Last week, en route to a speech at New York University, I chanced upon a mural in Greenwich Village. It depicted Barack Obama as a white man and John McCain as a black. Underneath this arresting transposition was the legend:”Let the issues be the issue”.
The artist got his wish in the United States on November 4 when the Tsunami of economic woes and popular discontent with the presidency of George W Bush swept Barack Obama to power, and drowned any lingering attachments in the United States to racial politics.
South Africa’s sclerotic race-based politics, where every election since democracy could in various ways be predetermined on the basis of an ethnic census, is set for a shake-up with the formalisation of the Congress of the People (COPE) next Tuesday in Bloemfontein. Might South Africans hope that this most significant breakaway from the ruling ANC since the formation of the PAC nearly 50 years ago, leads to a localised version of “letting the issues be the issue”?
Having enjoyed (the verb endured might be more apt) the title of longest-serving leader of the official opposition in Parliament since 1994, perhaps I can offer some (unsolicited) advice to the late-joiners to the opposition patch.
First, in a mechanical sense at least, any worthwhile democrat in South Africa will welcome an addition to the scattered ranks of the country’s opposition forces. One of the reasons why our democracy has not fulfilled its early promise and the high expectations so many of us had for it ,is reflected in the last general election results. More than 50-points separated the ANC and the principal opposition that I then led. This allowed the governing party to ignore dissenting voices, sideline alternative views, however meritorious, and suck most of the oxygen out of the democratic space which the constitution, in theory, created for a multiplicity of players. Any reduction in that gap must be welcomed.
Second, it is commendable that COPE has clothed its somewhat threadbare policies in a robust defence of the constitution – our founding democratic settlement. Recent polls suggest that South Africans, retain an overwhelming faith in it, despite their misgivings about current politics and failing institutions. At this time of deep political uncertainty in South Africa and huge economic upheaval around the world, it is worth recalling the words of America’s investor sage, and its wealthiest man, Warren Buffett. He is fond of remarking in business, “it’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s swimming naked.” The same yardstick should measure political leaders.
It is therefore perfectly fair, to ask whether the leadership of COPE are the best guardians of our constitution and worthy stewards for its future protection. This inquiry yields a far from reassuring answer, despite the excitement at the prospect of a new challenger to ANC hegemony.
Brian Pottinger, in his excellent new work “The Mbeki Legacy” got it exactly right. He described the difference between the ascendant forces aligned to Jacob Zuma and the vanquished acolytes of Thabo Mbeki as being the difference between “ANC Classic” and “ANC Lite”. One should never underestimate the potency of the politics of resentment: that heady cocktail of hurt egos, withering resentments and loss of power. Indeed, it is difficult to discern any gulf of principle which separates the ANC from COPE. They both claim to be fighting for the real core, and the lost soul, of the governing party.
Ostensibly, the formation of COPE is not about getting even or bringing back the spirit of Thabo Mbeki through the back door. It is about the creation of an alternative based on principle. When I delivered my lecture at New York University, Breyten Breytenbach was in the audience. He gave me a copy of his recently published excoriation of the current South Africa in the latest edition of Harper’s magazine. It is subtitled “Notes of South Africa’s Failed Revolution”. As exhibit A of his deconstruction he presents the Marie Antoinette quote of Smuts Ngonyama “I didn’t struggle to be poor”. The words are entirely accurate, being the risible defence which Mr. Ngonyama [provided when asked to justify the R50 million he pocketed for his membership of a consortium that received a huge payola from the Telkom listing – in his case a result of “know-who” rather than “know how”. Breytenbach, however, inaccurately cites Ngonyama as “spokesman for the African National C0ongress”. Today, of course, he is Head of Policy for COPE. It is not his undeserved millions which concerns me. But in his new incarnation, is he still the staunch defender that he once was of the cadre policy and deployment strategy of the ANC? In 1999 when I revealed this document which stated that the accountability of all ANC cadres lay to the Party high command and not to the institutions in which they were serving, Ngonyama described me as “a childish but confused individual”. In fact, as events over the past decade have made manifest, the ANC’s decision to place its officials in every key post in every institution, especially those requiring robust independence, has led to the corrosion of the constitution which COPE has now vowed to protect.
