Carl Niehaus, Gwede Mantashe and Cronyism (cont.)
According to Niehaus, he made a clean breast of his past before being appointed as national spokesperson of the ANC in November 2008. Reports suggest that he was head hunted by the Secretary General of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, who, in so doing, angered the incumbent ANC spin-doctor, Jessie Duarte, who reportedly wants to quit her position once the election has been held and the need for a high profile spokesperson diminishes.
However, Mantashe the alleged head hunter, is reported as denying knowledge of this clean breast, saying that Niehaus only disclosed his financial woes after he was quizzed by the party, and not before his employment as party spokesperson. Corroboration for the Niehaus version is to be found in his alleged confession to (now) Premier of Gauteng Paul Mashatile when he came off the rails in 2005 by forging a letter while employed by the Gauteng Economic Development Agency - GEDA. At that stage GEDA was under the political leadership of Mashatile, who apparently told him to resign or face disciplinary action. Niehaus resigned on 9 December 2005. Mbhazima Shilowa, former Premier of Gauteng, confirms that Mashatile told him that Niehaus had resigned over "financial impropriety". While Shilowa, now a leading member of Cope, has no duty towards the ANC anymore, Mashatile can hardly have forgotten the traumatic circumstances of Niehaus' departure from GEDA and could not but have noticed that nothing was said in public of this when he was employed by the ANC as its spokesperson. Mashatile should have shared his dark knowledge if not before, at least as soon as he became aware of, the new job given to Niehaus. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, Niehaus must have known that Mashatile knew of his past criminal misconduct and was still a colleague of Mantashe in the top echelons of the ANC. Niehaus would have been taking a terribly risky course to keep his dark secrets from Mantashe in the interview or other pre-employment processes of the ANC, when he knew that Mashatile was well placed to spill the beans on him to Mantashe.
If it is true that the top ANC functionaries, at least his head hunter and his former boss, did know of the somewhat unfortunate past of their new national spokesperson, it is inexplicable that nothing was said in public about the basis upon which he landed his new strategically sensitive assignment. The value system of the nation, as specifically set out in the Constitution, our supreme law, seems to have been flagrantly ignored in the interests of expediency and cronyism or perhaps some nefarious Machiavellian plot to forever knobble Niehaus. The values relevant to the situation which appertained when Niehaus was under consideration for the spokesperson post are, of course: openness, transparency and accountability.
Imagine how differently things would have worked out for Niehaus had these values been the guiding lights of those who engaged him. Assuming that his version of the pre-employment clean breast is true, the ANC could have called a press conference, made the dark details now surfacing for the first time public "up front", and indicated its preparedness to give Niehaus another chance to rehabilitate himself in a job in which trustworthiness around money does not feature prominently and his eloquence in spokesperson activities could be put to good use. In this unhappily spurned scenario, how churlish his detractors would have sounded had they made critical noises about the noble efforts of the ANC to assist a fallen comrade. How unkind to insist on the "pound of flesh" when no major harm has eventuated and an apparently genuine endeavour to put his wrongdoings right has been made by Niehaus. His encounter with the "dark anima" embodied in his relationship with his second wife is over and he has been for therapy. He says he wants to be a better man. Surely he should be given the chance to redeem himself. These arguments were all available to the ANC and Niehaus then. Now, instead, he acknowledges that he has to be trustworthy to do his job and ruefully wishes he could turn back the clock.
Even if he could turn it back to November last year, by which time his record of improprieties and wrongdoing (give or take a few fibs to his landlord) was apparently complete, the decision to hush up the nature of his past, which he either went along with (on his version) or was solely responsible for (on Mantashe's) is actually what has led to his current downfall and resignation. That decision shows a complete lack of commitment to the foundational constitutional values of openness, transparency and accountability and a woeful lapse of judgment on the part of those (being, at least, Mashatile and Niehaus but also Mantashe once the quizzing to which he refers took place) who knew of and hushed up what Niehaus calls his "massive mistakes", in the vain hope that they would be able to get away with the opaque and unaccountable procedure adopted to engage Niehaus in the high profile position he occupied for such a short time. Now that the awful truth is exposed to the public gaze at the instance of an investigative journalist's informant(s), the Niehaus career as spokesperson is over as he very properly, if tearfully, concedes it should be.
Regardless of whether or not Mantashe was in fact told the terrible truth, whether before or after engaging Niehaus, and whether by Niehaus or by Mashatile, the lesson to be drawn from this sad saga is the same for everyone. If all concerned had at all times behaved openly and transparently, if they had exacted accountability from Niehaus and each other in accordance with the requirements of the law and the Constitution, none of the unfortunate consequences of the decision to keep silent and hope that the past wrongdoing would go undetected would have occurred. Instead, the unwelcome and entirely avoidable bad publicity has screamed out from the front pages of the newspapers.
So the closed, opaque and unaccountable modus operandi adopted in engaging Niehaus has brought shame upon the ANC, fuelled the fires of its critics, lent credence to their claims of cronyism and has fortified calls from opposition quarters for the machinery of the law to be harnessed against Mashatile with a demand that he act against Niehaus now or face prosecution himself under the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act. The inwardness of the ineffable sadness is that all this mess could have been avoided with a sensible measure of openness, transparency and accountability. Choosing not to live by the values of the Constitution has its unhappy consequences.
Paul Hoffman SC
Director designate, Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa
Cape Town
16 February, 2009.