LYING AND THIEVING Anthony Brink

300 Pages·2009·1.24 MB·English

LYING AND THIEVING
The fraudulent scholarship of
Ronald Suresh Roberts in
Fit to Govern:
The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki
with reference to chapters 8 and 9 on AIDS:
‘A clash of fundamentalisms 1: medical politics’ and
‘A clash of fundamentalisms 2: racial politics’

Anthony Brink

Open books
Lying and Thieving: The fraudulent scholarship of Ronald Suresh Roberts in ‘Fit to
Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki’ with reference to chapters 8 and 9
on AIDS: ‘A clash of fundamentalisms 1: medical politics’ and ‘A clash of funda-
mentalisms 2: racial politics by Anthony Brink was published by Open
books in Cape Town on 10 November 2007.
An expanded edition with an Addendum containing five new chapters
was published on 15 January 2008.
It was reprinted after re-formatting on 10 November 2008, the first an-
niversary of its release, with a new Endnote comprising five updates.
Open books
Postnet Suite 273
Private Bag X1
Vlaeberg 8018
Cape Town
www.open-books.co.za
Set in 10 pt Garamond
ISBN: 978-0-620-39980-7
Underlined superscript numbers within the text indicate hyperlinked
documents (not footnotes) accessible at www.lyingandthieving.com.

