Finish & Klaar: Selebi's fall from Interpol to the underworld

For Cecile, my rock and my rose

Corruption and maladministration are inconsistent with the rule of law and the fundamental values of our Constitution. They undermine the constitutional commitment to human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms. They are the antithesis of the open, accountable, democratic government required by the Constitution. If allowed to go unchecked and unpunished they will pose a serious threat to our democratic state.

- Former chief justice Arthur Chaskalson in South African Association of Personal Injury Lawyers v Heath and Others, 2000

Working South African journalists don’t write books. We chase tons of stories every day, break them, drink beer and watch how the café attendant wraps fish and chips in our precious work of yesterday. Tomorrow we wake up and do the same thing. Sitting in courtroom 4B of the South Gauteng High Court for over fifty days, listening to the gripping evidence being stacked up against the former Interpol president and South Africa’s police chief Jackie Selebi, I realised this wasn’t just another story in which fish and chips should be wrapped.

Selebi was the most prominent civil servant facing corruption charges post-1994. He was a powerful member of the governing African National Congress and the stakes at play were huge. The investigation and eventual prosecution against him claimed the careers and reputations of mighty people. It fertilised the soil for the most efficient law enforcement agency in South Africa’s history – the Scorpions – to be shut down and exposed police corruption at the highest levels. The Selebi trial also exposed the ugly face of organised crime and showed how quickly and relatively easily its tentacles were able to reach into the office of the one man supposed to uphold law and order in the land.

Luckily, a number of special and courageous people agreed with me that this story needed to be recorded in a more lasting form than newsprint.

Adriaan Basson,

Johannesburg, August 2010

FOREWORD by Ferial Haffajee

In May 2006, which feels like a lifetime away now, my colleagues at the Mail & Guardian came to me with a story, the basis of which was that the national police commissioner Jackie Selebi was on the take.

The Mail & Guardian’s crack team of Stefaans Brümmer, Sam Sole and Nic Dawes broke the story and invited a storm upon our heads. The cops formed a thick blue line around Selebi, dismissing the story and the newspaper. Political pressure was intense and dirty tricks the order of the day, as Brümmer and Sole faced efforts to plant drugs on them and monitor their mobile phones. Later there was a raid on our offices and late-night attempts to gag the story.

‘Not Jackie,’ I remember thinking when they first told me of the story. The same incredulity peppered later conversations with my friend and fellow editor Mondli Makhanya when the Sunday Times followed our work. ‘Not Jackie.’

In my simplistic division of politicians, he was a good guy. He was not a Joe Modise, the former defence minister who was known to be corrupt and corruptible. Or a member of the Alex Mafia, the second generation of activists from Alexandra township in Gauteng, who treated the provincial fiscus as their personal piggy bank. Or even a Jacob Zuma, who at the time was at the centre of the arms deal scandal and who had been ousted for allegedly getting his bagman Schabir Shaik to ask for a half-a-million-rand allowance from an arms company.

As the investigation unfolded, we found that Selebi was at the centre of a Scorpions’ investigation christened, ironically, Operation Bad Guys. It shook my trust and political moorings as someone who believed intrinsically in the African National Congress as a largely moral force, which took care in its choice of cadres to lead the party. And it began a process of rapid political maturing in our country where we saw, graphically, through the investigation, prosecution and eventual conviction of Selebi, that power does corrupt. Sadly, corrosively, quickly, power does corrupt.

Jackie Selebi’s life story was one of those that taught us as young people the art of the possible. A schoolteacher, he was targeted by the system and had to leave the country. In exile his life was one of service in the achievement of freedom. He ended his life in exile at the United Nations in Geneva, where he built a reputation as a negotiator and lobbyist for anti-landmine and small arms protocols.

When he came back home, it was as a hero and a natural leader. As the first post-apartheid director-general of foreign affairs, he had his work cut out for him. How to take the isolated and shamed pariah state and capitalise on the global goodwill to build a geopolitical strategy that would deliver desperately needed investment and influence for South Africa? It was not an easy task but he acquitted himself well, and soon his friend and president Thabo Mbeki asked him to become national police commissioner.

