist traditions of the ANC.

To last so long in that putrid swamp required a firm constitution, and to extricate himself from the mire was a heroic task.

Kasrils is still the continent’s highest-profile white revolutionary, and in spite of all the muck, exudes an exceptionally powerful moral influence, charisma and charm.

Last week he visited the University of KwaZulu-Natal as a Time of the Writer festival guest at the Centre for Creative Arts and speaker at the Centre for Civil Society’s seminar on state authoritarianism and corruption.

A student there in the early 1960s, Kasrils reminisced about disputes during economics classes with Professor Owen Horwood – later a Vorster-Botha regime finance minister – over Horwood’s affection for Bantustan policy.

In 2010, Kasrils’ beautiful biography of his late wife Eleanor, The Unlikely Secret Agent, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton non-fiction prize and his autobiography Armed and Dangerous had its third edition in 2004. His presentations last week celebrating writing, women and radical politics were thoughtful and humorous.

Kasrils’ focus on corruption highlights the banal acquisitiveness of the political-bureaucratic petit bourgeoisie, aspiring to great wealth for little effort.

His naming as “WaBenzis” several former colleagues – including the late Joe Modise and SA Communist Party chief Blade Nzimande – certainly helps personify the problem.

Kasrils griped in our seminar: “South Africa is regaled by one revelation after another involving luxury limousines, lavish banquets, expensive hotel bills and other extravagant follies.”

However, the 1997 arms deal was the font of SA’s large-scale corruption, and Kasrils had spent the late 1990s arguing that the deal could “stand up to the closest scrutiny” because the process was “meticulously professional and objective”.

For the two leading arms deal experts, Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren, “It almost beggars belief that this claim could be made.”

Kasrils also notified Parliament of “major offset or counter-trade agreements so that for every rand spent abroad, the same amount will be invested in SA.

“Such packages will be of enormous benefit to our Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy. A tremendous boost to our economy and Treasury.”

Latest estimates from the Sunday Independent are that of the R114 billion promised in arms deal offsets, only R4bn was delivered.

Kasrils’ defence last Friday was that post-apartheid armed forces desperately needed the highest-technology weapons, but this did not convince his audience.

Exclaimed anti-corruption campaigner Marianne Camerer: “How can you sleep at night?!”

Kasrils’ answer: he’s sleeping well, because the arms deal didn’t corrupt at ministerial level in major transactions, though he now concedes that at secondary level, the company-to-company transactions had plenty of holes, such as Schabir Shaik’s facilitation of the French firm Thales’ access to President Jacob Zuma for a reported R500 000 a year.

Another contradiction is the Secrecy Bill, the legislation that Kasrils originally introduced in early 2008, but now virulently opposes.

As the Mail&Guardian reported four years ago: “Kasrils portrayed it as striking an enlightened balance between the need for secrecy and the constitutional imperative for open and accountable government.”

By mid-2008, Kasrils’ internal ministerial review commission – consisting of Joe Matthews, Frene Ginwala and Laurie Nathan – warned not to provide “so sweeping a basis for non-disclosure of information, reminiscent of apartheid-era secrecy laws”.

To his credit, by late 2011 Kasrils was in the lead of a civil society campaign against the more totalitarian version of the bill.

It is, he said at a Wits University rally, “turning into a Frankensteinian monster, a dog’s breakfast of toxic gruel”.

These are the kinds of dialectical discussions which Kasrils invites: vast contradictions in past practices, transcended by his ability to track degenerative trends and speak out today.

We are fortunate that the way that John le Carré’s great novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was described by Time magazine – “a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he’s forgotten how to tell the truth” – is the polar opposite of how to understand Kasrils’ renewed life on the left.

l Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society.