Conspiracies, cryptids and coups: A deep dive into SA's political anxiety: Terence Corrigan

Key topics:

• Coup talk raises alarm but lacks real threat, may be political misdirection

• Intelligence services abused for ANC factional and political purposes

• State secrecy enables power misuse, eroding trust and democratic norms

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By Terence Corrigan*

I started this week’s column as a reflection on the country’s investment malaise and what the impending US tariff regime would mean for it and for South Africa’s future. There is little enough cheer there, but I changed tack when I saw I thought about this while watching Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshaveni, discuss the National Security Strategy.  

Of that briefing and that document, one phrase captured headlines: coup d’etat. South Africa, she said, was safe and secure and the country’s security services had a handle on things. But a coup was “a potential risk”. There were, she added “measures” in place to mitigate against it. For all the troubles afflicting South Africa, a coup has always been safely excluded. That it was now being mentioned as a possibility – indeed, people were planning it, we were told – was testimony to South Africa’s apparent freefall. 

I said as much on the Daily Friend Show. 

That evening, I chanced on a schlocky 1980s mock documentary on YouTube. It dealt with the prophecies of Nostradamus; I’d actually seen it on television back in the day (dated is a polite descriptor). I’ve always had a fascination with the esoteric and the unexplained. As a youngster, I scoured the local library for books about mysterious lights in the sky, cryptids in lakes and forests, and the search for lost artifacts that could alter our understanding of the world and our place in it.  

My late father thought this all a frightful misdirection of curiosity. This stuff entertaining, but not intellectually nourishing. “Wouldn’t you rather read up about the Flying Bomb than the Flying Dutchman?” he once asked me.   

Maybe the answer to that was that I felt I was dealing with arcane knowledge, and unearthing things hidden in dark conspiracies. The sensational always holds our attention, particularly when we believe that someone knows truths that are hidden from us; I found this is an apt metaphor for the Minister’s presser and her disturbing claims. 

Secrets and abuse 

Conspiracies have a certain compelling logic because they built on a core of reality. States collect information and keep secrets, though these are typically more mundane than time travel technology and the location of the Ark of the Covenant. 

Rather, they amass the sort of information that is necessary for the management of a mass society, much of it uncontroversial: how the population is distributed, where children attend school, what goods and services are produced. But as the collection of that information becomes more focused on the individual – the bearer of citizenship and political responsibility – and on freely constituted associations – individual firms, religious bodies, political parties, for example – it becomes a more fraught matter.  

The state is structurally a more powerful force in society than those subject to it, and information is a commodity that can easily be weaponised. Indeed, in modern conflicts, whether within a state or between states, information and reputation are often more important than guns and tanks.  

For this reason, we accept that states will keep secrets. Not everything can be made available to all comers. Information on foreign espionage, or on the operation of criminal syndicates, or on particular aspects of military preparedness is kept under wraps for good reason: that it is necessary to counter those seeking harm to society. 

Yet this is inherently ripe for abuse. The maintenance of open, democratic constitutionalism has always sat uncomfortably with granting governments the power to gather and keep information. If ever there was a time when people – and here I mean in particular, citizens of democracies – trusted their governments always to act benevolently, slews of scandals and revelations of the abuse of power have put paid to that.  

There is an allure in the wielding of power and the sense of mission it engenders that leads to the disregarding of the constraints that constitutional leadership should be subject to. 

Moreover, conspiracies are believable because sometimes they turn out to be true. Lies and distortions told to the American population over the misadventure of the Vietnam War make the notion of an alien crash at Roswell, and the recovery of non-human bodies from the wreckage – official denials notwithstanding – a not uncredible proposition. In fact, a whole science fiction genre has developed around this idea, the television series The X-Files being the most prominent example. 

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There is a converse to this: where trust has decayed sufficiently, and where abuse and corruption are expected, people will expect to find it. Replace hope with trepidation, and it’s rather like the confirmation bias that would lead a wide-eyed UFO hunter to see an alien craft in every light in the sky, and a seeker of Noah’s Ark to imagine an ancient ship in every shadow under a glacier.  

This environment can be a useful tool for the exercise of power. 

Is there a looming coup? 

Looking at the report – a redacted version (redacted because you know, secrets), it’s clear that a coup is only one of a very long list of emergency scenarios. It’s something against which a contingency has been developed, though there is nothing to indicate it is seen as a serious or realistic threat, at least not as the idea is typically understood, and as we’ve seen it happening in West Africa in recent years. 

Nor is there much beyond the report to suggest that this is a likelihood. South Africa’s military is chronically underfunded, underequipped, and has been indifferently led. Post-apartheid, it has played little role in political life, and even prior to that, it was kept under civilian control. These are not the makings of a power seizure by a cabal of generals.  

Still, the idea captures the imagination. It would be a sudden, dramatic end to the constitutional order. It’s a sensational idea, and while it may not capture executive offices, raising the possibility in public was bound to capture headlines. Frankly, I can’t help wondering if that wasn’t intentional, since very little has been said about the rest of the report. 

For many years, there has been both public and official concern about the state and conduct of the country’s intelligence apparatus. One of the early initiatives of President Ramaphosa’s incumbency was a review of the State Security Agency (SSA); this report was published in early 2019 and makes for deeply disconcerting reading.  

It flags systemic abuse of the intelligence services. Above all, it pointed to the intrusion of party politics into what should be (and for a constitutional state, absolutely needed to be) impartial, professional institutions. The report was candid: “From about 2005, with the emergence of the divisions in the ANC, there has been a growing politicisation and factionalisation of the civilian intelligence community based on the factions in the ANC. This has been partly aggravated by the fact that many of the leadership and management of the intelligence services have come from an ANC and liberation struggle background and have seemingly, in some cases, not been able to separate their professional responsibilities from their political inclinations. This became progressively worse during the administration of the former President, with parallel structures being created that directly served the personal and political interests of the President and, in some cases, the relevant ministers. All this was in complete breach of the Constitution, the White Paper, the legislation and other prescripts.” 

