Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (38 page)

Peega is released on R20 000 bail. He returns to work. SARS removes him
from the unit and transfers him to head office in Pretoria pending a disciplinary inquiry. He is still required to report for duty each day, but begins arriving for work later and later. He is given a written warning. It’s the final straw.

On 10 February 2009, at 10 a.m., Peega loudly tells colleagues he’s going to ‘expose’ SARS. His angry threats are reported to his managers. A short while later, Peega’s boss gets a call from his lawyer, Elise Swanepoel, who suggests that if SARS is prepared to pay Peega a year’s salary as severance, he’ll go quietly. Failing that, he intends approaching ‘the newspapers’. The SARS man is outraged. It is tantamount to extortion. He tells the lawyer that he regards her approaches as ‘highly unethical’.

At a meeting with the lawyer later that day, Peega’s boss and another manager remind her of the secrecy oath Peega has signed and suggest that he bear the safety of his colleagues – who are investigating organised crime – in mind. Should he carry out his threat, SARS requests that they be given time to put contingency plans in place to protect the operatives Peega plans to betray. Swanepoel is non-committal. She is merely acting on the instructions of her client, she says.

Peega’s disciplinary hearing is held over three days and ends on April Fools’ Day 2009. Not once during the hearing or his subsequent appeal against his dismissal does he claim that he was part of a ‘sting operation’ targeting rhino poachers.

Details also begin to emerge of Peega’s uncomfortable proximity to senior politicians, most notably former ANCYL president Fikile Mbalula, a member of the ruling party’s national executive committee and later a cabinet minister. Peega repeatedly boasted to colleagues that he knew Mbalula from ‘days long before I joined SARS’.

On one occasion, in August 2008, Peega was in Durban, along with five colleagues, carrying out investigations into the trafficking of drugs, abalone and pirate DVDs. They were checked in at the Hilton Hotel. One day, in the lobby, Peega ‘bumped’ into Mbalula. While the other members of the team went to their rooms, Peega lingered behind, huddled in conversation with Mbalula.

Peega seemed to make a habit of running into senior ANC figures. At Durban airport, while standing in a queue at the Avis rental desk, he spotted Tony Yengeni, a controversial ANC national executive committee member
and convicted fraudster who was once dubbed the ‘Gucci socialist’ for his taste in fine clothing and flashy cars. Peega approached Yengeni and they spoke for a bit. He then introduced Yengeni to his colleagues.

During the Durban trip, Peega also arranged a tour of the Hilton Hotel’s presidential suite for his colleagues. He boasted that President Jacob Zuma was staying there at the time, but that he had a contact in security personnel who could get them into the rooms.

In June 2009, Peega is unceremoniously dismissed from SARS. But he isn’t finished with them yet.

2 March 2012

Peega is emphatic. The meeting is off. I’d called him two days earlier, explaining that I wanted to hear his story. He seemed keen to talk and we’d arranged to meet in Soweto.

At 9.02 a.m. on the day of the meeting, my phone buzzes. It is a rambling text message from Peega, reproduced verbatim below:

Im in a meeting with my family over our meeting and since im still not employed talking to journos wil tarnish my name further so they suggest i cancel all engagements with the media as it has brought enough stress in the past and i might remain unemployable,so to respect their wish i will humbly cancel the meeting so i can concentrate on clearing my name and im aware that this statement will b used against me,tnx.

I push him for more.

[D]espite al evidence that could not be contested by sars i was still nailed, i’ve accepted my fate n doin my best to move on, its hard bt im enduring, im sorry i cant be of help again.

I send him another SMS, asking if – as he has claimed – his confession to
Lubbe was coerced. ‘Honestly i stil have med reports of what i went thru while tortured …’

Would he send me the report? I ask. ‘Sir im already talkin to u which is against my families wishes,lets nt push it, lets leave it to rest, my loss of everything is enough, no more.’

Peega, it seems, has a lot to hide.

In intelligence circles, ‘information peddlers’ are regarded with contempt. They are the whores of the spook’s trade – operating on the fringes, disseminating smears and shopping half-truths that contain just enough fact to give them a modicum of credence. But in the ugly succession battles that have become a hallmark of the ANC under Zuma, peddlers are useful puppets.

In a March 2012 editorial,
Mail & Guardian
editor Nic Dawes observed that if Zuma’s tenure as president had taught South Africans anything, it was that power is contested ‘not at the ballot box or in the public sphere, but in the spook-haunted corridors of the secret state’. Smears and conspiracies have become the ‘universal solvent for scandal’.

In the wake of his dismissal, Peega becomes just such a peddler. He forms a bond with a loose grouping of disgraced SARS and intelligence operatives, some of whom have been dismissed for fraud or resigned their posts in the face of disciplinary hearings. He pesters his former teammates, claiming he is investigating SARS and now works for the presidency. He tries to recruit them as informants and coerce them into providing him with affidavits implicating SARS in a range of illegal activities.