With crime out of hand – an unexpected and sour consequence of freedom – Selebi was widely welcomed in our misguided belief that political activists made good crime fighters. Selebi soon revealed his arrogance when he called a young constable a ‘chimpanzee’ because she was not reverential to him on a visit to a police station. It was an arrogance that would contain the seeds of his destruction. Selebi believed himself to be infallible, but the easy way in which he was lured by lucre speaks instead of a man who has not mastered the ways of the world even though he was a globetrotter.

Convicted drug dealer Glenn Agliotti courted Selebi and found his Achilles heel, a love of bling. While in the main Selebi’s court case has often been dry, it has been narrative of bling: the Fubu kit Agliotti sponsored for Selebi’s boys, tens of thousands in cash parcels and even expensive handcrafted leather shoes bought for Mbeki (Agliotti said he bought them; Selebi said he did).

As an aide to Selebi told me when he was convicted, none of this bling is affordable on a commissioner’s salary and so, somewhere in his conscience the commissioner justified these as gifts from ‘a friend, finish and klaar’. Thus was traded a reputation measurable in gold for a few pieces of silver. In essence, Selebi became a bellboy for Agliotti, available for dinners with others in the shady businessman network of cronies, on the other end of a phone line when there was trouble like Brett Kebble’s gruesome death on the side of a Jo’burg road.

He dropped us, the nation, and all our trust in him for a cappuccino in Sandton City where he helped his friend Glenn out of several sticky situations.

When the charges were laid, Selebi was suspended and his friends quickly evaporated like the foam over a rapidly cooling cappuccino. His political support thinned to nothing by the day of his sentencing, when only his friends, family and his loyal wife, Anne, attended.

Alone, drained, grey, Selebi cut a pathetic figure. Abandoned, broke and bitter. Selebi’s is a cautionary tale, his story played out for national attention by ever-vigilant cameras.

My great and abiding fear is that we, or at least those who lead us, have learnt nothing, and that our criminal justice system is not sturdy enough to prosecute corruption in thorough and committed ways. Corruption is entrenched, from the metro cops who let you off for R20, to the mining officials who give up concessions to cronies in dubious circumstances, to the numerous shady tenders ticked as OK in provinces and municipalities everywhere. Corruption curdles hopes and dreams; it keeps wealth and prosperity circling within connected elites so that it never percolates downward. It destroys leaders and it harms trust.

All these trends are contained in this book written by the country’s most talented young investigative journalist. I hope it becomes one of those books that people talk about and learn from. It must teach us as ordinary citizens to say that corruption is not acceptable, whether small or grand.

Ferial Haffajee

Johannesburg

Haffajee was editor of the Mail & Guardian from February 2004 until her appointment as editor-in-chief of City Press in March 2009.

KEY CHARACTERS

Agliotti, Glenn: Convicted drug trafficker, and Jackie Selebi’s corruptor and (former) friend.

Cilliers, Jaap: Jackie Selebi’s senior advocate in his corruption trial.

Joffe, Meyer: South Gauteng High Court judge who convicted Selebi of corruption in July 2010.

Kebble, Brett: Mining boss, former chief executive of Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company (JCI), murdered in September 2005.

Leask, Andrew: Chief investigating officer of the Scorpions in the Selebi case.

Mabandla, Brigitte: Former minister of justice in Mbeki’s cabinet.

Mbeki, Thabo: Former president of South Africa and close friend of Selebi who appointed him as national police commissioner in 1999.

McCarthy, Leonard: Now working for the World Bank, he was the last head of the Scorpions before the unit was officially disbanded in January 2009.

Mphego, Mulangi: Former assistant police commissioner of crime intelligence, known to have been very close to Selebi.

Muller, Dianne: Glenn Agliotti’s former fiancée and key witness in the Selebi trial.

Nassif, Clinton: Owner of Central National Security Group, a security company specialising in covert activities, and security boss of Brett Kebble’s mining companies.

Nel, Gerrie: The state’s chief prosecutor in its case against Selebi. Nel headed the Scorpions in Gauteng.

