Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, Minister in the Presidency responsible for the State Security Agency (SSA), cut a tragic figure as she confronted a barrage of questions from parliamentarians pertaining to the SSA – an agency in shambles.
Founded in 2009, bringing together the National Intelligence Agency, the South African Secret Service, the South African National Academy of Intelligence and the National Communications Centre, it has been mired in controversy since inception.
The legality of the proclamation which brought it into being was questioned. By 2015, its annual budget mushroomed to R4,308 million. However, these vast resources hardly benefited the country. Crime levels remained rampant, and the terrorist threat continued to grow in South Africa. Instead, millions from the SSA budget were siphoned off and the SSA itself was, perversely, implicated in state capture.
Unbelievably, then, matters got still worse. According to Jane Duncan, the SSA shielded former President Jacob Zuma from criticism by undermining the political opposition, created a fake labour union which was supportive of Zuma, illegally infiltrated civil society structures, and also attempted to disrupt Cyril Ramaphosa’s campaign to succeed Zuma as ANC president.
Given these partisan interests which the SSA was representing and the current electoral threat posed by Zuma’s MKP, it is perhaps unsurprising that Minister Ntshavheni wants to rid the SSA of Zuma acolytes. So, in December 2024 she announced that senior managers between the ages of 50 and 58 were asked to take early retirement or confront with retrenchment. It was expected that the rank and file of the SSA would also be confronted with such a choice.
Two problems
There are two problems with this position. First, such a move might well throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Not all SSA personnel between those ages may be Zuma-aligned and their departure may well result in the loss of valuable expertise when South Africa’s vulnerability to terrorism is increasingly apparent. Second, it is disconcerting that this was taking place while the Joint Standing Committee of Intelligence had still to be formed.
Any restructuring of the SSA should flow from the creation of the Joint Standing Committee to ensure that the process is fair and transparent and that it will not simply be a matter of replacing Zuma acolytes with those of Ramaphosa. What is desperately needed is an SSA that is truly professional and non-partisan and one that puts the country’s national interests first.
Returning to the most recent session in parliament, Minister Ntshavheni’s and the SSA’s responses were clearly underwhelming, sadly demonstrating how clueless they are in the face of real national security threats.
Two statements underscore the depth of the challenge posed with our current security apparatus and personnel. Ntshavheni proclaimed that the Agency was participating in a number of interdepartmental forums aimed at identifying terrorism risks. It is incredible that the SSA is still in the process of identifying terrorism risks when there are a number of media reports, academic articles, foreign government reports and UN documents mapping out the threat in vivid detail with facts which Pretoria scarcely contests.
Across the African continent
Consider here the threat posed by Islamic State across the African continent – from the Sahel to Central Africa and down the east African coast from Somalia and Tanzania into northern Mozambique.
Moreover, a number of active Islamic State cells exist in South Africa. In addition, the danger of the SSA interdepartmental fora is that they merely serve as an echo chamber that confirms the prevailing SSA position. This group think needs to be avoided at all costs.
The SSA, meanwhile, stressed that it was following up on various research and media reports that the country was being used by terrorists. At face value, this sounds positive but one would expect that our spooks, given the enormous resources at their disposal, would be ahead of journalists and academics when considering terrorist threats. However, whatever positive there may have been in this statement by the SSA was immediately undermined by the second part of the statement – the SSA belief that many of the reports lacked evidence.
Playing ostrich
This is in keeping with the position of successive South African governments, of playing ostrich, putting their head in the sand and downplaying the threat posed.
The credibility of the SSA’s statements is further undermined by the fact that South Africa’s own National Terrorism Financing Risk Assessment for 2024, which is an interdepartmental product approved at cabinet level, puts South Africa at high risk from terrorists.
As the terrorist threat intensifies regionally and nationally, Pretoria continues to fly blind.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dm-set/4298494017]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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