Servant Leader

"I’ve written about this and I’ve actually reflected a little bit negatively about the way the ANC abandoned economic issues in the discussion in exile, but I think you know they were desperate. And the feeling was “let’s get hold of government and then we’ll do what we can”. You mean my latest one or the previous one? (Daniel interjects: the one that speaks to this matter) well I think my Magnum Opus I think is my ‘From Freedom Charter to Polokwane’ which deals with the economic history of the ANC and in that book, I discussed this question of and his people who were negotiating in exile and the fact that economics was dropped and the ANC has never admitted this, but I have confronted people like Pallo Jordan and others and it's quite clear that economic policy was dropped in the interest of a political settlement. My view is that, even if they had to go slow on the economics, we should never have let it go, because in 1994, we had the RDP which was an excellent document for a developmental state. But because we neglected to officially as the ANC you know not everybody likes the RDP, and I can tell you that, I’ve written about it in the book, that when we had a meeting to discuss the RDP, and ready to govern, that period in 1992 about, people like Tito Mboweni and others and Trevor Manuel were very reticent about the RDP, they didn't like it very much, and it was they who inserted paragraphs about fiscal discipline you see, and we allowed them to insert it into the RDP even though it was completely out of character with the rest of the developmental approach. But we allowed them to do it, and they knew and they had already made up the position, that they were going for a government of fiscal discipline. And fiscal discipline has led us to where we are today."

"Dina Pule had witnesses and she lied all the way through (She was at the time Minister of Communication ) and a very glamorous lady. The evidence was very hard to get because what had happened was she had a boyfriend who was her business partner and a beneficiary of a lot of dealings with the department and this guy used to travel with her around the world. So we had to get evidence that they’d been on the same flight, that they’d been in the same hotel, that they’d lived in the same room, which he denied. But we got the evidence, through a long hard battle. We got the evidence to prove that they were sharing a bedroom, and also their shared taxis and so on. We had to follow this thing through unfortunately she had Mikel Masutha (an advocate) the present Minister of Justice, he was her defendant, a lawyer defending a lawyer because he was an MP and we were allowed that. And Mike was very stubborn and he kept raising points of order and bringing documents and he delayed, we had four or five days full of hearings, so he sat. And we had masses of documentation, well over a thousand or two thousand pages of evidence and of course they were civil servants from her department who lied as well, who were complicit. So it was a very complicated case, but in the end we found her guilty, and actually strangely enough I was asked, not long ago, to give evidence in a disciplinary hearing against the public servants on the same matter, so they sent me records of hearings again, five volumes of massive documents, so it was a tough case. But during the case I was told, parliamentary security came to see me and said they’ve got information that there was going to be a hit, because this boyfriend was a criminal and he was organising a hit, and so couldn't leave the house without security, I couldn’t drive my own car, on the weekend if I wanted to go out to dinner with my family security will come, you know the restaurant on Fishhoek beach? we went there for dinner, before I could go into the restaurant, security went into the restaurant to case it, look where the exits were, look at where the staff were and they were standing around, and everywhere I went, security all the time. If said I want to go for a walk on the beach they’d say you can’t. If you do that we follow you all the way down. And they fetched me everyday to get to Parliament. We took a different route every time we went to Parliament in case there was an ambush. They took it very seriously. So my office was under surveillance, I couldn’t walk anywhere without security. It was a damn nuisance. So after a while, the temperature cooled down and they thought well it can’t go on forever you know, and anyway I was tired of this. Well I didn’t realise how stressed I was quite frankly, and a couple of months later, I had a heart condition, quite a serious heart condition, and I was in ICU in hospital, and I don’t know whether it was related, but it seems possible that the stress, was also I was terribly busy finishing my book. You see my book of ‘The Parapet’ I was finishing that so you know I continued New Agenda (a South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy edited by Professor Turok) so I had three big jobs to do and it was too much, and so yes I suspect that I caved in from all the stress."