Last week ,the New York Times highlighted on its front page a recent Harvard University study which pinned the needless death of more than 300000 South Africans on then President Mbeki’s refusal to accept the scientific consensus on AIDS and his promotion of crank remedies drawn from AIDS dissidents. When in 2000, the Democratic Alliance rolled out the provision of antiretrovirals in the Western Cape, and offered to extend the treatment in its municipalities, Ngonyama accused us of peddling “apartheid-era biological warfare”. His other colleague in COPE, Mbhazima Shilowa was at the time Premier of Gauteng. But that province resisted and fought the constitutional court case in July 2002 which the TAC launched to force birthing facilities to provide antiretrovirals to HIV-positive mothers and babies.
Thirdly, nothing has divided South Africa’s opposition forces more than questions of unity. It is therefore reassuring to note that COPE leader Mosiuoa Lekota has pledged to work with other opposition parties, including my own, on the question of creating provincial governments where the opposition commands a majority. I have warm regard for Lekota, not least because of the very kind remarks he made when I stood down as leader of the opposition. But I also remember the entirely destructive role he played in 2001, in decimating opposition forces by luring Marthinus van Skalkvyk into the ANC in an attempt to monopolise all power in the hands of the ruling party. At one level, that’s politics. At another, it brings to mind the rueful remark of a famous British politician who said, “When you want to protect a principle, don’t look for protection from among the tramplers.”
My enduring hope for the new opposition party is that it will be staunch and resolute in its attachment to constitutional principles and practice: the very ideals its key leaders undermined when they occupied the seats of power.
* Written for Independent Newspapers in South Africa- publishing date: Sunday, 14 December 2008.
Showing posts with label AIDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AIDS. Show all posts
Friday, December 12, 2008
Friday, October 31, 2008
Jacob Zuma Visits the USA *
Last week a senior South African ANC politician managed to break through the media radar screens in Washington DC. Given the intense attention, and corresponding coverage which the US presidential election and the simultaneous and ongoing financial crisis enjoy, this was no mean feat.
Unfortunately, perhaps for him, his Party and the country, the politician in question was the Chairperson of Parliament’s Finance Committee the accident-prone Nhlanhla Nene. His fifteen seconds of infamy when he fell through the chair in the SABC TV studio ensured him primetime place on at least one cable TV news network – MSNBC (and more than 36 000 hits on YouTube, where viewers gave his performance a 5-star rating.) Jacob Zuma, who was in Washington last week, received far less coverage.
To be fair to the ANC President, his visit was designed to calm the waters – and uncertainties relating to his presumptive State Presidency – rather than to make waves. In this regard he went to considerable lengths before his major Washington audience at the Council on Foreign Relations to indicate that there would be “no change” of broad economic policy and political direction under his leadership.
He claimed, for example, that his allegiance – and indebtedness – to the forces on the ANC left, particularly the SA Communist Party and COSATU, was no greater or more significant than that of his two predecessors, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. He also managed, or attempted, to pivot his leadership away from the flagship issues of AIDS and Zimbabwe which has made Mbeki, and through him South Africa, a figure of some notoriety and certain unpopularity in Washington. He dismissed the Mbeki-Manto Tshabalala-Msimang AIDS denialist regime as one characterised by their “personal opinions”, at variance with mainstream ANC policy, now being corrected. On our benighted northern neighbour, Zuma gave a tepid endorsement of “quiet diplomacy” but robustly denounced Robert Mugabe’s refusal to grant Morgan Tsvangirai a passport.
Zuma was, by all accounts, well received by the soon-to-exit Bush administration at the White House. But perhaps his visit there, meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and even a quick grip-and-grin session with President George W Bush underlined the ambivalence of his reception. On the one hand, Zuma is, in effect, if not in formal office yet, the most powerful politician in South Africa. We are, beyond argument, the most important country in Africa. Even Bush’s detractors regard his Africa policy – particularly the PEPFAR AIDS-fighting fund and the Millennium Challenge Account as his “finest hour” (to quote no less an adversary than Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden). Therefore, Zumas’ clout ensures him access. On the other hand, the notoriety which the unresolved criminal corruption charges have attached to his name ensured that the White House cancelled a photo opportunity of his visit.
