MAKHUDU SEFARA | Fixing the fixers – Madlanga commission shatters the illusion of control

One of the beneficial offshoots of the Madlanga commission has been the exposure of political fixers who usually operate in the shadows, putting out fires and managing bad press.

To succeed as a fixer, they must believe their omnipotence fantasy — that they can, for a fee, control external events and shield cartel leaders from scrutiny. The fixers get a “power high” from knowing secrets, which is why access to state security, but specifically crime intelligence, is so vital.

They also get a kick from holding and using dirt on others and being the go-to guy for powerful politicians and cartel leaders. It feeds the psychological beast in them. But when the enabling environment is shattered at the Madlanga commission before the entire nation, the fantasy breaks into smithereens.

In a perfect world, they’re not to be seen or heard. They’re smooth and suave. In reality, they sometimes get trapped in their own cobwebs, with catastrophic consequences for themselves and their principals. Their undoing, often, is being blinded by past success and mistaking temporary leverage for invincibility.

It is against this background that celebrated American playwright Shonda Rhimes penned The Fixer (so named for South African audiences to avoid confusion with e.tv’s soap Scandal!, but Scandal elsewhere).

Rhimes uses “gladiators in suits” to create an illusion that “no crisis is too big” to tell a story of a team using underhand, often illegal, means to solve challenges faced by Washington’s political elite. The main character, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), uses the catchphrase “it’s handled” to show how the fixer is always several steps ahead and has absolute control of crises — something real-life pretenders try to emulate.

While Olivia Pope deftly erases the dark secrets of billionaires, South African “fixers” have been exposed as bumbling fools unable to fix their own scandals. They, it appears, need real fixers to sort them out.

The latest “fixer” to be exposed by the Madlanga commission is a shadowy character known as Malcolm X, whose rise to fame came from being rescued by struggle icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, among others, from jumping off a building in Johannesburg in protest at being academically excluded for failing Wits University examinations in 2002. Of late, he films himself distributing wads of cash to poor students.

The Madlanga commission dragged him out of the woodwork for being a conduit for murder-accused Katiso “KT” Molefe — he of the Big Five cartel — whose Sandhurst property was raided by police. Malcolm X was shown to have frantically called and exchanged messages with the head of the Hawks, Lt-Gen Godfrey Lebeya, to intervene. Instead of his high-level information brokerage helping Molefe, Malcolm X’s involvement sullied Lebeya’s reputation — he had to explain why a helicopter was used to interfere with an official operation on the back of a phone call from a purported fixer.

This drew intense scrutiny to Malcolm X’s operations. Lebeya initially outed him as a police informant, which would have put Malcolm X on a collision course with the underworld figures he liaises with. Malcolm X later denied Lebeya’s claim, which then raised questions about why a senior police official would lie about something that appears innocuous but puts Malcolm X’s life in danger. In the end, his was a sorry story of a fixer failing to fix his own situation.

The most embarrassing of the failed fixers is Brown Mogotsi, who had positioned himself as a deeply connected political and intelligence operative whose big mission was to hoist suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu to the top of the ANC’s food chain. He even claimed to have assisted in the capture of Thabo Bester, the so-called Facebook rapist.

But it didn’t take much for the Madlanga crew to break down the façade, labelling him a “professional liar” who was then charged with perjury, unlawful firearm possession and defeating the ends of justice for allegedly shooting at his own car and/or trying to escape from custody.

He has since made no fewer than four unsuccessful bail bids. With each court appearance, Mogotsi cuts a lonely, pitiful figure in the dock. On one of these occasions, clad in what appears an unwitting crop-top t-shirt, his hands could be seen shaking. Nothing so poignantly depicts a fixer out of ideas as the sight of Mogotsi being denied bail repeatedly. The leverage has disappeared, and the networks have disassociated. Like Malcolm X, he too needs a real fixer.

Bejani Chauke is a former adviser to President Cyril Ramaphosa known less for advice than his powerful back-channel influence peddling. Some say he’s the guy who knows where the proverbial bodies are buried, while others consider him a rogue diplomat forced out of the shadows through the Phala Phala scandal.

