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Saturday 8 October 2011

'Anarchy' in the ANC

The big news of this week - be it the first that I come to present in an immanent archive - has been the split in the ANC's Tshwane region. A dissident congress was held by a cluster of 40 branches as opposed to the 89 that filled the official congress in Midrand on the weekend of 1-2 October.  The splinter group is according to the chairperson it elected, Mafika Mahlangu, has legitimate grievances related to how the party drew up the lists of local government councillors. Mayor of Tshwane, Kgosientso Ramokgopa, who was re-elected chairperson of the region at the official congress, pronounced after the congress ended this past Sunday his first priority to be to clamp down on the ill-discipline in the party's regional structures. The stick he was to haul out this week was a truncheon. Gauteng ANC secretary, David Makhura, on Wednesday convened a press conference announcing an investigation into the 'gang of anarchists' behind the dissident congress. What stunned the country, seated dolefully for the nightly SABC news, was the allegation that the dissidents were funded by 'dirty money' from cash-in-transit heists.

The reference to heists must be to Mafika Mahlangu's checkered connections to the armed gangs taking aim at the banking industry. He was an associate of Colin Chauke, the kingpin nailed for the first wave of heists, and both were councillors for Winterveld outside Pretoria. It's without a sense of irony, then, that Mafika Mahlangu was reported to be a member of a gang of ex-soldiers dubbed ‘Government’.‘Known’ for their sophistication and military training, their reach was international with Mahlangu, having both trained in Zimbabwe and been captured in Botswana. He and Chauke were co-accused in the case of a heist in 1997 that reportedly copied the tactics of Robert de Niro’s gang in a Hollywood blockbuster to crash a cash-in-transit vehicle carrying R17-million and executing the guards. Both were acquitted of involvement in this especially ruthless heist. The two also faced charges related to another, R12.6-million heist, but while Mahlangu was cleared, Chauke and five others shot their way out of Pretoria Central Prison in December 1997 before the verdict could be read. An enthralled media divulged the exploits of Colin Chauke over the course of the 410-day cat-and-mouse game he played with his pursuers. Newspaper articles burnished his struggle credentials, even reporting an allegation that he had been seen at the birthday party of Peter Mokaba, the then Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs. The notoriety this lent Chauke as the chief suspect led the national police commissioner to declare him the most wanted man in South Africa and that he would be captured by Christmas. Instead, as the media gleefully reported, the commissioner received a Christmas card from Chauke. He appeared to enjoy the media attention, even calling into a Johannesburg radio station to profess his innocence. His most brazen media stunt was to initiate a covert interview with City Press, a Sunday newspaper that published a series of articles about him in February 1998. In this interview, Chauke alleged that senior white detectives in cahoots with private security companies were behind the spate of cash-in-transit heists and were trying to pin them on former Mkhonto weSizwe members who had not been integrated into the army. When he was finally apprehended in January 1999, the Minister of Safety and Security sent his message of relief from London where he was on an official visit and President Mandela issued a statement congratulating the police. His lengthy trial saw throngs of curious onlookers jostling to get a glimpse of the heist mastermind who, with some political training and media savvy, became a cause célèbre. Their fascination with him bore no sentiment supporting his protestations of innocence and if anything, the public’s curiosity was fuelled by his presumed guilt. From then on until his death from an illness in 2003, Chauke was locked away in C-Max, the super-maximum security section of Pretoria Central prison for inmates considered beyond rehabilitation.

Before garnering the support of the 'anarchists' in the ANC, Mahlangu re-surfaced after his release from prison as the representative of a company registered in Chauke’s name in an eviction dispute with shack dwellers. This Friday evening's newscast brought him for the first time to our TV screens. A slightly built man in a suit insisting he and his comrades are not anarchists, he spoke with the timbre and conviction more befitting a cleric than a heist gang leader. So I've been led to doubt whether the would-be chairperson of the ANC in Tshwane is the same Mafika Mahlangu who was Colin Chauke's comrade. As this knot of crime and politics unravels, I look forward to finding out.