Apartheid agents are destroying the ANC from within – Thabo Mbeki

Former President Thabo Mbeki has accused apartheid-era infiltrators of dismantling the African National Congress (ANC) from the inside, saying some now occupy key leadership positions.

He made the remarks during an interview with former EFF MP turned radio host, Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, on the African Renaissance Project podcast.

Ndlozi asked the former president why it is never discussed that the living conditions of South Africans across the racial spectrum were improving at a much faster pace in the first 15 years of ANC rule.

According to Mbeki, there was a systematic programme implemented by the “Apartheid regime” to infiltrate the ANC and the rest of the liberation movement before 1994 to ultimately destroy it.

While the ANC had mechanisms in place to ensure that new members were genuine about their intentions, some managed to sneak through this process, he said.

“These people became part of the national leadership in 2007,” said Mbeki. “I’m talking about agents of the old regime.”

He alleged that there is a member of the ANC who currently occupies a senior position and who was a spy of the apartheid regime.

Mbeki first raised this concern in 1996 during a presentation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). At the time, the ANC identified more than 600 “enemy agents” in the party.

“It would be foolish to assume that there are no longer enemy agents in the ANC,” he said, explaining that hundreds of individuals associated with the National Party government had joined.

The suspicion that some of these agents remained in the top ranks of the ANC was shared by former South African National Defence Intelligence Chief Maomela Motau.

In 2021, Motau claimed the ANC had been compromised by apartheid agents “hellbent on destroying the ANC,” according to allegations collated in the Tshwane Declaration and reported by The Citizen.

He said a list of these spies had been compiled during Nelson Mandela’s administration, but nothing was done to remove them.

Mbeki said the role of at least one high-ranking infiltrator is to obscure the truth — to hide that both the ANC and the country would have continued on a positive growth path had an outside force not intervened.

Instead, he said, “he allows the blame to fall on myself.” Mbeki described this as a difficult truth that few in the ANC are prepared to utter.

“There were people from the old order who said ‘the ANC thinks it has won a war in 1994. It hasn’t. The ANC has won a battle, but we will win the war,’” he said.

They wear the T-shirts, but they are not ANC

Labeling the infiltrators “enemies,” Mbeki argued that their presence explains how the first 15 years of democracy were marked by progress, followed by the next 15 years, in which the country headed “in the opposite direction.”

Between 2000 and 2008, during Mbeki’s presidency, South Africa’s GDP per capita grew by 28.2%, marking his tenure as the most impactful for economic growth.

In contrast, under Nelson Mandela’s presidency from 1994 to 1999, GDP per capita increased by approximately 10.4%.

The global financial crisis of 2009 coincided with Jacob Zuma’s assumption of the presidency, resulting in a modest GDP per capita growth of 3.5% over his term from 2009 to 2018.

Under President Cyril Ramaphosa, however, GDP per capita declined by approximately 5.6% from 2018 to 2023.

“The change comes with the change in leadership in the ANC following the Polokwane conference in 2007,” Mbeki said.

Mbeki concluded that those who came to power in 2007 are not true ANC members. “They wear the T-shirts, but they are not ANC,” he said.

He said the current leadership suffers from selective amnesia about those early years because they are afraid of the truth.

“It’s not negligence, it’s a conscious decision not to tell the truth about what happened in the past.”