Former spy boss Arthur Fraser placed Chauke at the heart of the Phala Phala saga, claiming he not only brought the dollars into the country on chartered flights — a claim Chauke denies — but also that he was a shadowy diplomatic operator travelling to no-man’s-land near Namibia for meetings with the late president Hage Geingob, which bypassed traditional diplomatic and police channels.

While his mission to execute an off-the-book extraction and recovery of the stolen dollars seems half successful in that the thieves were identified and allegedly tortured, the whole mess blew up in his face, revealing actions bordering on illegality that the head of state must not be seen to be associated with.

On the surface, Chauke lives the high life of absolute presidential protection and proximity, stays in gated Hyde Park and is sent on high-level assignments to Russia, Ukraine and across the continent. But the section 89 independent panel report blows him out of the water, taking a dim view of his attempt at cover-up. This is supported by the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, which flags his Namibian trips as unauthorised. His last mention at the Madlanga commission was when Lebeya said he was called by private investigator Paul O’Sullivan, who was with Chauke, who requested an update on the Hawks investigation into Phala Phala, which he turned down.

Chauke’s attempt to become ANC treasurer was rejected three years ago as the Phala Phala scandal raged on. The irony is that here is a fixer, Chauke, who spent years fixing Ramaphosa’s survival only to become one of the most exposed legal and political liabilities for his principal when he should be operating in the shadows.

It is not immediately clear, in this last example, if Mavuso Ntandani and “McGrath” — who tried to get Hawks Lt-Col Deenadayalan Govender to falsely implicate KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi in 172 police shootings — were just clumsy amateurs or thought mentioning Mchunu’s name would get Govender to bend a knee.

In a short space of time, these largely unknown provincial puppet masters found themselves in the glare of an anti-corruption commission whose proceedings thrust them into national focus, voice notes and all.

Fixers are an interesting breed. Fixing scandals and managing bad press requires one to sustain a veneer of both invincibility and invisibility. It is your work that people must see, but, like a good spy, you must never be caught in the act.

In the US, E Howard Hunt, G Gordon Liddy and John Dean stand out as historical prototypes who cemented the view that “the cover-up must not be worse than the crime” after the Watergate scandal. Dubbed “The Plumbers” because their job was to plug information leaks for President Richard Nixon, Hunt and Liddy ended up in prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. John Dean, who was the White House counsel and played a role in the cover-up, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice and served just four months in custody. He famously warned: “There’s a cancer growing on the presidency” — in reference to the parallel shadow state that made them overestimate their immunity.

To be a successful fixer, it seems, one has to operate within a specific pathological mental architecture of total control which, for all intents and purposes, is an illusion. Yet they must project to their clients possibilities of absolute control because not doing so, not believing in the illusion, runs counter to the business model.

Some real-world fixers exhibit cold disregard for morality. For them, people are chess pieces to move around, not humans; they can be used today and compromised tomorrow without regret or guilt. They can look someone dedicated to their job in the eye and ruin their career without remorse. Asking someone to falsely implicate Mkhwanazi in murders while sharing a meal is par for the course. Self-gain is their modus operandi.

Others show a deep need for admiration. Hence their choice of residence (Chauke, Hyde Park) or videos of themselves distributing cash to the poor (Malcolm X). Once the poor are part of a PR project, it’s no longer about them but about the self-styled philanthropist, the hero who not only must be admired but whose fragile ego requires constant external validation.

Neurologist Lord David Owen has shown that power, or even access to it, physically changes the brain. What this means is that if you have got away with hubris, you start believing you will always get away with it — until you can’t, until your fragility is laid bare. Malcolm X denies he is a police spy to save his own life. Chauke denies he was involved in the Phala Phala cover-up. Mogotsi trembles in loose-fitting clothes from the dock. The limited, vulnerable humans, stripped of borrowed leverage, emerge. The psychological reality of defeat humbles even those who spent years fixing others unaware they, themselves, require fixing.