Zuma was hardly evasive on his legal challenges. With a degree of mind-numbing detail which probably bewildered, in its labyrinthine complexity, the Washington grandees and old Africa hands listening to his address at the Council on Foreign Relations, Zuma painted himself as the innocent victim of a political conspiracy. And I suppose, if you are to press such a charge, Washington is the ideal place to do it. He described his case as “a very obvious political manipulation” and he had no qualms in fingering Mbeki, and former Director of the National Prosecuting Authority, Bulelani Ngcuka, and ex-Justice Minister Penuel Maduna as the guilty parties.
The complex detail which Zuma provided around his legal travails stood in sharp relief to his vague bromides around South Africa’s economic challenges and the massive downturn in overseas investor confidence towards our country and other developing economies. On the very day that Zuma was suggesting to his American audience that they should “invest more in South Africa”, the New York Times published a list of the currencies of emerging markets countries that have fallen against the US Dollar over the last three months. The South African Rand ranked second from the bottom of the world’s worst performers, beating only the Icelandic Krona (we dropped 31.38% compared to Iceland’s 31.78%). Unhappily, Iceland has declared national bankruptcy. Yet, the run on the Rand and the vertiginous decline in commodity prices – barely preoccupied Zuma. Or at least, his answers evinced little fresh or reassuring thinking on the subject. He simply repeated the mantra that “the ANC has good policies” and announced that even the President of the Party – or the country for that matter – was unable to change them.
I spoke to a key Wall Street investor (or more accurately, one of the few still left standing) who attended a smaller Zuma event at the Harvard Club in New York. He said the ANC President displayed more charm than substance and did not present a persuasive case for investment or, given the latest portfolio reversal out of the JSE, reinvestment. “On the other hand”, he said, “he was neither frightening nor arrogant.”
My impression of Zuma in Washington was similar. I was struck by how he reached out to me, seated in the audience, and described the government and South Africa’s parliamentary opposition, as partners in South Africa’s democracy, in a manner that Thabo Mbeki never countenanced. This strongly suggested, to an audience containing many Africa-sceptics, that our democratic gains are less reversible than the fluctuating fortunes of our currency.
* Written for the Independent Newspapers in South Africa - submitted 29 October 2008.
Unfortunately, perhaps for him, his Party and the country, the politician in question was the Chairperson of Parliament’s Finance Committee the accident-prone Nhlanhla Nene. His fifteen seconds of infamy when he fell through the chair in the SABC TV studio ensured him primetime place on at least one cable TV news network – MSNBC (and more than 36 000 hits on YouTube, where viewers gave his performance a 5-star rating.) Jacob Zuma, who was in Washington last week, received far less coverage.
To be fair to the ANC President, his visit was designed to calm the waters – and uncertainties relating to his presumptive State Presidency – rather than to make waves. In this regard he went to considerable lengths before his major Washington audience at the Council on Foreign Relations to indicate that there would be “no change” of broad economic policy and political direction under his leadership.
He claimed, for example, that his allegiance – and indebtedness – to the forces on the ANC left, particularly the SA Communist Party and COSATU, was no greater or more significant than that of his two predecessors, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. He also managed, or attempted, to pivot his leadership away from the flagship issues of AIDS and Zimbabwe which has made Mbeki, and through him South Africa, a figure of some notoriety and certain unpopularity in Washington. He dismissed the Mbeki-Manto Tshabalala-Msimang AIDS denialist regime as one characterised by their “personal opinions”, at variance with mainstream ANC policy, now being corrected. On our benighted northern neighbour, Zuma gave a tepid endorsement of “quiet diplomacy” but robustly denounced Robert Mugabe’s refusal to grant Morgan Tsvangirai a passport.
Zuma was, by all accounts, well received by the soon-to-exit Bush administration at the White House. But perhaps his visit there, meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and even a quick grip-and-grin session with President George W Bush underlined the ambivalence of his reception. On the one hand, Zuma is, in effect, if not in formal office yet, the most powerful politician in South Africa. We are, beyond argument, the most important country in Africa. Even Bush’s detractors regard his Africa policy – particularly the PEPFAR AIDS-fighting fund and the Millennium Challenge Account as his “finest hour” (to quote no less an adversary than Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden). Therefore, Zumas’ clout ensures him access. On the other hand, the notoriety which the unresolved criminal corruption charges have attached to his name ensured that the White House cancelled a photo opportunity of his visit.