They reject his advances. He becomes abusive and angry. He and – it seems evident – the coterie of spooks surrounding him, try at first to extort money from SARS. Their threats, some of them contained in emails, are explicit. If the Receiver plays ball, they’ll keep their mouths shut. If not, they will release a damaging ‘dossier’ to the press.

Journalists love the word ‘dossier’. Not only does it look good in a headline, but it has come to denote something both weighty and secretive. It is not merely a reference to a bundle of documents, but a portent to revelations
of deeds both dark and dastardly. A great number of dossiers have been shopped to newspapers in South Africa in recent years. Most have been tendentious, badly written smears.

There was the 2003 dossier which suggested that National Prosecuting Authority head Bulelani Ngcuka – the man who had pursued allegations of corruption levelled against Zuma – had ‘most probably’ been an apartheid spy, agent RS452. The claims fell apart when the real agent RS452, Vanessa Brereton, confessed. Then, in 2006, came the notorious ‘Special Browse Mole Report’, created by an investigator in the now-defunct Scorpions investigations unit, which outlined rumours that the Angolan intelligence establishment planned to covertly support Zuma in his bid for the presidency. It, too, was rubbished.

More recently, in 2011, a ‘top-secret’ dossier emerged after the arrest of disgraced police Crime Intelligence boss Richard Mdluli, which attempted to link the then national police commissioner, Bheki Cele, and senior ANC politicians, including human settlements minister Tokyo Sexwale, to a plot to unseat Zuma.

In November 2009, Peega’s dossier is leaked to a newspaper. A journalist shows a copy to SARS. Among the documents is a report that details the activities of a shadowy intelligence unit within SARS, which purportedly targeted key Zuma allies and supporters. It claims that the unit was ‘personally’ set up by SARS boss Pravin Gordhan, later the Minister of Finance in the Zuma cabinet. Some of the ‘revelations’ contained in the report read as follows:

Post Polokwane we were given projects and subjects named as tax offenders, but on close inspection we realised that the concerned targets were JZ [Jacob Zuma] sympathisers or what came to be known as friends of JZ. [S]ubjects of interest were mostly in Gauteng and [Kwa-Zulu-Natal] provinces and internally in SARS especially if perceived to be aligned to JZ. [W]hen the black members objected to the merit and reason for the investigation they would not be paid their allowances or either redirected to more hostile operations but operations still carry on with the exclusion of black foot soldiers …

Operations would involve stealing of mail from residences (dumpster diving), interception of emails, mobile and landlines, extraction of bank statements, installing of tracker systems on vehicles and posing as loitters [
sic
] around the premises while monitoring movements via hidden cameras even using sound enhancers to listen to the conversation of our targets.

[It is quite evident that SARS was playing a dirty and dangerous game, the issue was WHY are the state resources being abused in such a dirty way? … Some of us threatened to go public with the units [
sic
] activities and were threatened with disclosure clauses, all of a sudden approvals of only legitimate cases were made available to us as members and the direction changed to investigating counterfeit and textile industry … Someone must stop this nonsense otherwise the security of the country is threatened …]

Peega had clearly been watching too many bad spy movies. The document is littered with references to ‘honey traps’, ‘bugging, ‘cryptology’, ‘covet [
sic
] tactics’ and ‘counter-intelligence’. SARS compiles a fourteen-page briefing document on the dossier. Peega’s claims are all too easy to refute.

The journalist shelves the story, for now. SARS reports the dossier to police and intelligence agencies. In the weeks and months that follow, various versions of it will crop up again and again.

22 February 2010

Julius Malema, president of the African National Congress Youth League, is on the defensive. Damaging details about the sources of his wealth have begun to emerge. The most damning revelations have appeared in both
City Press
and the
Sunday Times
. The newspapers conducted separate investigations, but came to similar conclusions: Malema’s opulent lifestyle is being bankrolled by a string of lucrative government contracts.

One Malema-linked company had reportedly benefitted from government tenders worth R140 million over the previous two years. There were
also questions about the lavishly appointed R3.6-million house Malema had bought in Sandton in 2009. It would later emerge that he had paid more than half the purchase price in cash. Then there is his unashamed taste for designer clothes, R250 000 Breitling watches, bottles of Moët & Chandon champagne and fast cars. How can he afford it all on a reported salary of just R25 000 a month? Malema has long positioned himself as a ‘revolutionary’ struggling for the poorest of the poor. The lie is wearing thin.

Malema – who is frequently referred to in newspapers, often mockingly, by his nickname ‘Juju’ – is the
enfant terrible
of South African politics. His role as kingmaker during the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference – which marked the end of the Thabo Mbeki era and the beginning of Zuma’s ascent to power – cemented his position in the party … for a while, at least.

In a stagnant newspaper market, editors love him. With every bombastic outburst and every racist, sexist and hypocritical statement, Malema sells papers. His ability to court controversy is unrivalled. For many whites, he is the embodiment of their worst fears and their worst and most racist prejudices of black Africa. It is easy to dismiss him as a buffoonish clown, and many do.