O’Sullivan, Paul: The Irish-born former head of airports security who played a significant role in securing sensitive witnesses and evidence for the Scorpions.

Pikoli, Vusi: Former national director of public prosecutions who authorised an investigation into Selebi in March 2006. Pikoli was fired by the government in December 2008.

Pruis, André: Selebi’s loyal deputy police commissioner.

Rautenbach, Billy: Infamous Zimbabwean businessman and ally of President Robert Mugabe’s regime.

Schultz, Mikey: Professional boxer, former bouncer, and self-confessed killer of Brett Kebble.

Stemmet, Paul: Head of Palto security company, that provided undercover services to the police under Selebi. His affidavit set off the Selebi investigation.

Stratton, John: Brett Kebble’s business partner and head of security operations for the Kebble mining companies.

ABBREVIATIONS

Acsa Airports Company South Africa

AIN Associated Intelligence Networks

ANC African National Congress

CMMS Consolidated Mining Management Services

CNSG Central National Security Group

DRD Durban Roodepoort Deep

DSO Directorate of Special Operations (the Scorpions)

FHR Foundation for Human Rights

HSC Heath Specialist Consultants

ICD Independent Complaints Directorate

Idasa Institute for Democracy in South Africa

ISS Institute for Security Studies

JCI Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company

MK Umkhonto weSizwe

NDPP National Director of Public Prosecutions

NEC National Executive Committee of the ANC

NIA National Intelligence Agency

Nicoc National Intelligence Coordinating Committee

NPA National Prosecuting Authority

R&E Randgold & Exploration

SAPS South African Police Service

SARS South African Revenue Service

Saso South African Student Organisation

1 Selebi’s tragic fall

Crime is a global phenomenon, affecting every country in the world, and Africa is now in the privileged position of having one of its own at the helm of international crime fighting.

– Jackie Selebi after being elected Interpol president, October 2004

Jackie Selebi never wanted the job. After returning home from Geneva in 1998, where he served as South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations, Selebi was appointed by Nelson Mandela’s cabinet as South Africa’s first black director-general of foreign affairs. But his tenure as the country’s über diplomat was to be short-lived. In October 1999, Thabo Mbeki, after being sworn in as the ANC’s second state president, contacted his good friend Selebi to ask him a favour. This is how Selebi recalled the interaction during his 2010 corruption trial:

I had gone to see the president [Mbeki] about some issue we were preparing for the negotiations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. … At the end of this, when I was leaving the official state house, he got me by the hand – which means there is trouble – pushed me to one side, away from the rest of the people that were there, and said, ‘Jackie, you know we have a problem … The problem is George Fivaz going. We do not have a commissioner of police. So I asked people to give me a list; they gave me a list of a hundred names to choose from. From [these] hundred names one person can be commissioner of police. I looked at this list and the only name that I found that I can think of is you.’

That is why I looked at him; I thought he was not well. I said: ‘Hah, me? I got back from Geneva to become DG of the department of foreign affairs. Whilst I am doing this now you are telling me I must go to the police. Me in the police? You know where I come from. Me and the police!’

Reflecting on his reticence in accepting the post and the manner in which Mbeki put the idea to him, Selebi said in court: ‘I made a mistake at that meeting.’ Mbeki put it to him that while he himself was not insisting on appointing Selebi, his advisors were: ‘Because he [Mbeki] had indicated that: No, I did not like to do this [i.e. appoint Selebi] … but all everybody is saying is you [i.e. Selebi for the post].’ Not knowing how to interpret Mbeki’s equivocal response ‘[Mbeki] had said he did not like the suggestion that he [himself] was making to me,’ Selebi continued with his recollection of the interaction:

I thought I was being smart and became brave and said to him, ‘What do you say? If the others say I must go there, what do you say?’ And then he said, ‘I say you must go [i.e. accept the position].’ That was the end of the discussion. So I then prepared myself to go to the police and that is how it happened.

