KEBBY MAPHATSOE - 'is a 'complete idiot' QUOTE

KEBBY MAPHATSOE -  'is a 'complete idiot' QUOTE

MAY 5TH 2015 THE STAR

HEREWITH ARTCLE IN THE STAR -Johannesburg - Kebby Maphatsoe misled Parliament on Tuesday when he tried to discredit The Star to get himself out of trouble.

The deputy minister of defence told Parliament that The Star got it wrong when reporting on Monday that he accused Public Protector Thuli Madonsela of being a CIA spy at the unveiling of a tombstone in Soweto at the weekend.

Then a few hours later, he apologised and withdrew his comments, in his capacity as chairman of the MK Military Veterans Association (MKMVA).

“After consultation with my organisation, the ANC, it would seem as though my statements have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. 

I therefore withdraw those statements and apologise for any offence and hurt that would have been caused.

“However, the behaviour and conduct of the public protector remains a concern to us,” he said.

Their only concern is that we are seeing more and more the idiots that surround the ANC

Maphatsoe’s original comments are on YouTube, available for anyone to hear.

“I reject the allegations about what I said,” Maphatsoe told Parliament on Tuesday, in confusing comments that indicated he stood by what he had said at the weekend and claimed The Star got it wrong.

“I refer all others to the record. I stand my ground that she (Madonsela) was never a member of Umkhonto weSizwe,” he said in a rowdy parliamentary session.

After a plethora of points of order and unparliamentary language, including DA MP David Maynier being asked to leave the National Assembly chamber for refusing to withdraw his remarks that Maphatsoe was an “idiot”, Maphatsoe had another go at explaining his comments at the tombstone unveiling.

“The journalist who published that article of The Star was not at that event. He used secondary documents.”.

Maphatsoe added “we have records that can be made available if people want”.

“So what is happening in the newspapers, and if people read correctly, there is nowhere in the newspaper, in The Star, where there is mention of the public protector being a Central Intelligence Agency spy.”

Maphatsoe said it was “just a headline, and by a person that was not there”.

But what Maphatsoe failed to tell Parliament was that The Star’s reporter, Baldwin Ndaba, watched a video clip of the event - made by the MKMVA and posted online to YouTube - and that Ndaba transcribed what Maphatsoe said in the video when he alluded to Madonsela allegedly being a CIA spy, then phoned him to verify it and ask him to explain his comments.

There was no SMS exchange, as Maphatsoe claimed. Instead, The Star’s phone records confirm the reporter’s call to Maphatsoe’s cellphone on Sunday.

This is what the video records Maphatsoe as saying, and which The Star quoted on Monday: “We can’t allow people to hijack the ANC. We’ll fight and defend the African National Congress. UThuli umele asitshele ukuthi ubani ihandler yakhe (Thuli must tell us who her handler is)” – to applause from the crowd. (Who her handler is.....the problem is that these people actually believe this absolute drivel)

“Thuli Madonsela can’t claim to say she was a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe and all of a sudden she’s acting like a counter-revolutionary…

“They are even using our institutions now… These Chapter Nine institutions were created by the ANC but are now being used against us. (Here what is happening is that the Public Protectors office is uncovering corruption on a huge scale in all the departments of the government. She is trying to hold them accountable....this is called counter - revolutionary by the ANC & their cadres)

 

“And if you ask why, it’s an agenda of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ama (the) Americans want their own CEO in South Africa, and we must not allow that.”

During the phone call, Maphatsoe confirmed his comments to Ndaba, and when Ndaba asked “Are you saying she is an agent”?, he confirmed this, saying he had been brief in his comments at the unveiling event but that he would hold a media briefing at Luthuli House on Monday where he would provide “full details” to back up his claim.

The Star ran Maphatsoe’s comments on the front page on Monday, but in the well-attended media briefing that morning, Maphatsoe did not dispute this, although he backed down on providing the additional information he had promised.

Maphatsoe did not contact either Ndaba or The Star to complain about the story.

At the media briefing he acknowledged having seen Monday’s story in the newspaper and commented that this was why so many journalists were at the briefing.

But by then storm clouds of criticism were gathering over Maphatsoe, ranging from Madonsela giving him an ultimatum to retract his spy allegation to the US ambassador Patrick Gaspard threatening a formal diplomatic complaint. - Additional reporting by Marianne Merten

Playing the ‘spy card’ an old trickSeptember 12 2014 at 12:32pm  Comment on this story

When Kebby Maphatsoe called Thuli Madonsela a CIA spy, he followed a long-established path within the ANC, writes Marianne Merten.

Cape Town - Deputy Defence Minister Kebby Maphatsoe’s limp apology shortly after a parliamentary session that saw ANC MPs accused of protecting him from answering for his spy claims against the public protector, may have closed this sorry chapter, but it has by no means closed the book on such narratives in South Africa’s public discourse.

