The intelligence community plays an important role in ensuring the security of a country and its citizens. In these dangerous times we live in, when there are always individuals and organisations with evil intentions working under the cover of darkness to unleash terror on unsuspecting and innocent citizens, it is crucial for any country to have a professional and credible state security agency.
Although our intelligence services have never been perfect, for most of the past 23 years they have played their part in keeping our country relatively safe. When a group of misguided racial supremacists planned a series of terror attacks that would have plunged South Africa into a bloody civil war in the early 2000s, it was the police's crime intelligence unit, working with the then National Intelligence Agency, which thwarted the evil plan.
There are plenty of other examples of the community's usefulness here at home and abroad. However, these have often been overshadowed by growing concerns over the manipulation of the security agencies to serve the interests of powerful individuals and cliques within the government and the ANC.The period running up to the ANC elective conference in Polokwane a decade ago, for instance, was marred by allegations of various intelligence agencies illegally spying on people engaged in legitimate political activities, while criminal gangs were left to wreak havoc in society. This trend has continued and, judging by recent revelations, has now taken a sharp turn for the worse.
Since coming to power in 2009, President Jacob Zuma has taken a keen interest in the state security agencies. That on its own is not a problem; after all, Zuma has a background in ANC intelligence. What makes this problematic is that his only interest with such agencies is that they protect him and his associates from any harm, and not necessarily the country.
His appointments to the top jobs in the intelligence ministry as well as the state security agencies have always been of his close comrades, who he believes would secure his interests. Any sign that a minister, a director-general or any other senior official was putting the interests of the country ahead of those of the president and his associates has often led to immediate dismissal.
Just ask Moe Shaik, Gibson Njenje, Sonto Kudjoe, Simon Ntombela and other securocrats who have found themselves rubbing the president and his associates up the wrong way.As a result, the intelligence community is at its weakest, leaving the country vulnerable to all sorts of threats from criminal syndicates and other dangerous groupings.
The president's insistence on keeping controversial State Security Director-General Arthur Fraser in charge, even though there are serious allegations of corruption hanging over his head, is not going to improve the performance of the intelligence services.
Add to this a state security minister - Bongani Bongo - who stands accused of having tried to bribe a senior parliamentary official in a bid to stop an investigation into state capture, and you have a compromised intelligence service.
The president says he has received a report concerning the allegations against Bongo and that he is studying the matter. We all know this can only mean that Zuma is hoping to delay dealing with the matter in the hope that the public will soon move on to the next big story and forget about it. He should not be allowed to get away with it. We call on parliament, of which Bongo remains a member, to expedite its inquiry into the allegations against the minister.
While that is ongoing, he should be put on cautionary suspension. The same should happen to Fraser, who, according to the story we publish in this edition, should not have been appointed in the first place as there were serious allegations of maladministration levelled against him relating to the SSA's Principal Agent Network project, which he ran...