South Africa’s security chaos: Intelligence failures or high-level political maneuvering?

All is not well in SA’s security establishment. The question to be asked is whether the fault lies with that well-known malaise – public service indolence, disinterest and lack of training and application – or whether there is something more sinister in play.

Recent events have shown that our national intelligence gathering structures – the State Intelligence Agency (SIA), as well as the military and the police – appear to be in an abysmal state of dysfunction and malfunction.

At least as worrying, the alternative explanation is that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has been playing dangerous political games.

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Last week, the absence of meaningful border control by SIA, the SA Police Service (Saps), and the first-line security checks conducted by home affairs were exposed in a bizarre incident.

A group of 95 Libyan nationals, allegedly working for one of the numerous renegade groups battling for control of that country’s unstable unity government, were arrested in Mpumalanga at what Saps describe as an illegal military training base.

Media reports link the men to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, who is working with Wagner Group – the private military group that operates as a surrogate for the Russian government in Africa – to protect Russian commercial interests.

The base, just outside White River, is legally registered as a private security training facility.

However, according to the police, it had been operating undetected for four months as a military training camp for the Libyan group, which had entered SA on genuine visas.

To be hosting a group of mercenaries in cahoots with a foreign power is a diplomatic embarrassment.

Almost as embarrassing is the fact that the exposure of the clandestine training camp was inadvertent. It had nothing to do with good intelligence gathering.

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It’s common knowledge that SIA has been floundering for many years. Instead of directing its energies against SA’s foreign foes, the agency has been riven by competing ANC factions.

Saps criminal intelligence, too, is in dire straits. Or, more ominous, this was an approved covert project, sanctioned at the highest level by the ANC government and occurring with the full knowledge of the SIA, military intelligence, police criminal intelligence, and home affairs.

Could it really be that the vetting procedures of home affairs are so inadequate that an application by 95 young Libyan men for entry visas, containing what the department now describes as “misrepresentations”, rang no alarm bells?

It’s improbable that the final decision on this mass application was never referred up the executive food chain, as well to the SIA and Saps.

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Militating against an intelligence failure is the fact that the security establishment is a very active political player on the home political stage.

Lindiwe Sisulu, minister of intelligence for three years under president Thabo Mbeki, dropped a further SIA-related bomb this week.

She nonchalantly told a press conference that while she was in office, there was surveillance of journalists. “We bugged everybody, essentially.”

It was a startling admission that the government is illegally conducting wholesale surveillance on the entire media and, presumably, politicians and other citizens.

Ramaphosa’s office responded to half-hearted media calls for an inquiry: “With respect to claims of ‘bugging of everybody’, such actions would have been unconstitutional and illegal. Perhaps the former minister will take some time to reflect on the veracity and implications of her comments.”

Well, that’s okay then. Our government would never do anything illegal.