Fallen ANC freedom fighter looks back with regret

Former spokesperson for Nelson Mandela and South African ambassador to the Netherlands Carl Niehaus was unmasked as a forger this year. An interview with a destitute politician and fallen freedom fighter.

"No one believes me anymore, and I understand that,” says Carl Niehaus after hours of talking. “Why did it go so terribly wrong? I’m not an idiot, am I? I’m a reasonably intelligent person.” He is quiet for a moment. "Why did I let this happen? I really don’t know."

Niehaus is flat broke. He is the laughingstock of white South Africa. A fallen freedom fighter of the ANC. During a press conference in June he begged for forgiveness for a laundry list of lies, half truths and corrupt behaviour.

From Mandela to Zuma

In 1991 Niehaus was released after 7.5 years in prison for ANC activities during apartheid. He became a spokesperson for Nelson Mandela and in 1997 the first ambassador to the Netherlands for free South Africa. In 2000 he returned from his post early. He had cancer, he said, and wanted to get treatment in South Africa.

Many jobs followed and always ended abruptly. But last year he returned to politics, as a spokesperson for presidential candidate Jacob Zuma. A man after his own heart. “Someone who gives whites the feeling again they are included.”

Zuma became president, but Niehaus didn’t even make it as far as the elections. He has had serious financial problems for years, South African newspapers revealed during the campaign. Niehaus had been amassing debt upon debt and hardly paid back anything he owed friends. Together with his wife he moved into a Tuscan-style villa near Johannesburg costing just over 4,000 euros a month, but the rent and power bills went unpaid. A travel agency is still waiting for payment for an expensive beach holiday, and hotels in Johannesburg and Amsterdam have outstanding accounts for Niehaus.

When Niehaus confessed in February of this year that he had forged the signatures of provincial administrators three years earlier in order to get a loan, the job in the ANC was history. ‘Tearful Niehaus admits fraud’, was the headline in weekly newspaper the Mail & Guardian. Niehaus, who maintains that legally he did not commit fraud because he withdrew the forged documents on time, resigned from his position in the ANC.

Liar and con man

But the revelations did not stop there. He had tampered with his curriculum vitae published on the internet, reported Afrikaans newspaper Beeld. He apparently listed functions he no longer held or had never held. And he had invented a doctoral degree (‘summa cum laude’) from Utrecht University.

Niehaus, the papers wrote, is a pathological liar and con man, the embodiment of moral corruption in the ANC after fifteen years of democracy in South Africa.

Carl Niehaus, 49, now receives visitors in a nondescript office building in the eastern part of Johannesburg. He talks easily about politics, about fifteen years of democracy in South Africa, and about everything that went wrong in the ANC under president Thabo Mbeki. When it comes to his own downfall, he starts fiddling nervously with his Blackberry. “I cannot blame anyone else,” he says, speaking slowly, “only myself.”

In the 1990s Niehaus wrote about growing up in a conservative white family, his choice for the ANC and his time in prison in his autobiography Fighting for Hope. Now, his friends say, he should write a new book.

This one should start, he says, with his release - not until a year after Mandela was freed. He was 31 at the time. Jansie, whom he married in prison, was a year younger. He didn't get a moment to catch his breath. "In the morning I was released, in the afternoon there was a press conference, and the following morning I was expected at the ANC offices.”

It was not a pleasant time: he was under permanent protection. “I was on a hit list of the Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging [Afrikaner Resistance Movement]. I was seen as a traitor to the Afrikaner people. And in fact that is still the case.”

In 1994 he became a member of the first democratically elected parliament of South Africa. In 1997 he went to the Netherlands, as ambassador, at the age of 37.

Was the ambassadorship an escape from South Africa?

“I had a difficult relationship with vice-president Mbeki. He once lectured me sternly in parliament. It was clear he would become president so I asked Mandela if he had a solution. He sent me to the Netherlands."

Your parents never understood your ANC membership. Was there more appreciation when you stood next to Mandela and became ambassador?

“Maybe they became more understanding, but they never appreciated my political choices. Like many Afrikaners, they respected Nelson Mandela and his struggle against apartheid, but they wanted nothing to do with the ANC. Mandela defended his own people, my father could understand that. I betrayed my own people, this is different. But they loved the fact I became ambassador. They are simple people and I had a magnificent house in The Hague. They thought that was wonderful."

Did you enjoy the ambassadorship?

“It was an interesting job, but in retrospect that ambassadorship was a mistake. For diplomats it is first prize, for me – my political career was interrupted. Four years is a long time in politics. In South Africa people forgot me.”

You said you resigned because you had cancer. Was that the most important reason?

“I was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia. I wrote that in a letter to Mbeki at the time. But I also wanted to regain a position in South Africa.”

Were you even sick? Not everyone believes that anymore.

“The facts are clear, there were medical tests. I was treated. I don’t feel I have to defend myself about that. The cancer is in remission, and hopefully permanently.”

What was wrong with president Mbeki?

“His scandalous AIDS policy, the denial that HIV caused AIDS, was a slap in my face. In an interview at the time I tried to explain South Africa’s position. I did not want to contradict the president but nor did I want to present myself as an AIDS dissident. So I mumbled something about poverty and poor nutrition. But the bottom line is that HIV causes AIDS - and Mbeki denied that. I was evading questions and I thought: now I’m losing any shred of credibility.”

