The plan is to sow mistrust and confusion, in order to undermine cohesion and fragment the ANC. The best way is to accuse members and leaders of having served the apartheid regime as spies. As if anybody is immune from being called a spy. Even those accusing others of being spies can be spies themselves. There are no angels in war.

In this self-serving scenario, nothing can be ruled out.

When former president Jacob Zuma said that Ngoako Ramatlhodi was recruited to work for the apartheid regime while in Lesotho in the 1980s, it came as a shock. Zuma had served with Ramatlhodi in the National Executive Committee of the ANC since 1991, so why did he not report Ramatlhodi to ANC security and intelligence then and there?

As president, decades later, he appointed Ramatlhodi as a minister of public service and administration from 2015 to 2017, and later appointed him as a minister of mineral resources. The question in everybody’s mind, of course, is: why do you knowingly appoint a spy to serve in your Cabinet? Is this not treason?

And what about the oath of office which you took to act in the best interests of the republic, when you promised to serve the republic with all your ability?

Then come the supposed revelations that the last chief of staff of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), General Siphiwe Nyanda, was working for the apartheid machinery. General Nyanda served as the chief of the South African National Defence Force from 1998 to 2005. This is a man who supported Jacob Zuma’s campaign to be president of the ANC at the Polokwane elective conference in December 2007. Now Zuma is throwing him under the bus.

General Nyanda served the ANC/MK for more than 40 years. As ANC members and MK veterans we have never had doubts about his loyalty. Worse still, his brother Zwelakhe Nyanda was shot and killed by Eugene de Kock as an apartheid assassin in Swaziland in November 1983. This means that Zuma is trying to make us believe that General Nyanda was working with the killers of his brother. What a sham. So the people of South Africa are seriously supposed to believe that Zuma appointed General Nyanda to be a minister of communications, knowing him to have been a supposed enemy agent.

Where is his loyalty to the Republic of South Africa?

In desperation, following the present inquiry by Judge Raymond Zondo into State Capture of South Africa by the Guptas and Watsons under Zuma’s leadership, it has become clear that he is trying to kill the ANC in order to save his own skin, by sowing confusion and mistrust among members. We can assure him that he will not succeed. The ANC will overcome this.

At the State Capture inquiry, he seemed not to remember the instructions he gave to Themba Maseko, the director of Government Communication and Information Systems. His memory also seems to have failed him about his giving instructions to former minister of public enterprises Barbara Hogan to appoint Siyabonga Gama as CEO of Transnet.

Yet he “remembers” that Ngoako Ramatlhodi was recruited to work for the apartheid regime more than 30 years ago in Lesotho. His selective memory loss is not convincing.

As to who was a spy in the ANC, this is likely to be a lifetime secret. We may never know all the former spies in the ANC. Patricia De Lille had a list of spies that outgoing President FW De Klerk supposedly gave to incoming President Nelson Mandela. We are still waiting to see that list. We might never see it.

As the way forward for the ANC, the problems we have are political and not espionage-based. Our problems emanate from our parliamentary electoral laws, which have established autocracy and not democracy in Parliament and the provincial legislatures. We as voters have no power to choose or get rid of any elected politician at this level, since the Constitution – as it is at present – gives us the right only to vote for this or that political party.

It was easy for the Guptas and the Watsons. All they had to do was to capture the president through corruption, and he then had total power to get rid of any ANC MP or provincial councillor who defied him. This is not democracy; it is a shameful semi-slave political system, since our MPs are slaves to their bosses in party headquarters.

Most of the corruption will be addressed by the people of South Africa – the voters – once we reform the parliamentary electoral laws and start directly electing 75% (300) of Members of Parliament to represent ourselves, with political parties appointing 25% (100) of MPs. Power in the hands of the people is the best safeguard of the republic and its Constitution. At present we are powerless against corruption because we are powerless in Parliament.

Within the ANC, we need to establish One ANC Member, One Vote for electing leaders from the president to the branch chairperson. This will clean the ANC despite rogues within the party.

It is time to renew the ANC and our electoral system, rather than trying to search for former spies. If we do not do this, and carry on as at present, we are playing a loser’s game.

Political parties can only be cleaned when Parliament is clean as the seat of power. We can successfully reform ANC internal electoral laws after the parliamentary electoral reforms have been undertaken.

Let us empower ourselves now as ANC members to clean the party of Sol Plaatje, John Langalibalele Dube and Reverend James Calata.

No more sowing of confusion. DM

Omry Makgoale is a rank-and-file member of the ANC. These are his personal views