SAPS Wars Part 3: Bheki Cele, Robert McBride and the mysterious Mr Marimuthu | amaBhungane
Part 3 traces the central role of Robert McBride - and his not so surprising fallout with President Cyril Ramaphosa's minister of police, Bheki Cele."We are in the thick of a full-blown war right now," political commentator Oscar van Heerden wrote last month.
They are similar in other ways: Both are essentially poachers turned gamekeepers and both grew strong in KwaZulu-Natal, where the line between war and politics was always blurred and bleeding.Both were sharp thorns disrupting Zuma's state capture footwork, slowing him down, hobbling his foot soldiers.
Perhaps most crucial was IPID's intervention, on the eve of the Nasrec conference, to investigate and block the purchase by SAPS crime intelligence of a"grabber" to intercept cellphone communications. There are indications that crime intelligence agents opposed to Mdluli played a role in surfacing allegations that their new boss was involved in the 1999 murder of love rival Oupa Ramogibe - which culminated in his current trial on charges of intimidation, kidnapping, assault and defeating the ends of justice.
The 2006 report of the Jali commission into prison corruption states that in 1992 Marimuthu was sentenced to four years imprisonment for dealing in mandrax. Marimuthu was frank about his strategy. Speaking about"a very good friend of mine in government", he explained that he had thought about"how to get to this guy and get closer to him".
AmaBhungane has also seen an affidavit from a crime intelligence agent to the effect that in conversations around the same period Marimuthu told the agent that he and Cele"were very good friends and he was looking after him as they have business deals together". While the story - subsequently withdrawn by the Sunday Times - has been criticised for mistakes and sensationalism, perhaps its gravest sin was to omit the context of the political war between Mdluli and Cele.
"My current engagements with Minister Cele relate to addressing cash-in-transit heists since I am now working at Fidelity Security Services who deal with cash-in-transit."As well as sending the damning intelligence report to Zuma, he also attempted to buy influence over Cele by recruiting Marimuthu, according to a 2012 report prepared for the Inspector General of Intelligence .
This may have significance in relation to Cele's decision to oppose the renewal of McBride's IPID contract. Meanwhile, the Hawks were also pursuing him as part of a larger investigation into abuses of the crime intelligence secret fund. In September 2011, Mdluli faced further charges of fraud and corruption in the Commercial Crimes Court in Pretoria. He was alleged to have employed his friends and family as intelligence operatives, and misused police funds to purchase luxury cars.
Thuli Madonsela found that Cele's role in the dodgy procurement of two building leases for new police headquarters amounted to maladministration. The way Mdluli overplayed his hand against Cele served to bury the unsubstantiated, but unanswered, allegations in the Ground Coverage report. Until now.Zuma's second term launched the almost total capture of the security services.In September, Mdluli ally Berning Ntlemeza was made the new Hawks boss and proceeded to suspend Booysen, then head of the Hawks in KwaZulu-Natal.
McBride also relied on another ally, private forensic investigator Paul O'Sullivan, who was dragged off a London-bound flight by a Hawks team in April 2016. It is alleged that two SAPS service providers that benefited from SAPS tenders had contributed more than R1m to construction costs on Phahlane's house and had subsidised his family's luxury cars.Phahlane, in turn, accused O'Sullivan of having"unlawfully inveigled himself" into the IPID investigation"as if he were a member of SAPS".
This cloak-and-dagger maneuvering culminated in an amazing coup for McBride: The successful halting of that inflated"grabber" purchase, a deal he alleges was a last-minute effort to conjure up cash to swing the ANC election at Nasrec in December 2017.Several sources sympathetic to McBride told amaBhungane they believed McBride's dogged pursuit of the grabber case was a bridge too far for his survival as IPID executive director.
McBride added that, about the same time, SAPS Crime intelligence also procured from I-View a system known as"Daedalus" to encrypt cellular phone communications, for an amount of R21m. McBride concluded:"On 15 December 2017, IPID contacted the National Commissioner, General Khehla Sitole… Following IPID's recommendation, General Sitole stopped the processing of payment to I-View."
Who knew what else the IPID dragnet might dredge up from the depths of the secret fund: the truth about Marimuthu perhaps?IPID was also demanding SAPS disclose material relating to another project with political undertones: the employment by crime intelligence of Captain Morris"KGB" Tshabalala. "This budget was not properly accounted for and as a result IPID and the Office of the Inspector General of Intelligence [are] conducting an investigation in this regard," the IPID briefing stated.
In an affidavit, Nkabinde denied this. When he was shown to have lied about a crucial detail in his affidavit, the magistrate found him to be dishonest, rendering his evidence unreliable.Despite this, Nkabinde's claims against McBride later formed the major plank of Cele's justification for not renewing McBride's contract.The saga around Nkabinde shows how the battle between McBride and the SAPS brass played out.
In an affidavit, Hlungwani explained how he had become friendly with Nkabinde in mid-2017, when the IPID investigator was introduced to him by the then-acting crime intelligence head, Major General Pat Mokushane, together with McBride and Matthews Sesoko, IPID's national head of investigation. "Around November 2017… a contact of mine warned me against being close to Mr Nkabinde as he believed he was a double agent working with our Counter Intelligence... I did not take this serious as I had done nothing wrong…"
"He told me that I will be bringing the whole Top Management of the SAPS down and I must be aware that these people are very powerful people and have just been appointed therefore I will be fighting against the whole Police Force as I will be taking down the National Commissioner and his two deputies and the Acting Divisional Commissioner of Crime Intelligence and that the generals can get hitmen to kill me.
The IPID staffer alleged, among other things, that McBride allowed a private person – forensic investigator O'Sullivan – to conduct official investigations, had divulged confidential information to him and conducted investigations through the media in order to deliberately tarnish the reputations of targeted individuals.
As far as amaBhungane could establish, the chair never distributed the complaint officially, though it was leaked to the media later that month. Cele was forced to concede and the matter was referred to the multi-party committee at the eleventh hour for three days of bad-tempered debate, starting on February 25.
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