EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | EFF condoms in Pauw’s book are mere foreplay. It’s Ramaphosa and ANC who bring the action

You cannot read Our Poisoned Land by Jacques Pauw and think an ANC-led government is compatible with realising the vision of the SA constitution. This latest book by one of our most magisterial journalists and authors is a depressing and definitive account of the post-apartheid state’s moral, constitutional and material decline. Our Poisoned Land is genuinely searing, factually detailed, fantastically analytical and even contains delicious sprinkles of dark humour scattered alongside the narration of our hellish realities.  

This is not a Sunday World-inspired book about EFF orgies in a high-rise Sandton building. An excerpt from the book, about wild EFF parties, complete with used condoms left behind in an apartment belonging to cigarette baron Adriano Mazzotti, did Pauw’s book a disservice. News sites and media houses generally choose excerpts that will maximise eyeballs. This excerpt certainly did. It also caused the EFF leadership, Julius Malema included, to lash out against the author, demand that those parts of the book be retracted and to threaten legal action. Neither the author nor his publisher relented. In fact, they doubled down, inviting legal scrutiny, and added an insult by suggesting Malema is no different to former spy boss Arthur Fraser, who made similar empty threats in response to the book to which this latest one is a sequel, The President’s Keepers.

All such threats do is increase talkability around the book ultimately help maximise sales. It is a poor strategy to use on the part of an aggrieved subject, even if they are objectively correct about falsehoods in a book. Readers love to rush to buy books that are “controversial” and to even panic-buy a title that might be taken off the shelves soon. To that end, the publishers probably secretly enjoyed the response to the excerpt about the EFF’s wild parties in Africa’s richest square mile. Given some controversies about Pauw’s journalism in recent times the publishers could not have known whether this book would be well-received since some readers might not yet, or not at all, have forgiven Pauw for unethical journalism on the Daily Maverick platform. Malema soothed the commercial fears of the publishers, no doubt, by being the best possible publicist and PR machine, for this new book of Pauw’s, that they could not have paid for.

PODCAST | Eusebius McKaiser in conversation with Jacques Pauw

The conundrum, however, is that the excerpt banalises a serious work. Which is why, some 500 words into this essay review, you still have a reviewer (myself) distracted by meta-discussion about the distraction. In the book itself, the first serious mention of the EFF only happens on page 351. And, only from page 374 in a chapter entitled “Never leave an enemy behind”, does Pauw really begin to dig deep into the EFF’s apparent moral hypocrisy, campaigning on a pro-poor agenda while, on the evidence that the author has gathered and synthesised with the work of colleagues such as journalist Pauli Van Wyk, being knowingly ensnared in anti-poor, anti-constitutional, corrupt, criminal networks.

This is, yes, a serious critique of the EFF, but the condom-party story is the least important aspect of those gripes. And all of the EFF material, in turn, is besides the fact that 350 pages of serious work on the ANC-led state happens before we get to the EFF. That sort of nuance is lost when a publisher allows a news platform to maximise eyeballs at the cost of the central narrative of the book.

As a fellow author, besides being a book journalist, I can tell you this is not a trivial matter. One would-be reader stopped me, by way of example, at a coffee shop in Morningside and asked me, unprompted, what I made of the excerpt about the EFF. Before I gave my view — which was that having read the book, I can confirm the book is about much more than that — this guy shared with me how a mate of his reacted. “Eusebius, my friend wondered whether Pauw thinks black people are not allowed to have parties? Or luxury goods? Or whether Pauw thinks that using a condom is a BAD thing?” He opined that, like his mate, he is therefore disinclined to buy or read the book. I did not try to persuade him otherwise, other than to factually explain how the excerpt constitutes serious misdirection.

For me, the heart of the book is actually a devastating lament of lost opportunities, grand theft and sustained assault on the constitution by mostly ANC politicians and their immoral friends in the private sector. It is, in other words, a book best understood as another contribution to the literature on state capture, along those of, among others, Pieter-Louis Myburgh, Themba Maseko, Athol Williams, Crispian Olver, countless other investigative journalists, civil society and research organisations, whistle-blowers and the state capture commission itself. Pauw acknowledges the intersection of his work with those of colleagues, but I still regard this new work as distinctively useful, even if the well-informed reader will find much of it familiar.

