WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-07-05 Time: 05:00:03 Posted By: News Poster
By Karima Brown
Johannesburg – HOW does a man go from being a Soweto school teacher, revolutionary, top diplomat, presidential confidant and national police commissioner to a common criminal?
In trying to answer this complex question I asked people who knew and worked with him during his many years in exile and then in post-apartheid SA, how a man with such a background ended up being taken down by someone like gangster-turned-snitch Glenn Agliotti. Unsurprisingly the majority did not want to speak on record.
A pop-psychology answer could be that Jackie Selebi fell victim to one too many personas he learned to cultivate during his days as an underground operative – a man who had to “live his legend” (cultivated cover) to mask his real work for the African National Congress (ANC).
A former Umkhonto weSizwe operative who served with Selebi in a refashioned police service says one reason revolutionaries often lose their moral compass is “unfettered power”.
“You must remember, as the national commissioner he was all-powerful. He could deal with his enemies, he could engage individual ministers including the president at the time. Why do you think no one was alarmed when he was hanging out with people such as Agliotti? He was untouchable, because there was no one watching him.”
Political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi says a cursory study of the ANC in exile confirms that there were abuses of power by senior ANC officials even then, which debunks the myth that access to state power post-1994 is the main cause of Selebi’s dramatic change.
But Doobi Gray, as Selebi was affectionately known when he taught history at Musi High in Pimville, Soweto, in the early ’70s and who was once a favourite son in Africa’s oldest liberation movement, has now fallen from grace. An appeal notwithstanding, Selebi faces the very real prospect of spending his twilight years behind bars given that the punishment for corruption carries a minimum sentence of 15 years in jail.
Selebi’s downfall was played out graphically over two days as Judge Meyer Joffe read his judgment sealing his fate. Sitting hunched, with his son crying and his wife appearing distracted after Judge Joffe found him guilty of graft, Selebi cut a lonely figure, a far cry from the imposing police commissioner he once was.
During the ruling on Friday, Judge Joffe said Selebi and Agliotti “were strangers to the truth”, ironic if one thinks back to 2004 when Selebi, during his inaugural speech as police commissioner, told the country that the fight against corruption was a necessity because “crime had to be fought with clean hands”.
Selebi’s earlier life was a lot more illustrious, with an almost guaranteed future of greatness. As a fiery youth leader operating from the frontline states during the heady days of exile, Selebi was an important player in the exile movement.
Howard Barrell, who has researched the ANC and who operated within the party when it was still banned, says Selebi hails from a group of people who joined the ANC at a time when its prospects were the bleakest.
“He was working for the ANC underground before the 1976 uprisings, playing a very significant role tirelessly building – even if it was very rudimentary – structures of the ANC which would later play a pivotal role in linking leaders such as Jacob Zuma and others freshly released from Robben Island with the many youngsters who wanted to leave the country and swell the ranks of the ANC in exile,” he says.
Selebi ascended the ranks quickly and became the leader of the ANC youth section, a position which allowed him to travel abroad, in many ways a harbinger of things to come when he became an influential figure in the ANC’s expanding diplomatic presence.
Mr Barrell says Selebi’s rapid rise in the youth section brought him into contact with former president Thabo Mbeki and was the basis of a relationship that defined both men in later years.
However, many people reminded me that patronage networks and abuse of power were not the preserve of a post-1994 ANC.
“You must remember that in exile, one depended on everything from the ANC. Travel, study, food rations, everything,” a former cadre says. “And given that Jackie was the head of the youth section, he would be well versed with how to work the system and how to abuse it, if you get my meaning.”
If this view is to be taken at face value, many would argue that Selebi’s life has now merely come full circle.
Original Source: 
Original date published: 5 July 2010
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201007050147.html?viewall=1