Zuma was hardly evasive on his legal challenges. With a degree of mind-numbing detail which probably bewildered, in its labyrinthine complexity, the Washington grandees and old Africa hands listening to his address at the Council on Foreign Relations, Zuma painted himself as the innocent victim of a political conspiracy. And I suppose, if you are to press such a charge, Washington is the ideal place to do it. He described his case as “a very obvious political manipulation” and he had no qualms in fingering Mbeki, and former Director of the National Prosecuting Authority, Bulelani Ngcuka, and ex-Justice Minister Penuel Maduna as the guilty parties.
The complex detail which Zuma provided around his legal travails stood in sharp relief to his vague bromides around South Africa’s economic challenges and the massive downturn in overseas investor confidence towards our country and other developing economies. On the very day that Zuma was suggesting to his American audience that they should “invest more in South Africa”, the New York Times published a list of the currencies of emerging markets countries that have fallen against the US Dollar over the last three months. The South African Rand ranked second from the bottom of the world’s worst performers, beating only the Icelandic Krona (we dropped 31.38% compared to Iceland’s 31.78%). Unhappily, Iceland has declared national bankruptcy. Yet, the run on the Rand and the vertiginous decline in commodity prices – barely preoccupied Zuma. Or at least, his answers evinced little fresh or reassuring thinking on the subject. He simply repeated the mantra that “the ANC has good policies” and announced that even the President of the Party – or the country for that matter – was unable to change them.
I spoke to a key Wall Street investor (or more accurately, one of the few still left standing) who attended a smaller Zuma event at the Harvard Club in New York. He said the ANC President displayed more charm than substance and did not present a persuasive case for investment or, given the latest portfolio reversal out of the JSE, reinvestment. “On the other hand”, he said, “he was neither frightening nor arrogant.”
My impression of Zuma in Washington was similar. I was struck by how he reached out to me, seated in the audience, and described the government and South Africa’s parliamentary opposition, as partners in South Africa’s democracy, in a manner that Thabo Mbeki never countenanced. This strongly suggested, to an audience containing many Africa-sceptics, that our democratic gains are less reversible than the fluctuating fortunes of our currency.
* Written for the Independent Newspapers in South Africa - submitted 29 October 2008.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Home Thoughts From Abroad: The US Election and Africa
The American financial meltdown is upmost in the minds of both US Presidential candidates and voters. It seemed unlikely, therefore, that the continent of Africa would be more than a minor footnote, and certainly provide no sound bite, as the campaign enters its final month.
Yet, in last Tuesday’s second presidential debate, both Senators Barack Obama and John McCain used several bloody and conflictual examples from the oft-forgotten continent to illustrate the reach and purpose of their foreign policy doctrines.
In suitably vague terms, Obama proclaimed that standing “idly by” in Ruanda “diminishes us”. He announced that the genocide in Darfur can only be curtailed by an American-led effort to bolster the UN- African Union Peace Keeping Force there. McCain offered similar boilerplate assurances on preventing genocide, but pointed to the “limits of our capability”. He cited the infamous, “humiliating” Somalian intervention as a cautionary case of reach exceeding grasp. McCain went much further in Foreign Affairs (December 2007) by naming Africa as the most compelling case for humanitarian intervention and promised to use “all elements” of US power to halt the outrages in Darfur.
But Africa’s two minutes of presidential primetime raises prospects about the continent’s relationship with the next occupant of the White House.
President George W Bush’s policies and programs in Africa have provided him with rare approval from his domestic opponents. His $15 billion AIDS-fighting PREPFAR initiative has provided 1.7 million Africans with anti-retrovirals and has converted the disease, for them at least, from a death into a life sentence. Senator Joe Biden proclaimed it as one of Bush’s “finest hours”. The substantial enhancement by the Republicans of the Clinton administration’s Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the generosity, and crucially the conditionality, of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) has been described as one of his most important foreign policy innovations. Both Obama and McCain are enthusiastic supporters of the MCA. Obama initially announced he would fund it more generously but has now pulled back that pledge in view of the deteriorating fiscal picture in the US. McCain would enhance it in a different, and arguably more durable, direction: by abolishing wasteful agricultural subsidies for US farmers which so tamp down African agricultural exports.
