Mark Gevisser | How I became a victim of the Mbeki-Zuma spy-vs-spy wars

- News 24 , May 16 2022

Mark Gevisser working at his home in Kalk Bay, a few years after his break-ins in Johannesburg. Photo: Tommy Trenchard

Author Mark Gevisser reflects back on two home break-ins, in which he lost two laptops, just after his book "The dream deferred" was published, and just after the Polokwane conference. He writes that he views the break-ins as some kind of fall from innocence about his home country, which – like the robberies at his home – felt invaded rather than protected by the government constitutionally required to do so. 

One night in April 2008, at dinner following a well-publicised event promoting the first edition of The Dream Deferred in Johannesburg, I received a call from my neighbours. They, too, were not at home, but their 17-year-old had apprehended someone trying to break into our house, and had seen the intruder off with his father's gun.

We had recently moved in, and we were equally unsettled by the neighbour's boy with a gun as by the news of the intruder. We finished our dinner quickly, bade our hosts good night, and returned to our new home, high up on Melville ridge. Somewhat rattled, we drew the curtains against the city's lights twinkling all the way to the Magaliesberg, and went to sleep.

Some time later, I was pulled out of my slumber by my partner C: there was loud banging at the back of the house and then the shattering of glass, followed by the unmistakable sound of people in my office. I jumped up to lock the bedroom door, called our security company and the police in a terrified whisper, and then lay in bed next to C, our hearts racing, trying to suppress the panic as we debated whether we should lie quietly or make a break for it out of the sliding door that led to our first floor balcony. Suddenly, everything went silent, but we stayed in our locked bedroom until the armed security guards arrived and gave us the all-clear. A good while later, the police rolled in. We took stock. Someone had broken into my office, two floors above the driveway, by trying to pull the window off its hinges and then breaking it. Only one item was missing: my laptop computer.

The two police officers on the scene were in disagreement. One told me that crooks often went just for laptops, which were easy to pocket and did well on the black market. The other asked, pointedly, when hearing that there was an earlier break-in attempt that evening:

Do you have anything on that computer someone would like see?

The break-in took place a few weeks after Thabo Mbeki's defeat by Jacob Zuma, as president of the African National Congress, at its December 2007 conference in Polokwane. Mbeki was still serving out his term as president of the country – it was to end in April 2009 – but his foes in the party made no bones that they wanted him out sooner.

Zuma had just been indicted on charges of fraud and racketeering, arising out of his relationship with a convicted felon, his friend Schabir Shaik, who had gone to prison for trying to bribe him as part of a multimillion-rand arms procurement programme known as "the arms deal". The issue had split the governing ANC in two, and contaminated the country's security apparatus, particularly its intelligence services, which were allegedly being used by both sides to find dirt on the other.

There were people on Mbeki's side who believed they had to do what it took to ensure that the corrupt Zuma did not become president. And there were people on Zuma's side who wanted to get Mbeki out of power as soon as possible so that they could have full control of the state. They sought to do this by trying to find evidence that Mbeki was using state resources in a vendetta against Zuma – and that Mbeki, too, was on the take in the arms deal, which he had championed. 

In this uneasy interregnum, laptops belonging to several other journalists and researchers had gone missing. The was nothing on my computer that could help either side, but the men who broke into my office didn't know that. In fact, it seems so determined were they to crack my sources that they had come back a second time. A few months previously I had been raided in an even more mysterious way:

This was in November 2007, just after the publication of my book, and in the fever before the Polokwane conference. We were packing up our rented flat on the fourth floor of a block in Killarney when, one morning at about 06:00, I was awoken by a call. It was a police officer. My car – a beloved Subaru Impreza – had been found, totalled and abandoned, about a kilometre away on Joe Slovo Drive. The keys were in the ignition.  

I stumbled into my office, where I usually kept my keys. They were gone – as was my laptop computer. My wallet, with a fair amount of cash and my credit cards, lay unruffled on my desk.

Nothing but my laptop and the keys had been taken; this time, the intruder had taken care not to disturb my sleep. There was no sign of forced entry, but my office door, leading to the balcony over the street, was open, as it often was: so high was our eyrie we did not imagine this to be a problem. A cat-man must have scaled the block's sheer face to get to his objective before departing the civilised way, through the parking garage door, with my remote, in my car.

Why had he totalled it, though? Is it possible he was skilled (or sober) enough to scale a five-storey building but not to drive a car? Did the feel of an Impreza's pedals under his feet make him crazy? I called an acquaintance with many years of experience in the security organs both of the underground ANC and the new democratic state. He gave a knowing laugh: 

It's an old trick, making a hit seem like the random actions of someone high off his tree. People are trained to do this.

Why didn't he take the wallet, then? 

"He had a plan. Take the computer, take the keys, wreck the car. Maybe he was disturbed before he could make the crime scene look more authentic…"

I will never know who stole my two laptop computers and why. But 15 years later, as I launch a new updated edition of The Dream Deferred, I look back at those break-ins, in the febrile Polokwane Summer of 2007-8, as some kind of fall from innocence about my home country, which – like my physical home – felt invaded rather than protected by the government constitutionally required to do so.  

That summer pivoted South Africa into the era of "state capture", to describe the way the Zuma kleptocracy "captured" key organs of state – from the revenue service to the electricity utility to the prosecuting authority – to protect itself while siphoning off public funds through corrupt contracts. A key building block of this capture was precisely the abuse of the organs of the criminal justice and state security systems, so rampant at the time of my break-ins, to fight internecine ANC battles. 

We live with the consequences today. 

- Mark Gevisser is the author of 'Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred - The Updated Edition', which is published by Jonathan Ball.