Former MK Cadre, Vronda Banda, Joins the Apartheid National Party

On 24 January 1994, The Times of London newspaper reported that with South Africa’s first multi-racial election campaign kicking into high gear, the apartheid National Party (NP) opened an office in the heart of Soweto. What was remarkable about this was that the NP representative in this office was former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadre and ex-Robben Island prisoner, Vronda Zeblon Banda.

Banda was released from Robben Island in 1990, shortly after Mandela’s release, and spent a further couple of years with the African National Congress (ANC). However, according to his own account, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the lack of benefits and jobs offered by the organisation. This led to him defecting to the apartheid National Party, claiming that it was the NP alone that possessed the necessary political and economic “expertise” to run the country, unlike the ANC, which had never governed before, the NP “know how to govern”.

Banda argued that he still had friends within the liberation movement, and expressed confidence that others would come around when they realised that it was “better to sleep with the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. As an ANC soldier, Vronda Banda was trained in East Germany and sent back to his homeland in 1982 to organise opposition to the government’s apartheid policy. Arrested and charged with treason, he became a fellow inmate of ANC leader Nelson Mandela in the Robben Island prison.

When he came out of prison in 1990, Banda said, he was surprised to see so many members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) high up in the ANC leadership: “They are just using the ANC as a vehicle for their socialist ideas”. Searching about for a home for his nationalist ideas, he said, he found it in his reformed old enemy, the National Party. He signed up in April, one of a few former ANC soldiers to join the National Party, men who came back from exile to find no jobs and little support from the ANC.

Banda said of the National Party, “I realised that they had changed. Changes can happen from within. Look at the American Civil War. That was about people changing from within. This is what happened with the National Party.” Vronda was also associated with Joshua Nxumalo, who claimed to be merely a businessman, representing a consortium of other black businesses that controlled Virodene Pharmaceutical Holdings (VPH).

Nxumalo’s background, however, was a curious one, pointing to both military and intelligence work for the ANC. Nxumalo, known as “The General”, claimed that he went into exile from 1976 to 1989 and became a senior MK commander operating out of Swaziland and Mozambique, reporting directly to the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC). However, the ANC’s detailed submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on its MK structures in that period did not name Nxumalo among its operatives.

Nxumalo maintained that he went into business in 1992. Months before the 1994 elections, he joined the National Party in its last-ditch efforts to win votes in Soweto – but he said he was actually working undercover as a “mole”. “It was an intelligence matter,” Nxumalo added. “I fought for years to destroy them (the NP). This was a strategic move to sabotage them.” Nxumalo says his partner and sole commander in the project was former Robben Island inmate Vronda Banda, a friend he had known since childhood. Nxumalo argued, “He (Banda) was a loyal cadre; his loyalty was beyond question.”

Banda was shot dead in March 1997, around the same time as General Leonard Radu, Deputy Police Commissioner and former ANC Security Chief, who was killed in a car crash. Reports at the time speculated that Banda and Radu had been working to dig out informers in the ANC’s ranks. The ANC, however, maintained that Banda was a real NP member, and that it did not sanction any pre-election initiative to infiltrate the NP.

Castro Khwela
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