While the Bush administration acted decisively and swiftly against Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s electoral theft last December, its attempts to restore democracy in Zimbabwe have been uneven and feeble. By appointing then regnant, now vanquished, but at all times pro-Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki as his “point man” in Harare, Bush effectively handed the issue over to South Africa to resolve (or not, as the current stalemate suggests).
Too often the Bush focus on “the war against terror”, allowed rights’ delinquent regimes such as Ethiopia’s to escape the democratic-deepening requirements of the MCA. Meanwhile the multiple conflicts and violent anarchy in the strategically significant Horn of Africa remain unaddressed.
Bush’s engagement with Africa has not always been reciprocated. The recent establishment of the stand-alone Africom (US Military Command for Africa) has generally been coolly, even suspiciously, received on the continent. The pre-emptive unilateralism of the Bush doctrine has given forward cover to the anti-American chorus which has escalated in volume over the past five years.
Africa will remain in the frame of the next President because of the other major driver of US policy, aside from the war against terror, namely America’s energy needs: by 2015 it is estimated that no less than 25% of US oil imports will come from Africa, up from 15% in 2007.
Obama’s campaign advisor on Africa, Witney W Schneidman recently suggested that his perspective is informed by the fact that “he is the product of the African Diaspora, the son of a Kenyan father, whose grandmother still lives in Kenya”. This unusual provenance has suggested to some, in my country at least, that Obama will be a “soft touch” when it comes to Africa. In fact, a close analysis of his record indicates otherwise: during his 2006 visit to Africa, he forthrightly attacked the disastrous AIDS-denialism of South Africa’s then Health Minister. In Kenya he railed against “the lack of basic rule of law and accountability” in many predatory African states. While Obama has scaled back his promise of doubling US foreign aid he has not adjusted his requirement of conditionality: it is helpful that Obama has coupled US aid with “an insistent call for reform, to combat the corruption that rots societies and governments from within”. Citizens of the world’s poorest continent, governed by some of the world’s richest leaders, can only say “amen” to that.
Obama’s initiatives in the Senate such as his 2005 amendment which helped bring Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor to international justice, suggests that Obama might become impatient with the “big man solidarity” which the African Union invokes repeatedly to shield dictators from justice and accountability, most recently, in the case of Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan.
Obama proposes to renew and restore America’s somewhat tattered international partnerships. However, in dealing with Africa and the world, he will soon enough confront the limits imposed on United Nation’s action imposed by Russia and China who had vetoed decisive action from Burma to Zimbabwe.
McCain has elaborated little in the campaign on his grandiose project of creating “the league of democracies”, to act “where the United Nations fails”. He clearly envisages such a body to overcome the shield for tyranny which the Russia-China vetoes provide. However, there is no appetite in Pretoria and in other African emerging democracies for such a league.
Whoever wins in November, Africa’s worst problems, from AIDS to Zimbabwe and its best prospects, from deepening democracy to spreading economic opportunity, require a continued engagement and partnership with the United States.
Yet, in last Tuesday’s second presidential debate, both Senators Barack Obama and John McCain used several bloody and conflictual examples from the oft-forgotten continent to illustrate the reach and purpose of their foreign policy doctrines.
In suitably vague terms, Obama proclaimed that standing “idly by” in Ruanda “diminishes us”. He announced that the genocide in Darfur can only be curtailed by an American-led effort to bolster the UN- African Union Peace Keeping Force there. McCain offered similar boilerplate assurances on preventing genocide, but pointed to the “limits of our capability”. He cited the infamous, “humiliating” Somalian intervention as a cautionary case of reach exceeding grasp. McCain went much further in Foreign Affairs (December 2007) by naming Africa as the most compelling case for humanitarian intervention and promised to use “all elements” of US power to halt the outrages in Darfur.
But Africa’s two minutes of presidential primetime raises prospects about the continent’s relationship with the next occupant of the White House.
President George W Bush’s policies and programs in Africa have provided him with rare approval from his domestic opponents. His $15 billion AIDS-fighting PREPFAR initiative has provided 1.7 million Africans with anti-retrovirals and has converted the disease, for them at least, from a death into a life sentence. Senator Joe Biden proclaimed it as one of Bush’s “finest hours”. The substantial enhancement by the Republicans of the Clinton administration’s Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the generosity, and crucially the conditionality, of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) has been described as one of his most important foreign policy innovations. Both Obama and McCain are enthusiastic supporters of the MCA. Obama initially announced he would fund it more generously but has now pulled back that pledge in view of the deteriorating fiscal picture in the US. McCain would enhance it in a different, and arguably more durable, direction: by abolishing wasteful agricultural subsidies for US farmers which so tamp down African agricultural exports.
