June 9 2014 at 02:34pm
By LOUISE FLANAGAN
By LOUISE FLANAGAN
Independent
Newspapers.
Judge
Willie Seriti during the Arms Procurement Commission in Pretoria. Picture: Oupa
Mokoena.
Johannesburg -
The arms deal inquiry is running into difficulty trying to work out how
decisions were taken when one of the key people involved is not able to be
questioned.
The man the
commission would really like to talk to is former minister of defence, Joe
Modise, but he died in 2001.
On Friday,
Ronnie Kasrils started giving evidence to the Arms Procurement Commission,
which is looking into the controversial 1999 arms deal. Kasrils was asked to
focus on the rationale for the deal.
In the run-up
to the deal, from 1994 to June 1999, Kasrils was the deputy minister of
defence. By the time it was approved by the cabinet in November 1999, however,
he was the minister of water affairs and forestry.
That means he
was a member of the cabinet from mid-1999, but he was out of Defence and was
never part of the ministerial committee (a cabinet subcommittee) which ran the
arms deal project.
Kasrils told
the commission he enjoyed a good relationship with Modise but was not privy to
all matters Modise handled, and, as a deputy minister, “I played no role in
making policy decisions at cabinet level”.
While he was
the deputy minister of defence, Kasrils sat on the Council of Defence and the
Arms Acquisitions Council, both chaired by the minister and which advised the
minister on defence procurement.
Commission
evidence leader advocate Simmy Lebala SC tried to get an insight into Modise’s
thinking in some of the Council of Defence meetings by questioning Kasrils,
particularly because of his good relationship with Modise.
Lebala quoted
from council minutes from February 1998, which said Modise “warned that the
figure of R6 billion must never be mentioned. If we do, we will fail… Our aim
remains a one-to-one ratio.”
The same
meeting referred to the total cost of the arms deal as R26bn. Kasrils said he
thought the R6bn was a reference to offsets but he wasn’t sure; he thought
Modise had wanted the full R26bn cost back in offsets.
There was confusion
over timing.
The Defence
Review, a major defence policy review which included looking at the
re-equipping of the SANDF, was passed by Parliament in May 1998.
But the
requests for information (RFIs) and requests for offers (RFOs) on the arms deal
were issued before the Defence Review was finalised.
Kasrils said
the RFIs didn’t bind the government to anything, so issuing them did not
undermine the Defence Review process, and there was some discussion at the
hearing over exactly when the RFOs were issued.
Lebala said he
was trying to establish that the arms deal procurement started before the
Defence Review was approved by Parliament.
Kasrils said he
couldn’t remember. He said some processes happened “concurrently” with the
Defence Review but would be concluded only once the review was concluded.
Kasrils
confirmed that funding the deal was a big issue – it couldn’t be funded out of
the annual defence budget – and that this would have been kept quiet as the
government would not have wanted the outside world to know it would have “big
problems” funding it.
Friday’s
hearing ended with the commissioners, Judge Willie Seriti and Judge Thekiso
Musi, calling on Lebala to deal only with critical points, and adjourning so
that he could reassess how to proceed with leading Kasrils’s evidence.
Kasrils was
asked to return on Tuesday.
The Star