The simplest way to summate the uselessness of the work is to share my description to a friend of mine. Pauw did the hard work for many of us. He scrutinised every footnote and every under-examined page of the state capture reports. He did less primary research than in the previous book, but there is some new stuff. The main value, however, is the clarity and cogency of how he has synthesised a vast literature, range of themes and voluminous sources without skimping on the detail, but is so well-written you stay with the story for hundreds of pages, and all the while he gives himself permission as a senior journalist and commentator in his own right, to also periodically offer some argument, interpretation and comment, and not just to do a dry data dump.

Before we get to the EFF around page 351, for example, we would already have travelled deep inside the rot at Prasa, the SAPS, the SSA, the Hawks, crime intelligence and the NPA. If the book stopped there, it would still have been worth your money, time and serious engagement. Yet these aspects have not been mentioned in the early public articulation of this new work. The role of money in internal ANC politics, to take but one of the book’s many early plot lines, including in the lead-up to Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC presidential victory at Nasrec at the end of 2017, for example, is a scary story of the billions of public money fleeced in the service of internecine factional battles of the ANC. These monies have often been stolen by unethical cops and spooks under the pretext of keeping citizens safe. Pauw demonstrates how easily we mistake the political axing of a few famous names for the entrenchment of accountability and restoration of constitutional supremacy. That is an illusion. Many of the people who propped up former president Jacob Zuma are still around, and Ramaphosa has not cleaned up as much as his superfans insisted he would despite early criticism that the ANC’s sins might be too much for him to deal with. Pauw shows us how wrong the Ramaphoria lot turned out to be.

Crime intelligence, for example, has been a site of corruption and politicisation for many years now. Pauw writes at one stage: “In January 2011, police commissioner Bheki Cele approved a request from [Richard] Mdluli [ former crime intelligence boss] to appoint an additional 250 undercover managers and agents to infiltrate organised crime syndicates and gather evidence which cannot be obtained through normal and conventional investigation methods.” It also made provision for the appointment of an additional four brigadiers and thirty colonels. This was typical Mdluli bullshit — nothing more than a smokescreen for him and his cronies to appoint their wives, girlfriends, sons and daughters in senior positions in the unit. He handed (Solly) Lazarus (the former CFO), who was responsible for the appointment of agents and informers from the secret fund, a list of family members who had to be employed. The Mdluli Seven had between them no knowledge or experience of the intelligence world. Both Mdluli’s former wife and his new wife were appointed as colonels, his daughter as a lieutenant-colonel and his son as a captain. They all received cars, ranging from Audis to BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes.”

Not only is it improbable that Cele was innocently implicated in this criminality, if you read Pauw, but the questions about his relationship with property mogul Roux Shabangu are also not answered by a case poorly handled by the state. He was not exonerated. His guilt or innocence was simply not examined. Then public protector’s reports on him were not taken on review. How did Ramaphosa, with his new dawn narrative, deal with such politically grey characters? By retaining them in cabinet or giving them other roles such as ambassadorial posts. Ramaphosa is not quite the constitutionalist he was sold to be.

Here is another example of the nexus between the theft of public money, ANC internal battles and the erosion of constitutionalism. “The cost of a state-of-the-art grabber [which crime intelligence pretended it needed to secure Nasrec ahead of the ANC elective conference in 2017] was around R7m, but this one was going to be invoiced for an almighty R45m. The hugely inflated price of the grabber was not a problem. I-View, though in business rescue and not on the SAPS supplier database, had previously supplied crime intelligence with surveillance material, albeit at exaggerated prices.

“An Ipid investigation later concluded that the purchase of the grabber was just subterfuge because at least part of the money was going to be laundered into the coffers of the RET faction to buy votes for [presidential hopeful Nkosazana] Dlamini-Zuma. The dabbling of crime intelligence in the ANC’s elective conference was not new. In 2012, when Jacob Zuma stood for his second term as ANC president, crime intelligence agents descended on Mangaung with R50m in cash, also taken from the secret services account. The money was never properly accounted for and is the subject of an investigation to this day. This account appears to have been used as a piggy bank for Zuma to ensure his own political survival and that of those he chose as his proxies to continue his legacy.”

So, the EFF’s unhappiness with Pauw’s new book should be a sideshow because the book, actually, inadvertently helps opposition political parties. Sure, the EFF has some defending to do in response to the later chapters of the book. But even a quick read of this book makes it clear what the most important takeaways are. First, there is more of a chance of Father Christmas being real than of the ANC ever morally and organisationally renewing itself. Second, Ramaphosa, even if he wins another leadership term as president, is unfit for purpose.