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=Dark cloud of nepotism tarnishes appointment of deputy president=

Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, July 3, 2005

 * By Patrick Laurence**

Government spokespersons have offered several explanatory statements in a bid to assuage anxiety and silent criticism over President Thabo Mbeki's appointment of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka to replace Jacob Zuma as his deputy. None is wholly convincing.

Whatever her intellectual and administrative talents, and whatever her indefatigable energy when it comes to hard work, Mlambo-Ngcuka's appointment is, at the least, potentially problematic. A primary reason for that is her previous position as minister of mineral affairs and energy.

In that capacity she was ultimately accountable for the transfer in December 2003 of R15-million of public money from the state-controlled company PetroSA to Imvume, a company whose chief executive officer has close ties with several ANC notables, and which - in turn - promptly transmitted R11 million to the ANC four months before the April 2004 election.

Leaving aside the R50 000 that found its way from Imvume to her businessman brother Bongani, there is a secondary and nearly equally compelling reason for disquiet over Mlambo-Ngcuka's appointment.

She is the wife of Bulelani Ngcuka, the former national director of public prosecutions who played a central role in the investigation of the financial affairs of Zuma and who - controversially and illogically - declared in August 2003 that there was a prima facie case of corruption against Zuma but that charges would not be pressed against him because a conviction could not be guaranteed.

The marital connection invites the deduction by Zuma's seemingly ubiquitous supporters that Mlambo-Ngcuka is the beneficiary of her husband's 2003 presumptive denigration of their hero nearly two years before he was dismissed as deputy president and charged on two counts of corruption in rapid succession.

One assurance that has been offered about her appointment is that Mbeki would not have selected her to succeed Zuma unless he was certain that she was not culpably implicated in the Oilgate scandal, as the transfer of money from the public fiscus has been dubbed.

Without questioning the bona fides of government spokespersons or the due diligence of Mbeki on the issue, there are two objections to the response: first, Mbeki is not infallible and has, moreover, made errors of judgment on a similar matter before; second, an official investigation into Oilgate by Lawrence Mushwana, the public protector, is still in progress and its outcome should not be anticipated.

Mbeki's error of judgment concerns Allan Boesak, the former ANC provincial leader in the Western Cape and president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches who was jailed for theft and fraud.

Having refused to accept the finding by a reputable legal firm acting on behalf of Scandinavian donors that Boesak had "unlawfully expropriated money to which was not entitled", only to witness the vindication of that finding by the high court and, later, the constitutional court, Mbeki subsequently granted Boesak a presidential pardon, thereby expunging Boesak's imprisonment from the official record and, arguably, compounding his original error.

Government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe advances another reason for discounting concerns over Oilgate.

"It is not relevant at all to government work," he has stated. "As far as we are concerned it is a party-political matter and is being dealt with."

He thereby disregards the ANC's status as the ruling party, as well as its duty as the governing party to ensure that public money is spent according to prescribed procedure in the interests of the public as a whole and not those of a political party.

Netshitenzhe dismisses concern that Mlambo-Ngcuka may be disadvantaged in the fulfilment of her deputy presidential duties by her husband's role in the events leading to Zuma being, as Mbeki puts it, released from his responsibilities.

He castigates those who ponder the implications of her marital connection, accusing them of "questioning her capacity" as an individual and of failing to recognise that she was chosen "in her own right".

Mlambo-Ngcuka is, of course, a separate individual in a legal and even administrative sense.

In a political sense, however, she cannot escape her identity as the wife of the former national director of prosecutions, who, apart from initiating the investigation into Zuma and declaring that there was a prima facie case of corruption against him, reportedly sought to enlist the support of black editors in his long-drawn-out dual with Zuma.

Whether Ngcuka entered the political arena during his role in directing the investigation into Zuma's financial affairs is a matter of dispute. His detractors think so, particularly those who were targeted by the investigators, including former transport minister Mac Maharaj and, of course, Zuma.

They accuse Ngcuka of abusing his office and, more specifically, of leaking information to the media in contravention of the National Prosecuting Act.

An internal investigation in the national prosecuting authority, commissioned by Mbeki, has cleared Ngcuka of complicity in the leaks. But at the same time it points to strong circumstantial evidence that privileged information "found its way to unauthorised persons" (to quote the public protector's summation of the internal inquiry's findings).

That said, however, it must be noted that the public protector concluded in his report of May 2004 that Ngcuka's prima facie statement "unjustifiably infringed upon Mr Zuma's constitutional right to human dignity and caused him to be improperly prejudiced".

The threads of the Ngcuka-Zuma saga incontrovertibly crisscross repeatedly to form a tangled web, from which Deputy President Mlambo-Ngcuka may have difficulty extricating herself, her status as an individual in her own right notwithstanding.

Yet another official justification of Mlambo-Ngcuka's appointment pre-emptively dismisses the suspicion that Zuma may have been selectively targeted to eliminate him politically as a presidential candidate in 2009. Thus Netshitenzhe states: "Government rejects with the contempt it deserves any insinuation that state structures can be used for personal or political purposes."

Netshitenzhe's indignation is understandable. It poses a conundrum, however. How does one explain the use in 2001 by the then safety and security minister, Steve Tshwete, of state or semi-state structures (his office and the SABC) publicly to accuse three prominent ANC businessmen, Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa, of conspiring to oust Mbeki from his presidential office?

How, too, does one explain the almost simultaneous appearance of Mbeki on e.tv and his publicly voiced allegation that three unidentified businessmen were involved in a conspiracy against him?

Seen in the context of the 2001 unsubstantiated allegations against the trio of businessmen, for which Tshwete apologised before his death in 2002, the possibility that Zuma was selectively investigated may not be as preposterous as Netshitenzhe avers.


 * Patrick Laurence is the editor of Focus, the journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation


 * From: http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=1043&fArticleId=2609593