The author
Anthony Brink is an advocate of the High Court of South Africa, and
the convener and chairman of the Treatment Information Group
(www.tig.org.za). He is also the author of Debating AZT: Mbeki and the
AIDS drug controversy (Open books, 2001) and The trouble with nevirapine
(2008). RUDE LETTERS, Poisoning our Children: AZT in pregnancy, and
Introducing AZT: ‘A world of antiretroviral experience’ are in press. He is an
honorary co-author of a scientific monograph by Papadopulos-
Eleopulos et al., Mother to Child Transmission of HIV and its Prevention with
AZT and Nevirapine: A Critical Analysis of the Evidence (Perth, 2001). His
major work in progress, ‘Just say yes, Mr President’: Mbeki and AIDS, is a
comprehensive history of the AIDS treatment and causation controver-
sies in South Africa, and a multi-disciplinary interrogation and decon-
struction of their medical and ideological foundations. His work has
been translated into Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, German, and
Dutch.
Introduction to the expanded edition
On 7 November 2007, two days after Lying and Thieving was completed,
Mark Gevisser’s biography Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred was released,
reporting how in June, the month in which Fit to Govern: The Native Intelli-
gence of Thabo Mbeki came out, Mbeki himself moved to repudiate Rob-
erts’s basic opening lie that ‘Thabo Mbeki is not now, nor has he ever
been an AIDS dissident.’ A fortnight later an independent audit con-
firmed Roberts’s plagiarism of my work and turned up more evidence of
it – and the following month Fit to Govern’s editor Dr James Sanders
agreed. In the weeks thereafter, a number of documents were made
available to me affording further evidence of Roberts’s fraud in the writ-
ing of his book, in relation to his lying defamation of me, and to the se-
cret instructions he was taking from his political patron Dr Essop Pahad
concerning the content of the book, all the while claiming that he’d writ-
ten it with a free hand. Rather than revising the text to incorporate this
new material, I decided to cover it in an addendum in five parts. This
includes a review of Roberts’s responses to the charges in this book in
several newspaper articles and on his Mail&Guardian ThoughtLeader
internet blog. Some nips, tucks and minor corrections aside, the original
text otherwise stands as it was published on 10 November 2007.
AB
15 January 2008
A note on the second impression of the expanded edition
A new Endnote records further developments, and updates this book to
10 November 2008, one year after the book’s original release. Most im-
portantly, it reports that Mbeki wrote to Gevisser shortly after the publi-
cation of his biography specifically to confirm that he’d correctly de-
scribed him as an AIDS dissident – and it tells how, despite this, Roberts
has shamelessly persisted in selling his lying case in the media that he
isn’t. It notes the Press Ombudsman’s Panel’s finding that the Weekender
was right to report that Roberts had plagiarized my work. And it men-
tions Noam Chomsky’s supportive interest in the affair.
AB
10 November 2008
To the memory of my friend Sam Mhlongo
CONTENTS
Preface - 9
Background – 19
Brink portrayed in Fit to Govern – 47
Mbeki represented in Fit to Govern:
• Opening note – 103
• Chapter 8: ‘A clash of fundamentalisms 1: medical politics’ – 105
• Chapter 9: ‘A clash of fundamentalisms 2: racial politics’ – 177
Motive – 205
• in the light of Minister in the Presidency Dr Essop Pahad’s letter in
the Financial Mail on 10 November 2000 – 215
• and another by him in the Star on 5 July 2007 – 217
Appendices
1. ‘Illiberal journalism creates its own monsters’, Roberts in the
Mail&Guardian, 24 August 2007 – 225
2. ‘When saints are truly sinners’, Roberts in the Star,
28 August 2007 – 237
3. ‘Notes on a Theme: Functional Illiteracy in the Media Responses to
Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki’, Roberts’s public
address at Wits Business School, Donald Gordon Auditorium,
6 August 2007 – 239
4. SABC television interview of Roberts after his Wits Business School
talk – 245
5. ‘Notes on a Theme: The Aids-Drug lobby and the degradation of
public discourse’, Roberts’s public address at the University of the
Witwatersrand, Geosciences Lecture Theatre, 30 August 2007 – 247
Addendum
1. Mbeki’s ‘Castro Hlongwane’ bombshell – 263
2. More evidence of Roberts’s plagiarism turned up –
and the editor of Fit to Govern Dr James Sanders
agrees – 265
3. The mind of a rogue at work: Roberts’s developing
denigration of Brink in Fit to Govern from draft to
draft – 269
4. Roberts’s responses to the charges in Lying and
Thieving – 271
5. How Roberts wrote Fit to Govern to order, chopping
and changing his manuscript on Essop Pahad’s secret
instructions, and prostituting his ‘intellectual
independence’ to mining capital – 279
Endnote
Five updates – 297
6
‘[President Thabo Mbeki’s] continuing personal musings
[have provided] a year-long Christmas present to [the gov-
ernment’s] detractors, both here and abroad. Much of this
has been, frankly, Mbeki’s fault.
But as the dust settles now and his government continues
its multibillion rand assault on Aids, we must not forget that
this ordeal was not only – or even principally – a story of
presidential error. Aids – an opportunistic disease – has at-
tracted its fair share of opportunistic commentators.’
Ronald Suresh Roberts: ‘Beware those intent on un-
dermining Mbeki’, letter in the Sunday Independent, 8
October 20001
‘I found the plaintiff to be evasive, argumentative and an
opportunistic witness … He was unconvincing, and his evi-
dence was shown to be contradictory.’
Weinkove AJ, in Ronald Suresh Roberts v Johncom
Media Investments Limited, Cape High Court, 8 Janu-
ary 2007
‘… what I want to address tonight is … the public proto-
cols that properly bind healthy democratic discourse in a
liberal democracy … Solid facts. Coherent logic. Accurate
quotation. … Respect the intelligence of the public: there-
fore do not seek to censor or obstruct or re-write the op-
posing view. Be happy for both views to be aired, so that
the public can decide. Try to stay awake during the events
that you intend to report upon. Do not plagiarise the work
of others. These seem to me to be not only some good rules
for journalism or intellectualism or scholarship, but also of
common sense in any collective endeavor [sic]. …
In a properly functioning literary culture, plagiarism is the
cardinal sin, for obvious reasons. It is a theft from another
