So, for the record

Behind the Headlines in an Era of State Capture

Anton Harber

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781776190690
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Only Anton Harber, a pioneer of independent journalism in south Africa and one of the keenest observers of the media around, could have written the thriller that is this book.' – Jacob Dlamini

Veteran journalist Anton Harber brings all his investigative skills to bear on his very own profession, the media. For two years he conducted dozens of interviews with politicians, journalists, policemen, state security agents and 'deep throats', before piecing together two remarkable tales.

The first is a chilling story of police death squads, rogue units and renditions, and how South Africa's biggest newspaper was duped into doing the dirty work of corrupt politicians. The second starts with a broken and discarded hard drive and evolves, with many near misses, into the exposure of the depths of the Guptas' influence over the ruling party.

Harber's two tales reveal the lows and highs of journalism during an era of state capture. His book is both a disquieting exposé of how easily the media can be duped by a conniving cabal for its own selfish ends, and a celebration of brilliant investigative reporting by brave and ethical journalists.

PART 1

FAST JOURNALISM

A story of many beginnings

A great deal hangs on when one begins a story. Different beginnings lead to different endings. And that was the case with the Cato Manor ‘death squad’ story.

It is sometimes said, particularly by those close to the story, that it originated with a well-known KwaZulu-Natal human-rights activist, Mary de Haas. She sent an email in September 2010 to the Sunday Times with a tip-off about allegations of irregular killings by the Durban Organised Crime Unit’s Cato Manor team. De Haas attached a letter she’d sent to the unit telling them of taxi operators who were in hiding because their rivals, ‘allegedly operating in collusion’ with police, were threatening their lives.

De Haas’s tip-off was cited as part of the journalists’ argument that there was a legitimate public-interest story to be investigated. The trouble was that this origins story wasn’t quite true.

The reporters of the Sunday Times investigations unit have given oddly different versions of where it began. Stephan Hofstatter wrote in 2015 that the story emerged when they received a flood of calls after the arrest of his colleague Mzilikazi Wa Afrika in 2010, some of them from disgruntled police officers, several of whom told them about ‘a police unit gone rogue … controlled by one Major General Johan Booysen’. Wa Afrika said on one occasion that it came from senior officers in the Crime Intelligence division of the South African Police Service (SAPS), an agency that tracks criminal elements within the country.

An unattributed Sunday Times article on 1 July 2012, though, said that Hofstatter and Wa Afrika had got the tip-off while interviewing a senior police officer in Pretoria on 14 August 2010.

What the reporters told their editor when questioned about it in 2017 was that the story began with a telephone call from former Commissioner of Police Jackie Selebi to Wa Afrika in August 2010.

Selebi had been sentenced for corruption and was awaiting his appeal. It had been a spectacular downfall for someone who’d been a senior figure of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile and in government, and he was an angry man. He phoned Wa Afrika to sympathise with him after Wa Afrika was arrested in August 2010, and to share their mutual dislike of Selebi’s successor, Bheki Cele, who was believed to have been responsible for Wa Afrika’s arrest. Then Selebi dropped it into the conversation: ‘Have you heard about Bheki Cele’s death squad in Durban?’

Selebi died in January 2015, so we can only speculate about why he might have made a point of telling Wa Afrika about the Cato Manor unit – or why the reporters still feel a need to protect him if he was their source. Was he seeking revenge on those responsible for his downfall, particularly his successor, Cele? Was it part of the ANC’s internal battles, as Cele was from the Zuma faction of the ANC, while Selebi was firmly in Mbeki’s camp? Selebi was highly critical of the new ANC leadership, often arguing, as Hofstatter put it, that ‘Zuma and his henchmen such as Cele were turning South Africa into a gangster state’. Was it an attempt to win favour from Wa Afrika? Was it part of an information-swopping deal with the journalist, as is so often the case: I’ll tell you something because I want to ask you something?

One thing we can say for certain is that it’s unlikely that it was out of a concern for human rights. If that were the case, Selebi could have tipped off the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD, since renamed the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, IPID), a civilian agency responsible for investigating all deaths as a result of police action or while in police custody and other public complaints of police abuse, or the Human Rights Commission.

If Selebi told a journalist, he had a political reason to do so.

In 2020, Hofstatter would only say to me that he’d ‘received a tip-off from a high-level police source about what the source called “Bheki Cele’s death squad”.’ The source, he said, ‘though implicated in corruption himself, was a Thabo Mbeki loyalist’ who often criticised President Zuma and Cele. Mbeki was South Africa’s second president, ousted in a bitter battle with Jacob Zuma that split the ANC into two camps. This version fit the story that it was Selebi who told the reporters about the ‘death squad’.

Wa Afrika didn’t pay attention to the tip-off until some weeks later, when the note arrived from De Haas. Then he and Hofstatter, who at that time were the core of the Sunday Times investigations unit, travelled to KwaZulu-Natal to look into the allegations.