Admitting that he made a mistake when accepting the job was a rare moment of frankness in Selebi’s trial. He probably didn’t have much of a choice though: the ANC’s practice of cadre deployment is not one that leaves much room for individual preference. And Selebi was very loyal to Mbeki. This was illustrated during an interview about the charges against him conducted by former Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy on 23 November 2006. Asked about allegations that he took bribes, Selebi said, ‘One of the things that I will never do is to embarrass the president. That man … me and him come from far … And I have always said to myself, if [there is] one man I will not disappoint, it’s that one.’

In the weeks and months following Selebi’s appointment, Mbeki was slammed by opposition parties and critics for appointing a civilian and senior ANC politician to the job. It was a risky move, but Selebi was a Mbeki loyalist. And it surely wasn’t the first time in history that a president appointed one of his allies as chief of police.

For Selebi it was a career-defining job. It was also an impossible job, one that was more than likely to end in tears. In 1999, the year that he took over, 23 823 South Africans were murdered.¹ These were hideous figures compared to the same year’s murder rates in other countries – Argentina (2 150), Australia (700), Canada (1 221), Israel (137), Japan (1 265), Korea (976) and Swaziland (174).²

While Selebi often pointed out that the police couldn’t be expected to solve the country’s crime problem by themselves, the crime rate did not decrease significantly during his tenure. South Africa’s cold, hard crime statistics are a big blot on a legacy that was once full of promise.

But it is the stain of a corruption conviction that the history books will record as the downfall of a man once feared by all the president’s men and women, including the president himself.

Selebi’s story is a tragic one – a man who never really wanted the toughest job in the land, but was too ambitious and loyal to his political master to decline the offer. What made it an even bigger tragedy was that Selebi also became the first African president of Interpol – the International Criminal Police Organisation.

In a press statement a few days after his election as Interpol president on 8 October 2004, Selebi said, ‘I am as committed as ever to reducing the levels of crime in South Africa and to playing a role in combating transnational crimes in the Southern African region. I can now also play a pivotal role in countering international crime and terrorism together with all member countries of Interpol.’

Unbeknown to Interpol and fellow Africans and South Africans, Selebi had already eaten of the poisoned fruit. The man who had succeeded in his temptation of Selebi – Norbert Glenn Agliotti – fitted well into the category of transnational organised crime that Selebi had committed himself to fight tooth and nail. Agliotti, a flamboyant underworld character with a penchant for the finer things in life, had given Selebi R10 000 in a brown envelope on 14 June 2004 – the first in a series of bribes to buy the police chief’s favour, time and influence.

This was after Agliotti was recruited by the well-known Kebble mining family. They wanted Agliotti to assist them in what they believed to be an onslaught on their integrity by a competitor whom they thought was being assisted by the country’s law enforcement agencies. Agliotti set his price, and mining tycoon Brett Kebble agreed to pay $1 million for access to Selebi. They set up a special company for this purpose and Agliotti proceeded in ‘grooming’ Selebi with growing parcels of cash, often collected by Selebi in full police uniform from Agliotti’s Midrand office.

In the meanwhile, Selebi was shamelessly performing his SAPS and Interpol duties, attending international anti-corruption conferences, and leading the global fight against crime. His taste for expensive clothing had hit full stride after the Interpol appointment, and shortly afterwards Selebi opened an account with a luxury men’s boutique in Sandton City, and started splurging on expensive Brioni and Aigner suits with money he didn’t have. At the time, Selebi was taking home just over R30 000 per month after taxes. Some of the suits he bought cost more than his entire monthly salary.

In September 2005 Brett Kebble, by then also one of the country’s biggest patrons of local art, died in a hail of bullets while driving to a dinner in Melrose, Johannesburg. This set in motion a series of events that culminated just over a year later in Agliotti’s arrest by the Scorpions, the National Prosecuting Authority’s successful elite investigating unit that was disbanded in 2009 and, ultimately, in Selebi’s conviction.