When Maphatsoe resorted to describing Public Protector Thuli Madonsela as a CIA plant or spy, he followed a long-established path within the ANC, for such labels were applied to the “other” in political and organisational battles all the way back to exile days. It is part of a deeply ingrained history in this country.

The number of conspiracy theories is disturbing and it is never acceptable to throw about spy allegations, says Centre for the Study of Democracy director Steven Friedman, but there is a historical context.

“We have a history in which people were engaged in activities where, when you spoke to the wrong people, you’d get killed,” he says. “People used to be fingered as spies to settle arguments. This (Maphatsoe’s comment) is the consequence.” Many people were necklaced during the apartheid years for being collaborators, whether they were or not. 

Twenty years into democracy, the older generation dominates the ranks of political and government leadership under a president, schooled in exile intelligence, whose administration increasingly seems to favour the securocratic – from initially classifying the R215 million Nkandla security upgrades top secret to calling the riot police to Parliament.

But playing the spy card is not new, nor are conspiracy theories. In the Thabo Mbeki presidency, these largely, but not exclusively, focused on the outside – Western pharmaceutical profit motives and drive to impose their approach to HIV/Aids. This was only defeated through strong civic activism against Aids denialism and wide-ranging public debate.

On the political front, in 2001, businessmen Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa were accused of plotting to oust Mbeki, who was seeking a second term as president at the 2002 Stellenbosch ANC conference. The then-much-used label of “ultra-leftist” eventually fell away, as did the allegations against the trio.

In 2003, prosecutions boss Bulelani Ngcuka was accused of being the apartheid agent RS452 amid the ructions of his decision not to prosecute Jacob Zuma, then the country’s and the ANC’s deputy president. That was despite him saying there was a prima facie case for corruption.

Although the Hefer Commission of Inquiry found Ngcuka “probably never” was a spy and that number was linked to an Eastern Cape woman who moved to Britain, he traded prosecutions for business soon after.

In 2007, the Browse Mole Report, which claimed southern African intelligence support for Zuma’s bid for president and funding from as far afield as Libya, introduced the label “information peddlers” into South Africa’s political lexicon.

Mbeki lost his bid for a third term as party president, and the report was ultimately dismissed. But it brought into the limelight the divisions of the state intelligence services and their involvement in the political battles in the run-up to the Polokwane ANC national conference.

It was déjà vu in the run-up to the 2012 Mangaung ANC conference when the Ground Coverage Report, widely attributed to controversial crime intelligence boss Richard Mdluli, claimed a plot by four cabinet ministers to oust Zuma.

A year ago, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, on suspension for an office extra-marital affair, was accused of being part of a plot to undermine the government in an intelligence report that spins a web of insinuations against outspoken South Africans in legal and civil society circles.

Vavi said at the time: “The abuse of state institutions to drive internal factional wars has continued unabated. Some of us put our lives on the line and fought these tendencies. We thought it was buried at Polokwane. We were wrong.”

Judith February, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies governance, crime and justice division, says: “There’s a paranoia that runs deep in the ANC – and it’s not new to this administration.

“People casting suspicions, that squares with a culture in the ANC, it goes back to exile, and some of that is taken into a modern constitutional democracy,” she says.

The ANC firmly argues its right to be heard in public debates.

Its national spokesman Zizi Kodwa says there must be a multiplicity of voices, no matter how small, as all are crucial to a constitutional democracy, but the public discourse needs to be respectful and engaging.

Instead, he says, “when the ANC is under attack, there are celebrations”.

The spy comments from the deputy defence minister, also chairman of the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association and of the exile generation, ask the question whether the ANC’s hegemony, and its consistent election victories, somehow hasn’t translated into controlling the levers of state power.'

'Kebby Maphatsoe, the deputy defence minister who accused Thuli Madonsela of being a CIA spy, yesterday admitted he had run away from an ANC military camp during the struggle days.

It was during his escape that he lost his right arm, he told the Sunday Times in an interview yesterday. He was shot by soldiers of the Ugandan army.
"My escape was for a good intention, I am not a sell-out." said Maphatsoe, who was accused this week by MK veterans of ducking duty.
He said conditions in the ANC camp in Uganda were "unbearable". He said he left due to excessive punishment, poor conditions and inadequate food at the camp, in order to report these to senior ANC leaders in South Africa.
Previously, there were two contradicting versions of how he lost his arm.
In one version, Maphatsoe, the chairman of the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans' Association, said he was involved in a car accident in which he lost the arm.
In another, he said a hand grenade exploded in his hand.
Sunday Times investigations established that Maphatsoe was shot after he deserted from Ngoma camp and tried to escape to Kenya where he wanted to be repatriated to South Africa via a UN centre in that country in January 1991.
Maphatsoe also admitted in the interview that he was expelled from the camp in the northern part of Uganda after he was discharged from hospital, and sent to Kampala.'

He has told two different stories on how he lost his arm, and was expelled from the camp once he was ready to leave hospital.

The last great Hero.