Mbeki’s governing style moreover “caused a great deal of damage” to the ANC, says Niehaus. “He consulted no one, he was the big man who knew everything. If you disagreed with his view, you were his enemy. The ANC is a broad alliance with capitalists and communists and everything in between. A leader like that is a disaster for such a party. It became important to be in the right circles in order to get a job or have access to good investment possibilities.”

Did you still feel at home in the ANC?

“The ANC is bigger than Thabo Mbeki. It is an organisation with a long history and there is no alternative. That is why I will always be a member. But I was powerless at the time. I am white - this too limited the possibilities. I never had my own constituency. Whites wanted nothing to do with me, the black community doesn't need me and I've never been a communist. I used to convince myself this wasn't the case, but there is only a modest role for me in South Africa.”

You once said whites should be humble in the new South Africa. Have they become so?

“Whites have to understand that apartheid did tremendous damage, not just economically and politically but also to people’s psyches. Fifteen years is still such a short time. In the business world, white men are still running the show. That is simply unacceptable in a country where the large majority is black. Affirmative action to correct the damage must continue. But that doesn’t mean there is no place for whites in South Africa.”

Many white people have left to other countries.

“You cannot stop that, it is their own decision. But my experience is they often return to South Africa. When I was in the Netherlands, I sometimes met Afrikaners who had left the country around 1994. They were miserable. They think they are Dutch to some extent, but they are not. All they talk about is South Africa.”

You returned to the Netherlands to work for Deloitte&Touche, but you didn't last long there either. What happened?

“I tried to buy a house, but after signing the initial purchase contract, I couldn’t get the money together. I missed the deadline because I was in hospital. That is how I ended up in debt. Deloitte didn’t want to work with people who were saddled with those kinds of debts. It makes you vulnerable to blackmail, I can understand that.”

Was that the first debt?

“Yes, it started there and after that it just snowballed. Around that time I also divorced my first wife Jansie. We'd been in denial for a long time. It hadn't really worked between us since my release from prison. We kept trying for almost ten years. My second marriage was a big mistake. Linda was a woman who spent an enormous amount of money. We were together for four years, but it was clear early on that her expectations did not match what I could contribute financially.”

You have often called yourself a Calvinist. How do you reconcile that with this exorbitant lifestyle?

"I tried to buy her love, provided for a Porsche and booked expensive holidays. I think I wanted to continue to project the illusion of success, while in fact I was not at all successful anymore. I wasn't among the friends of Mbeki and was unemployed for two years. But I wanted to show I could still afford everything. In the new South Africa, it is all about what you project, the trappings of success. Even a Calvinist like me falls victim to that. In the meantime I needed more and more money to pay off the debts, but no job paid enough to alleviate the problems. I don't want to blame Linda: I allowed it to happen.”

Suddenly last year you became spokesperson for Jacob Zuma. What do you see in him?

“Zuma brought the spirit of Mandela back to the ANC. He listens to people, tries to rebuild the organisation from its foundation up. He trusts in knowledge and has appointed a number of good ministers. If you ask him for an opinion, he dishes out the decision of the ANC’s national executive committee. If you persist, he will say he doesn’t have a personal opinion. He sees himself as a chairman. That is a world of difference from the elites that called the shots under Mbeki. Zuma is the only one who can keep the ANC together.”

Zuma had to stand trial for corruption and rape.

“The judicial system was abused politically by Mbeki’s camp to floor Zuma and it didn't succeed. He was not convicted, that is what matters. And no one can question Zuma's position in the liberation struggle. People who worked with him at the time would still give their lives for him. You cannot understand South Africa as long as you don't understand the history.”

You accuse the ANC under Mbeki of favouritism and corruption. Are you yourself not a part of that problem?

“The police investigated my case and concluded that I did not commit fraud. I forged a signature and then confessed and withdrew the document. I couldn’t live with it. What I was considering doing was very wrong and how it happened, I don’t know. It is too early to even say anything about it, but I do want to answer. For the first time in my life I am being treated by a therapist.”

Can you imagine why people feel you have betrayed them?

“Yes, I can understand that. I am terribly sorry. But I have not betrayed everything I have done in my life. I know: there are also things which I can be proud of. But I think from now on I will have to work twice as hard to be believed.”

Did you lose a lot of friends because of the lies?

“It's not so bad in South Africa, the judgement in the Netherlands is fiercer. There people know me mainly as ambassador and the years-long history of the liberation struggle is less important. I have a long history in the ANC, people don’t forget that. I was not thrown out of the ANC, that simply wouldn't be possible. Even Winnie Mandela was allowed to remain a member. Everything went wrong with her, and the ANC has never denied that, but you cannot simply drop people who have given years of their lives to the liberation struggle. Winnie was rehabilitated and now serves in parliament.”

That does give the impression the ANC lets its members get away with anything.

“That is not the case, otherwise I should still have been a spokesperson now. The outside world will never understand the loyalty. The ANC is not an ordinary political party, but a liberation movement. That does not mean we whitewash unlawfulness or fraud, but we cannot overlook the history of some people. The last time I was at an ANC funeral I was immediately led to the VIP area. You are still one of us, people said. That felt good, but I am still very ashamed about what has happened.”