The President's Keepers. Jacques Pauw
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The 16th of December 2016 was my last day in Moscow. A snowstorm had been raging since early morning, and when I peered from my window on the third floor of the legendary Hotel Sovietsky, a flurry of white powder swirled around trees that balanced a mantle of snow on their elongated branches. The winter light was pale and watery; the sky ashen and pasty.
I waited for Paul Engelke in the foyer of the Sovietsky, a throwback to Politburo times. The hotel was constructed in 1952 on the personal order of Joseph Stalin to accommodate government dignitaries. It still oozes Bolshevism from every nook and cranny with its faded red carpets, a life-size portrait of the Red Tsar (Stalin's nickname) and decor that represents the height of Soviet sophistication and opulence.
We eventually landed in a dreadful ryumochnaya, a Russian basement bar that serves alcohol and food on the cheap. The decor hovered between the old, the new and the kitsch: nylon window curtains, football memorabilia and the odd Lenin banner. The waitresses were gruff and crusty with brash lipstick and powdered cheeks, who slammed shots of nameless vodka and a bowl of pickles in front of us.
I'd decided by then that I really liked Engelke. He had limitless energy and tackled life with an exuberance and vigour that I admired. His Russian adventure had netted him a gorgeous woman and we had endless discussions about how he was going to navigate the general-dad dilemma and whether he should seek a life and future in Russia.
The frozen country had set Paul Engelke free. It didn't matter how cold or inhospitable it was; he was his own man in his own skin with his own destiny. He had broken free from the mental incarceration of the SSA, where he thought he was doing the right thing by busting reprobates but was in fact setting his own demise in motion. I realised in Moscow what a great loss Paul Engelke was to our fledgling democracy and our quest to inculcate a culture of justice and accountability. If he decides to settle permanently in Russia, that loss will be forever.
He seems to have had an unfortunate departure from the SSA. In 2015, he enrolled for a master's degree in law at the University of Pretoria. He met a Russian guest lecturer and they discussed the possibility of his doing a similar stint at Moscow State University. The Russians were interested in utilising his experience in forensic law. He then quit the SSA but soon afterwards had second thoughts and withdrew his resignation. He was allegedly fetched by guards in his office, told to pack his personal belongings and escorted out of Musanda.
Throughout my stay in Russia there was one subject he refused to talk about: the SSA and his PAN project investigation. He told me from the outset that he was bound by his oath of secrecy and that he has children back home in South Africa whom he might never see again if he opened his heart to me. By then I already had studied two of his reports and reckoned that so many people knew about the PAN programme that its details would ultimately be blown open. I had gone to Russia in order to start writing this book as much as to see and talk to him.
I have stayed in contact with Engelke, and in one of his last messages, he said to me: “And how is the book going? I shudder when I think about it! In the meantime, I've asked Diana to get married and she has said yes. You are of course invited. I'm also getting along very nicely with the general. We are thinking of getting married in Cape Town. What do you think?”
Four
Glimmers of horror
I have only seen Jacob Zuma twice, the last time towards the end of 2007 behind the soaring walls and electric fence of his home in the leafy suburb of Forest Hill in Johannesburg. He was under siege: he had been fired as deputy president and his rancorous rival, Thabo Mbeki, was going for his jugular.
The president's hit men, the elite crime-busting Scorpions, had reintroduced corruption, fraud and money-laundering charges against Zuma, which could have sent him to prison for a long time. But Zuma showed no hints of his legal predicaments. After security guards had searched our bags, they ushered us into a study, where a minute or two later Zuma sauntered in. A smile covered the width of his face.
Zuma's residence was hardly the sanctuary it should have been. It was exposed to the outside world by two dramatic legal events that marked the run-up to his appointment as South Africa's fourth democratically elected president in May 2009.
We sat in a study at a polished wooden desk, the very same room the Scorpions had searched for computer hard drives and documents to support their criminal case that Zuma had taken bribes from his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik. Prosecutors eventually formulated 783 charges of corruption, fraud and racketeering against Zuma.
A year earlier, the world was taken on a sordid journey through Zuma's guest bedroom where he had unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman. She was the daughter of a struggle comrade who was imprisoned with Zuma on Robben Island. She called him “Uncle” and regarded him as a substitute father after her own had died in a car accident. She became known to the world as Khwezi and claimed that Zuma had forced himself on her; his defence was that the act was consensual. He testified that Khwezi was wearing a “kanga” – a brightly coloured, wrap-around cloth – which he interpreted as an invitation for sex. He afterwards took a shower to protect himself against the Aids virus. In a country ravaged by Aids, he said: “A shower would minimise the risk of contracting the disease.” Zuma was found not guilty, but the trial exposed his archaic and almost feudal perception of women, sex and HIV/Aids.
Quoting from Rudyard Kipling during his judgment, Judge Willem van der Merwe said: “And if you can control your body and your sexual urges, then you are a man, my son.”
Although Zuma afterwards apologised for his defilement of a comrade's offspring, a few years later he procreated with another friend's daughter. The father was soccer boss Irvin Khoza and his 39-year-old daughter was carrying Zuma's 20th (known) child. Zuma had to pay customary damages to the Khoza family, known as “inhlawulo” in Zulu.
The rape trial should have spelled the end of Zuma's political ambitions but instead set in motion a political tsunami as comrades and cadres flooded to the Johannesburg High Court with posters that said “Burn the bitch” and “100% Zulu boy”. They believed that the rape accusation was part of a Thabo Mbeki-driven political conspiracy to hammer the last nail in his deputy's political coffin. Khwezi, they argued, got what she deserved. Khwezi and her mother were subsequently hounded out of the country after Zuma supporters burned down their home. She died in October 2016 and was named as Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo.
When I saw Zuma, it was a few months before he was elected as ANC president. I was a researcher for a foreign journalist and had managed to arrange an interview with him. Dressed in a loose, casual shirt, he flaunted a perfect row of white teeth and said: “Maybe you are talking to the wrong man, because I am just a cadre of the ANC. And I can tell you now that I have no desire to be the president.”
Zuma laughed as he said it – not the he-he-he-he-he that later became his trademark in Parliament when he was in trouble or under siege, but a deep and genuine expression of merriment. It was difficult not to like him. His charm and geniality reminded me why he was often referred to as the “people's politician”.
There are two public personae of Jacob Zuma. Think of him standing in Parliament delivering the State of the Nation address or answering questions from the opposition. Or even more daunting: think of him addressing the United Nations in New York. Gauche, bumbling, unworldly, clueless, fibbing, awkward. Long-grump-pauses-grump-between-grump-sentences. Zuma is one of the most lampooned and jeered heads of state in the world and can easily be brushed aside as an uneducated peasant – yet he is in fact a brilliant strategist.
But then there is the other Jacob Zuma, entering a township in a cloud of dust and flashing blue lights. There is no more effective politician than Zuma when he knocks on doors, pats babies and holds the hands of the elderly. He listens, he chuckles, he empathises, he connects, he brings hope, he says whatever people want to hear. He is living proof of how the ANC, for 75 years, built a party and a struggle movement from door to door and from comrade to comrade before winning the 1994 election.
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The first time I saw Zuma, he was still banned and therefore regarded by the apartheid government as a terrorist and a communist