Special Hearings — Mandela United Football Club Hearings — 1997-11-24

DR BORAINE: Thank you Dr Chikane.  Just before Mr Mufamadi speaks, could I just inform Mr Vally that the introduction has now been made, the other members of the now-defunct Crisis Committee will speak to particular issues, after which I will have great pleasure in handing over to you to do the questioning.

SIDNEY MUFAMADI: Mr Chairman and the Commission, as Rev Chikane pointed out, I'm going to speak briefly to the documents that are attached to the main body of our submission.   We have attached to our submission a number of documents. In all, there are five: Annexure A, B, C, D and E.   I will not necessarily speak to all the annexed documents, but perhaps even before I speak to the documents that are annexed hereto, I must point out that if you look at the submission as a whole and you look at the annexed documents, especially those that were authored by this collective, you will notice that a common feature of these documents is that members of the Mandela Crisis Committee did not at any stage purport to have been material witnesses, either as individuals or as a collective to any crime that was allegedly committed.  I think it's important to point this out.  But we are of the view that, in the course of the work which we were doing as this collective, we gained some insights into the matters before this Commission today, insights which might be helpful in pointing the Commission in the direction which is likely to help the Commission discover the truth.   If for instance you look at annexure B, that is a press statement which we felt obliged to release on the 18th April 1996.  Although as a collective we were no longer meeting at that time to attend to these matters that are before the Commission today.  As I said, we were prompted to take this step by allegations and insinuations which appeared in the mass media, which we believe came from certain - at least a certain political party in the country.  Allegations to the effect that we as a collective were covering up the truth about what happened to Dr Asvat.   So I just thought that it's important for us to explain why we have this statement.   I may come back to it later. That's Annexure B.  Annexure C, that is a report which was sent by members of this committee to the late president of the African National Congress, Mr Oliver Tambo, who at the time was in exile, and it outlines these insights that I referred to earlier as we gained them.   Annexure E is a statement which was issued by the leadership of the African National Congress from Lusaka after they had received the report which appears here as Annexure C.  Rev Chikane has already said that, as a result of the insights that we gained, we formed an impression that there were serious problems with the Mandela United Football Club.  And I think if you look at the main body of our submission, and you look at the report which we sent to Mr Oliver Tambo, you will indeed see that that was our impression.  I think on page 19 of our main submission, not page, paragraph 19 rather.   Paragraph 19 of our main submission, we say - I will read that
"The committee insisted on removing what it considered a bush, that is the Mandela Football Club, around the Mandela family within which agents of the apartheid system were possibly operating".
 If you look again at Annexure C which is then our report to Mr Oliver Tambo, page 2 of that document. Or let me start with the last sentence of page 1.  This is how we reported to Mr Tambo:
"When we interviewed Katiza Cebekhulu, he came across as a person who understood no language other than Zulu. (There must be a full stop there.)  Somewhere along  the way we gained an impression that he is a maverick.  This prompted us to concentrate on additional issues. We broke him. (Not in the physical sense.)  Consequently we established the following from him
1. That both Gabriel (that's Gabriel Mekgwe) and Thabiso (Thabiso Mono) were heavily assaulted.  Stompie and Kenny were also assaulted. 
That he, Katiza, was instructed to contribute in  assaulting the four, the four namely Katiza, Gabriel, Stompie and Kenny.   He was himself not assaulted. 
He believed that Kenny had escaped, but he suspected that Stompie was dead.  
He, Katiza, before running away from Hammarsdale 
(Hammarsdale is in what today is known as the KwaZulu-Natal Province) He, Katiza, before running away from Hammarsdale, was working with the C.R.Swart's Security Branch. (That's what we got from him.) He maintains that he did this because of poverty.  He was, according to him, rejected by both the UDF and the Inkatha.  He reckons both organisations were after him, and he therefore decided to leave the area, namely Hammarsdale." 
"It is a matter of public record that sometimes this year the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party made public statements, that is the provisional structures of these two organisations in KwaZulu-Natal, they made public statements which one can say confirm what appears there as Point 4.  Or at least they have got the same impression that Katiza had of himself as he told us."   
 There I was dealing with annexure C.  Coming to annexure E - or before I come to Annexure  - if you look at Annexure C -
I'm looking for the relevant paragraph. I'm trying to - . Oh, then Franky said the paragraph immediately after what I read about Katiza. I'm just reading it as it appears in this document. 
"Winnie later told us that she has sent both Katiza and Xoliswa to Lusaka. (Katiza Cebekhuku and Xoliswa Falati to Lusaka.) This is what prompted us to take this step of communicating with you hopefully whilst the two are still in Lusaka, because we thought that it was necessary for him to be armed with this insight that we had gained ourselves.  We had not gone public for instance about what Katiza told us about himself, but we thought that it would be necessary for the leadership of the ANC to ask him a few questions about that.  When we spoke to Katiza, he implicated Xoliswa Falati in the alleged kidnapping of the children from the Methodist church. And indeed later, when the children had come out of the Mandela residence, they  implicated Xoliswa as well at the meeting which was referred to earlier by Bishop Storey, which took place in Dobsonville. So indeed we thought that, quite apart from whatever it was that they were sent to say in Lusaka, it would have been necessary for the leadership of the ANC to know about these other allegations that were being made about the individuals concerned.
 Coming to Annexure E that, as I said earlier, was a statement issued by the leadership of the ANC from Lusaka.

DR BORAINE: Mr Mufamadi, I'm sorry to interrupt you, is there a date on which this was issued?

SIDNEY MUFAMADI: It is not reflected there.  I guess you will appreciate the conditions in which people in exile operated.   Well, it's not reflected there.  Anyway, this was the statement.

FRANK CHIKANE: [Intervention] But the statement was made public during that time.