De Haas introduced them to two taxi operators who were in hiding, and these operators repeated their accusations that Cato Manor policemen were taking sides in taxi conflicts. One of them had a recording of a policeman threatening to kill him. The problem was that taxi violence was endemic, as were allegations of police involvement, and the views of two of those deeply embedded in this messy business couldn’t be taken at face value.

These operators introduced the reporters to three or four others with similar complaints. And Hofstatter said they spoke to other human-rights campaigners, including some involved in helping families bring civil cases against Cato Manor detectives who’d killed their kin. There were also local journalists who had investigated the Cato Manor unit’s killings, and who introduced them to other sources, including within the police.

They were building their story. But it was a murky semi-underground world they were learning about, and in this world allegations – like life itself – were cheap, and witnesses few.

He said, they said

It was more than a year later, in December 2011, that General Johan Booysen, head of the KwaZulu-Natal arm of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, also known as the Hawks, had his lawyer contact Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley. Your reporters have been snooping around here, the lawyer said. I hear they’re working on a story about Booysen’s men in Cato Manor. When are you going to talk to him about it?

Mzilikazi Wa Afrika and Stephan Hofstatter had been working on the story in those months, systematically gathering witnesses, evidence and other material. Journalist Rob Rose had joined the Sunday Times’s investigations unit when the story was quite advanced, and worked with them in crafting it.

They’d been told horror stories of what appeared to be cold-blooded killings by the Cato Manor unit, which seemed to have been given a free hand to be ruthless in pursuit of violent criminals. They’d been given photographs of what appeared to be members of the unit celebrating after killings, sometimes in the presence of the bodies or mourning family members. They’d spoken to forensic experts about what these photos showed.

When Booysen asked to have his say, the team was in the last stages of the investigation and was getting ready to send the police a string of questions. Professional best practice and the Press Council Code of Ethics and Conduct required that they give reasonable time for responses, but the Sunday Times had lost a few scoops before, when their subjects had used the time to pre-empt them by issuing a statement, to give a different story to another journalist to muddy the waters, or even to rush to court to try and prevent publication. It had therefore become regular practice on the newspaper to make the obligatory call as late as possible, to keep the initiative and avoid such pre-emptive action.

Sometimes they waited until the Friday afternoon before publication, sometimes the Saturday morning, sometimes even later, though the first edition of the paper went to press early on Saturday evening. The effect was to catch the person off guard, not give them time to gather evidence or consider their views, and reduce their capacity to influence the narrative. What that person said was usually too late for the reporters to do more than drop a quote or two into the story. Seldom at this late stage – with the deadline looming – could they reconsider the story on the basis of anything new learnt from the interviewee. It was little more than a formal ticking of the right-of-reply box.

This time, though, editor Ray Hartley decided to hold the story for that week, and Hofstatter flew down to Durban to speak to Booysen. Wa Afrika joined the interview by telephone from Johannesburg.

It was a crucial conversation. Having worked on the story for months, having got the material from Booysen’s detractors, it was the chance for the reporters to hear the other side.

*

The two parties – the policeman on the one hand, and the reporters on the other – gave me accounts of this conversation that differed in key aspects. Investigating these two versions told its own story about the difficulties of finding the truth in journalism.

Booysen told me that in the interview he’d challenged aspects of the reporters’ story, and had pointed to evidence or ways of getting evidence that would bear him out. The reporters, for example, had said Booysen had arrived in a helicopter within minutes of a shooting in the Maryvale area, to congratulate his men on the killings. This was important because it put Booysen at the scene of the alleged crime, while he argued he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day activities of the unit.

Booysen said he’d been at head office when he heard about the shooting, which was some distance away. He’d wanted to drive to the scene but was warned that he would hit peak-hour traffic, so instead he drove to the police air unit and was flown from there in a helicopter. He got to the scene of the shooting at least ninety minutes later, so it wasn’t true that he was on the scene within minutes of the shooting, he said. Booysen told me that he’d told the journalists that they could go themselves to the air unit, check the helicopter logs and speak to the pilot to verify this.

Booysen said that Hofstatter had shown him pictures of what were apparently the shootings, but that these were just standard crime-scene photos from the police’s own records, and he told the reporters this. One of them was of an event that didn’t even involve the Cato Manor unit, and he pointed this out to them.

Hofstatter denied showing Booysen any pictures.

With two versions of the same conversation on the table, it looked like I’d have to rely on the traditional journalism practice of presenting both and leaving the reader to decide which was more credible. This was an unsatisfactory shortcut, but sometimes the only way to deal with factual disputes.

Then Booysen told me that both sides had recorded the conversation. I asked him if I could listen to his recording. He agreed, but said he’d have to dig it out from a container-load of material that he kept in a hidden place. He’d need to set aside a day on the weekend to locate it.

Weeks passed, ...