MICHAEL MORRIS: Let’s not forget: the ANC’s graft murk goes all the way back to the arms deal - Business Day

Michael Morris
Andrew Feinstein told me an amusing story when I interviewed him all the way back in 2007 about his just-published excoriation of the ANC and its shameful (mis)handling of the arms deal, After the Party, A Personal and Political Journey inside the ANC. 

Last week I revisited the slightly more than 2,000-word piece I wrote on that interview in the first week of November 18 years ago, and found it rather depressing. 

Feinstein, for those who may need reminding, was an ANC MP in the late 1990s who, as chair of parliament’s public accounts committee, helped lead the most important attempt since the information scandal in the 1970s to expose government corruption and examine allegations that its senior figures — and the governing party itself — raked in millions of rand in secret.   

The arms deal probe his committee tried to launch was blocked by powerful people in government. Feinstein was eventually axed from his committee post in 2001 by then ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni and — having been “compelled to choose between truth and lies” — left the party that year.

Little of this was cheering then, or now. But, first, the amusing story. Reflecting in 2007 on the non-reaction to his book by senior party figures, Feinstein recalled a semi-exception. “I had a very funny experience in London recently when the BBC did a programme on the arms deal on Newsnight with me and [former public enterprises minister] Alec Erwin. And throughout all Erwin said was ‘that’s not true’, ‘no, no, that’s not true’, ‘no, no, that can’t be true’. 

“The next morning our high commissioner in London called the BBC and said the minister demanded a right of reply and he happened to be in London. The BBC said: ‘Well, how can you demand a right of reply? He was on the programme.’ So the high commissioner said ‘he wants to talk about it further’, and the BBC said that would be wonderful and since the minister was in London they could do something that night, and I could appear live with him. Well, they didn’t hear from him again.”

The arms deal almost certainly marked the beginning of the ANC’s decline, its descent into the murk of corruption. Feinstein was among the first to recognise as much. In the closing chapter of After the Party he acknowledges the emotional torment of taking a stand, of being “almost embarrassed at the thought of bumping into my former colleagues, as if I had done something wrong, shameful”, and “the personal sadness and loneliness of (saying publicly) that the good guys are corruptible”. 

Yet, there is some comfort in 2025. Feinstein’s conviction two decades ago that the prospect of “politics of basic truth, honesty and accountability” depended on individuals having the courage to “speak truth to power” is — neither miraculously nor magically — reflected today, most notably, in the candour of former chief justice Raymond Zondo, not least his stating plainly that he has less faith in the Hawks than he had in the agency’s predecessor, the Scorpions (whose disbandment by the ANC in 2007 left SA exposed to state capture). 

“The results are there for us to see,” Zondo said last week. “I don’t believe that the Hawks are up to their job.” He deserves applause, but more than that, what Zondo — and the country no less so — deserves the most is our willingness to be as courageous and forthright.   

We do have a different government; now it must be compelled to act differently. 

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-07-28-michael-morris-lets-not-forget-the-ancs-graft-murk-goes-all-the-way-back-to-the-arms-deal/