writer and it is a fraud upon readers. It defeats the orderly
circulation of ideas. It spells a lack of integrity. …
I also remind you that in the context of the HIV/AIDS
debate, President Mbeki asked: What do you do when senior
academics and journalists refuse to read? This points to a
systematic and deliberate degradation of public discourse.
… the discourse of Mbeki has been corrupted by … a
lazy, functionally illiterate dull drone of unexamined truisms.
… The regurgitation of hearsay becomes an acceptable
substitute for the investigation of facts.
… John Matshikiza … has published almost compulsively
harsh and personalised attacks on me in the Mail & Guard-
ian. He has a right to attack me. I was given adequate oppor-
tunities to reply.’
Ronald Suresh Roberts: ‘Notes on a Theme: Func-
tional Illiteracy in the Media: Responses to Fit to Gov-
ern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki’, public
address at Wits Business School, Donald Gordon Audi-
torium, 6 August 20072
8
Preface
In his book Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki (Johannes-
burg: STE, 2007) Ronald Suresh Roberts determinedly sinks an ice-pick
in my head, over and over again. He does this by making a number of
colourful and entertaining claims about me to portray me as ludicrous,
hysterical, stupid, dishonest, hypocritical, cowardly, delusional, manipu-
lative, unscrupulous, exploitative, publicity-seeking, irrelevant, and all
told, a certifiable nutcase who should be put away. Much more impor-
tantly, he seeks to discredit my work over the past decade as the distract-
ing, empty propaganda of a deranged fanatic.
The important thing with murder, of course, is to do it properly. It’s
obviously a huge mistake to botch the job and allow your target to recu-
perate from his grievous wounds and come back talking. He’ll be an-
noyed as hell, and he’ll be highly motivated to testify.
And if, as in 1941, you treacherously attack your ally in the dead of
night with ruthless force, and commit terrible atrocities of all kinds on
his own territory, which territory he knows better than anyone, you must
expect a firm response in consequence, and possibly even complete
obliteration.
As a researcher and writer I obviously have every personal and profes-
sional interest in cleaning Roberts’s shit from my shoe; but a focussed
examination of his writing where it hits me, preliminary to a critical
analysis of his scholarship on Mbeki’s thinking about AIDS, will serve a
broader purpose: it will provide an illustrative case study as a basis for
assessing Roberts’s method, professionalism and good faith, and there-
fore his reliability generally as a contemporary historian and the author
of a work headed for the annals of scholarship on Mbeki and his time.
This book is accordingly structured as follows: Commencing with
some relevant personal history, it proceeds to inspect and test Roberts’s
claims about me; it then critically examines and shows up his repeated
historical falsifications and fabrications, having regard to the historical
record, in which he fraudulently misrepresents Mbeki’s standpoint on
AIDS and antiretroviral (ARV) drugs; and in the course of exposing all
Roberts’s lying as aforesaid it points out all his thieving from me, and
identifies and reclaims what he’s stolen.
Finally: I’ve ruminated over Roberts’s motives at length, and in my
dismay over his personal duplicity, his political treachery, his theft of my
work, his assault on my reputation, and his fraud in misrepresenting
Mbeki’s opinions of the cause and treatment of AIDS for what this
might mean for future discourse and policy, I’ve taken the counsel of my
friends. Our various and several speculations are folded into an allegory
LYING AND THIEVING: THE FRAUDULENT SCHOLARSHIP OF RONALD SURESH ROBERTS
under the title ‘Motive’, in which I dismantle the complex of motives
that appear to me to have inspired Roberts to write the junk he did. The
chapter ends with a hard look at two letters in the media written by
Roberts’s political patron, Minister in the Presidency Dr Essop Pahad.
In the appendices I critique an article Roberts wrote plugging his book
in the Mail&Guardian on 24 August, the whole of which is based on an
idea of mine he’s stolen, and includes another one; it looks at an article
he wrote in the Star on the 28th regurgitating some of what he’s thieved;
it examines his false claims made in a talk given on 6 August at Wits
Business School; it deals with more lies told after it during an interview
recorded on video by an SABC reporter; and it deals with a talk a three
weeks later on the 30th at the University of the Witwatersrand in which
he tells lots more lies, taking a few more pot-shots at me on the way.
I suggest you pause here to view the short video clip of the television
interview (linked at this book’s website), because it will give you a very
good sense of the man behind the writing under discussion, and will
make it come to life. The content of the interview we’ll scrutinize at the
end.
If you’re less interested in Roberts’s lying than in his thieving, you’ll
find the plagiarism charges made throughout this book concentrated in
the second half.
I regret that this critique is so long, but when a rogue’s crimes are
manifold and their list is long, they take numerous pages to particularize
and indict.
Also, the trouble with chopping a mamba with a panga after he’s bit-
ten you is that he’s clever, and he has this way of slithering quickly and
smoothly across the floor, so that as soon as you think you’ve got him
you find him coming from a diametrically different angle, because of his
ability to slither quickly and smoothly across the floor and cleverly take
up the best angle to suit the moment. It’s because these snakes are like
this that it takes some time to sort them out.
In his book, besides attacking me and discounting my work in an abjectly
dishonest manner, Roberts has perpetrated a literary fraud of Goldhagen
and Dershowitz scale; and it’s in view of the possibility that his AIDS
chapters may in future be cited in accordance with their pretensions as
an exposition of Mbeki’s views on AIDS and ARVs, and their potential
policy implications, that I consider it imperative that they be exposed.
Following the publication of William Mervin Gumede’s abysmal Thabo
Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (Cape Town: Zebra Press,
2005), Roberts has pursued him relentlessly (e.g. at the Cape Town Book
Fair in June 2006; in his book published in June 2007; during an SABC
10