In May 2006, the Mail & Guardian published details linking Selebi to a criminal syndicate dealing in narcotics and contraband. The same men were being investigated for the murder of Kebble. Agliotti was reportedly the leader of the pack, but little was known about him. In an interview with the Mail & Guardian’s Nic Dawes on 21 July 2006, the police chief admitted: ‘Agliotti is someone I know since 1992 or 1994. I know him as a friend, finish and klaar.’ Admitting to his friendship with a man he knew was operating on the wrong side of the law would become the ringtone of the Selebi corruption story. Agliotti’s lawyer confirmed the friendship, saying, ‘Our client has been a personal friend of Commissioner Selebi for a number of years and meets with him socially from time to time.’³

Asked whether he was concerned about the Scorpions’ investigation into people he regarded as friends, Selebi said: ‘They can look at anything about it. I’d say, Go ahead. I’ll still be sitting here and there will be nothing that comes out of that. I am not bothered.’ ⁴

It was this arrogance that finally brought down a man who thought he was cleverer than anyone else and untouchable. For years Selebi had the political protection of the country’s highest office. This was starkly illustrated by the desperate attempt to save him from prosecution after the Scorpions unit obtained a warrant for his arrest. In the scramble to protect Selebi, the country’s prosecutions head Vusi Pikoli lost his job, and the Scorpions unit was undermined to an extent that made it possible for the ANC to shut it down once it started sniffing around the highest echelons of power.

Selebi was one of the smartest civil servants in Pretoria and a veteran of the struggle. This guaranteed him respect and safeguarded him from scrutiny. But, to borrow from Yeats – when things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Although Selebi succeeded in clinging on to his job, salary and status for a few undeserved years, his dark side swiftly overshadowed his clean reputation.

The Selebi corruption saga brought to the fore the dark side of Mandela’s rainbow nation. For a moment the door to a world we wished didn’t exist was opened and what we saw was ugly: cops and robbers tangoing together at the expense of law-abiding citizens who believed the police were the ‘good guys’; opportunistic politics triumphing over the fair and equal application of the country’s laws, and the real ‘good guys’ being trampled upon in the desperate efforts to protect the integrity and career of one compromised man.

It would be naïve to think that Selebi’s loss of protection was unconnected to the change of guard in the governing ANC. Mbeki was voted out as party head in December 2007 and replaced with Jacob Zuma, a man also facing serious corruption charges. Ironically, the case against Zuma looked on paper to be a much stronger one than that against Selebi: in Zuma’s case there was at least a substantial paper trail. However, in April 2009, a month before South Africa’s national election took place, charges against Zuma were controversially dropped by the National Prosecuting Authority. Selebi had no such luck. His friend and protector, Mbeki, was no longer in power and he had to face the music.

2 ‘I’m not a policeman’

This is our country – we will not allow any criminal to take control of it.

– Commissioner Jackie Selebi, inaugural speech, 13 January 2000

Jackie Selebi’s first run-in with the law happened much earlier than his policing career. As a young history teacher in Soweto in the 1970s, Selebi was arrested under the apartheid government’s Terrorism Act of 1967 for political activities relating to his support of the ANC.

At his 2010 trial, Selebi described the political activities that led ultimately to his detention by police. He studied to become a teacher at the University of the North and his first political affiliation was with the ANC-aligned South African Student Organisation. He ran Saso’s Johannesburg office and was involved in organising Saso events in the old Transvaal province. Selebi testified that it was during this time that he was introduced to Yusuf Surtee, Nelson Mandela’s famous tailor, who would in later years play an interesting part in reconnecting Selebi with Glenn Agliotti.

After his conviction, one of Selebi’s ex-pupils at Musi High School in Pimville, Soweto, described Selebi as a maverick, troublemaker teacher who was known for his love of Mafia novels.⁵ Drum magazine journalist Kaizer Ngwenya was in matric in 1973 when Selebi taught him history and, more often, politics. He recalls one of Selebi’s favourite books – Honor thy father, the biography of New York gangster boss ‘Crazy Joe’ Bonanno. Selebi, according to Ngwenya, always had an eye for a quick buck. As a student, Selebi worked at a bookstore in downtown Johannesburg where according to Ngwenya he could ‘cut you a deal. … my friends and I would wait for him in a dark passage behind the bookstore where he would sell us setwork books and stationary at discounted prices’ . ⁶

As a teacher, Ngwenya said Selebi was ‘overweight, wore his hair in an