Picture: THINKSTOCK
Picture: THINKSTOCK

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IT IS OF concern that so many aspects of the bad old days of South African life appear to have been carried over seamlessly from the old order to the new.

A series of incidents of late suggest a hidden hand and evoke aspects of our past.

Last weekend, the Helen Suzman Foundation was victim to a peculiar incident in a purported "break-in" at its offices. Very suspiciously, certain laptops were targeted and stolen in circumstances that bear little resemblance to a normal robbery.

The foundation is only the latest in a string of organisations that had laptops, computers and documents stolen when they happened to be involved in actions challenging the government or the ruling party.

As it happens, the foundation is involved in legal action, in which it argues that the legislation in terms of which the head of the Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation (otherwise known as the Hawks) is appointed, is constitutionally invalid.

The case also challenges some aspects of the structure of the body.

It may be that the case has nothing to do with the break-in, but the coincidence is hard to ignore. The odd thing, however, is that the litigation is not built on the basis of inside information of any kind.

It is not based on a secret source inside the Hawks passing on intelligence. Neither does it involve a complicated legal strategy. It is built on a legal argument that is public, as the foundation’s documents are available on its website.

If information about the case were the aim of the break-in, then stealing computers would be an odd way to go about getting it — not that common sense is necessarily a bar to this kind of intimidatory action.

If seeking the names of the funders were the aim, these too are published on the website.

The foundation can now add its name to a list that have had computers stolen in suspicious circumstances — over the years this has included academics, trade unions, political parties and government officials. These thefts demonstrate a pattern that is simply grotesque.

Even more worrying is the "intelligence" that has been peddled from time to time.

Occasionally, some reports that seem to emanate from the intelligence services do leak, and if they are any indication of what these organisations are spending public money on to produce, SA is in deep trouble.

There is no way of knowing if these are genuine intelligence reports or not, but the National Union of Metalworkers of SA recently obtained a report that claimed the Marikana massacre "was a project of the American Central intelligence Agency, destabilising the state through provocation and negatively affecting the image of the country".

The report linked the massacre to the #FeesMustFall campaign, which it claimed was seen by socialist groups "as the best tool to collapse the incumbent government as total free education, in the current state of the economy, would collapse the universities…. Thus the regime change from capitalist to a socialist state would be achieved once the state collapses."

There is at least one irony here. Last year, the Al-Jazeera news network managed somehow to get hold of a document that was purportedly a South African intelligence document.

The document was called Security Vulnerabilities in Government and it was dated October 2009.

The report said: "Foreign governments and their intelligence services strive to weaken the state and undermine SA’s sovereignty. Continuing lack of an acceptable standard of security … increases the risk."

It then listed as particular problems insufficient lock-up facilities, limited vetting of senior officials in sensitive institutions, no approved encryption on landlines or mobiles … and also the theft of laptop computers.

What goes around, as they say, comes around.