Much the same message was conveyed in the official report of the investigation into the 2021 riots. Compromised intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies, honed to fight the contests that that should appropriately be conducted in the open, within the law between competing political factions.  

What we have seen is corruption in its truest, ugliest sense. Not merely the appropriation of resources (though the SSA report damning states that the agency was used as a “cash cow”), but the perversion of institutions and the undermining of democratic processes. That this is happening with institutions tasked with managing information and keeping secrets makes it that much more chilling. 

Note though that the report is inaccurate in attributing these pathologies to “divisions” in the ANC. The issue was that political loyalties were made a central consideration for “deployment” into state institutions. So too is the contention that certain officers had “not been able to separate their professional responsibilities from their political inclinations”; they were expressly expected NOT to do so. In fact, as then President Mandela said in 1997, “you are not ANC cadres only ‘after hours.’” 

This was the overt, intentional and publicly announced programme of the ANC since the 1990s.  It was always starkly counter-constitutional, and always destined to be destructive. And here we are. 

Interestingly, the National security Strategy – while flagging the risk of a coup, and all manner of other things – makes no mention of party dynamics. There is no mention of the ANC, nor as far as I can see, of even an oblique or generalised comment about the threats that might emanate from intra-party (or for that matter, inter-party) competition. Matters deemed by previous reports to be of grave national importance are simply absent. 

Yet the risk of a coup was foregrounded. Seems to me like misdirection, and the eager uptake in the media that this was successful. We become so obsessed with a reported sighting of the lake monster that we don’t notice that the lake is being poisoned. 

As it happens, the briefing coincided with claims that another intelligence report – presented to the National Security Council, though I’m not clear on who compiled it – had identified DA MP, Emma Powell, as a malevolent actor in South Africa’s foreign projection. As an article in the Sowetan has it: “The report says Ms Powell has been identified as a primary architect of a negative narrative concerning South Africa’s International Court of Justice case within Washington DC. This narrative is characterised by the dissemination of information inconsistent with the official position of the government of SA.” 

There is something deeply unsound about a report being drawn up about the public and entirely legal activities of a Member of Parliament. Her trip to the US was no secret, and she probably showed more transparency about what she was up to than the President and foreign affairs system have with regard to their efforts on the relationship with that country – or on foreign affairs more broadly.  

There is also something deeply anti-pluralistic about this. “Negative narratives”, “inconsistent with the official position of the government of SA”, and, as is stated elsewhere, an “unauthorised” trip. It’s almost as if everyone is expected to endorse the official position. But this is not China , and Ms Powell is under no such constraints, and nor can they be imposed in a constitutional democracy. Certainly, the ANC has long conducted its own foreign affairs, sometimes piggy-backing the state (or making the state piggy-back on itself), and sometimes independently. It would, for example, be enlightening to know what the party’s representatives discussed with the Iranian ambassador at Luthuli House recently, or what its “cadres” are learning at the Chinese-sponsored Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Tanzania. I doubt that all of that has been subjected to any sort of intelligence review. 

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It’s also thoroughly misdirected. The idea that Ms Powell – or for that matter, Solidarity or the Freedom Front Plus – has skewed thinking against South Africa betrays an almost comical sense of self-pity, and a paranoid sense of siege.  

It comes from the same self-righteous roots as Ebrahim Rasool’s contention that South Africa was a “moral superpower”. The state of our politics and the mismanagement of the South African state over decades has been open for everyone to see, including those abroad. The pathologies in its legislation are easily apparent to anyone who chooses to read it. There is an enormous volume of commentary around it all. It’s not a bad “narrative” that is the problem, it’s a bad reality. 

By the way, Ms Powell says that she has WhatsApp messages from the President’s spokesperson in which he wished her fair fortune on the trip to US, and looking forward to hearing what they had learned on it. Strange days indeed. 

Reform 

It’s important to note that some measures have been taken to deal with the state of our intelligence, notably the General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill. This attempts to deal with some of the structural issues afflicting the intelligence system, notably by separating foreign from domestic intelligence and introducing oversight mechanisms. 

I’ll refrain from comment on these details. But unless there is a change in the political culture and the manner in which our politics and governance are conducted, we can expect more of the same. 

All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the correct one; so goes the principle of Occam’s Razor. It’s reductionist, but a decent principle for evaluating extreme claims. Carl Sagan memorably said that extraordinary claims demanded extraordinary evidence. A streak of light in the night sky does not prove extraterrestrial intelligence, and assuming it does, my late father might have said, only serves to blind us to the wonders of natural world. 

This is no less true for our politics and the bizarre claims that attend it. here are secrets here, conspiracies even, but no mysteries. We have seen over decades the pathologisation of the state to serve party political interests. That this has become mundane rather than fantastical.  

Indeed, all that is possibly inexplicable is why we might still be surprised or taken in by any of it.  

*Terence Corrigan is the Project Manager at the Institute, where he specialises in work on property rights, as well as land and mining policy. A native of KwaZulu-Natal, he is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg). He has held various positions at the IRR, South African Institute of International Affairs, SBP (formerly the Small Business Project) and the Gauteng Legislature – as well as having taught English in Taiwan. He is a regular commentator in the South African media and his interests include African governance, land and agrarian issues, political culture and political thought, corporate governance, enterprise and business policy.

This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission