Back in 1973, the New York Times master columnist and resident conservative flag bearer in a hyper-liberal establishment newspaper popularised the acronym “MEGO”. It derives from the first letters of the editor’s phrase, “My Eyes Glaze Over”.
It was, he advised, an editorial put-down of a worthy but crushingly dull article. But he noted it was more than about soporific pieces. It also described writings about “a subject of great importance which resists reader interest”.
Dear Reader, you have every right, as a fairly awful year winds to a close, to resist the avalanche of bad news hurtling through cyberspace and the print media, here and across the world.
Too busy consulting the magnificent private tech solution (ESP) to state-sponsored darkness courtesy of a dinosaur (Eskom,) you could be forgiven for missing yet another scandal which crashed these shores in the past few days.
This additional shaft of light penetrating the darkness of our national security and defence posture (a double oxymoron to be sure) is entirely due to some unnamed old SA Navy buffer who last week refused to let his eyes glaze over in Simon’s Town, Cape Town.
He and several of his colleagues spotted the mysterious arrival in the Navy dockyard of a Russian cargo vessel, “Lady R”. It is a Russian Federation-flagged ship, which in the normal course of maritime commerce should have offloaded and, more materially, boarded its cargo in Table Bay harbour as every other commercial ship must. Instead, defence spokesperson of the DA Kobus Marais noted: “It was allowed to dock at the Simon’s Town naval base, which as the largest naval base in the country is a national key point.”
The ship spotter retirees also revealed that over the two nights of its stay in Simon’s Town “there was unusual activity in the harbour with ship-mounted cranes offloading cargo … and there was also truck movement transporting containers in and out of the naval base, protected by armed personnel”. While, as Marais noted, trucks transporting containers are not uncommon, “it is unusual for such activities to take place at night”.
Authoritative news site defenceWeb picked up the furtive departure of the mystery vessel: she sailed out of the harbour 48 hours after arrival at 6.30pm Friday, sans explanation and minus any comment from the minister of defence, the SA Navy or any government spokesperson. Despite repeated requests for them to do so.
If the use or misuse of a national key point defence installation by an ostensibly private vessel — albeit a ship under sanction by the US treasury department for its use as an arms carrier — reminds readers of the infamous misuse of another key defence installation, you would, on the face of it, not be far off the mark.
It was the landing of the Gupta wedding party jet at Waterkloof Air Force Base in 2013 which blew open the capture of the state by one family. And before his credibility was shredded by the calamitous collapse of our electricity grid, one brave minister back then, Pravin Gordhan, invited citizens to “join up the dots”.
However, when connecting the dots between last week’s furtive arrival, midnight cargo and hasty dawn exit of the Russian vessel, the eyes open not to the private misuse of state resources but to a question opposition leader John Steenhuisen asked minister of defence Thandi Modise in parliament on October 23.
He enquired whether state-owned Armaments Corporation of SA (Armscor) “sells arms, ammunition, propellant powder and/or explosives to the Russian Federation” and requested the relevant details.
When the pioneer of sanctions against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, Bill Browder and I, were writing a recent commentary piece for The Economist, seeking to explain the close alignment between Cyril Ramaphosa’s government and Putin’s regime in connection with the savage war it has mounted in Ukraine, we were struck by the detail and particularity behind this question. Steenhuisen advised us there was a belief among Ukrainian officials he met there in May that SA was arming Russia in its war, hence the question he asked months later.
Presumably if his question was ridiculous, based on false information or cooked up conspiracy-mongering, Modise would have offered a stern rebuttal or a withering put-down.
Instead she answered with a spectacular non-answer, and a question-begging response, the relevant portion of which reads: “Armscor may therefore from time to time enter into commercial arrangements with foreign entities including the Russian Federation … Agreements of such a nature are normally classified and protected by confidentiality clauses, as it relates to security information, where unauthorised disclosure may cause serious implications to the national security… It will therefore not be possible to divulge any detail regarding the specifics of agreements of this nature.”