While the Bush administration acted decisively and swiftly against Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s electoral theft last December, its attempts to restore democracy in Zimbabwe have been uneven and feeble. By appointing then regnant, now vanquished, but at all times pro-Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki as his “point man” in Harare, Bush effectively handed the issue over to South Africa to resolve (or not, as the current stalemate suggests).
Too often the Bush focus on “the war against terror”, allowed rights’ delinquent regimes such as Ethiopia’s to escape the democratic-deepening requirements of the MCA. Meanwhile the multiple conflicts and violent anarchy in the strategically significant Horn of Africa remain unaddressed.
Bush’s engagement with Africa has not always been reciprocated. The recent establishment of the stand-alone Africom (US Military Command for Africa) has generally been coolly, even suspiciously, received on the continent. The pre-emptive unilateralism of the Bush doctrine has given forward cover to the anti-American chorus which has escalated in volume over the past five years.
Africa will remain in the frame of the next President because of the other major driver of US policy, aside from the war against terror, namely America’s energy needs: by 2015 it is estimated that no less than 25% of US oil imports will come from Africa, up from 15% in 2007.
Obama’s campaign advisor on Africa, Witney W Schneidman recently suggested that his perspective is informed by the fact that “he is the product of the African Diaspora, the son of a Kenyan father, whose grandmother still lives in Kenya”. This unusual provenance has suggested to some, in my country at least, that Obama will be a “soft touch” when it comes to Africa. In fact, a close analysis of his record indicates otherwise: during his 2006 visit to Africa, he forthrightly attacked the disastrous AIDS-denialism of South Africa’s then Health Minister. In Kenya he railed against “the lack of basic rule of law and accountability” in many predatory African states. While Obama has scaled back his promise of doubling US foreign aid he has not adjusted his requirement of conditionality: it is helpful that Obama has coupled US aid with “an insistent call for reform, to combat the corruption that rots societies and governments from within”. Citizens of the world’s poorest continent, governed by some of the world’s richest leaders, can only say “amen” to that.
Obama’s initiatives in the Senate such as his 2005 amendment which helped bring Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor to international justice, suggests that Obama might become impatient with the “big man solidarity” which the African Union invokes repeatedly to shield dictators from justice and accountability, most recently, in the case of Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan.
Obama proposes to renew and restore America’s somewhat tattered international partnerships. However, in dealing with Africa and the world, he will soon enough confront the limits imposed on United Nation’s action imposed by Russia and China who had vetoed decisive action from Burma to Zimbabwe.
McCain has elaborated little in the campaign on his grandiose project of creating “the league of democracies”, to act “where the United Nations fails”. He clearly envisages such a body to overcome the shield for tyranny which the Russia-China vetoes provide. However, there is no appetite in Pretoria and in other African emerging democracies for such a league.
Whoever wins in November, Africa’s worst problems, from AIDS to Zimbabwe and its best prospects, from deepening democracy to spreading economic opportunity, require a continued engagement and partnership with the United States.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The end of Mbeki and Mbekism: Quo Vadis South Africa?
On Tuesday at 13h00 I boarded a plane in Johannesburg. Two hours later I arrived in Cape Town to discover that one-third of the cabinet had resigned. I thought, somewhat cynically and mischievously, that if I had been on a six hour flight that afternoon, then with a bit of luck the entire government might have left office!
Well, of course, as we know 48 hours later, Tuesday’s gyrations appeared to be a witch’s brew of calculated malice by the presidency, the last kick of the Mbeki loyalists and an incoherence of tactics and an infirmity of strategy by the rest of the cabinet.
Trevor Manuel cited “reasons of decorum” for his on-again, off-again resignation. To many it seemed the uncoordinated posturing of a prima donna. I don’t believe as experienced a politician as Trevor Manuel, who is also the world’s longest-serving Minister of Finance, could not have foreseen the punishment to our currency and the spooking of the markets which his temporary resignation caused. Well, he caused a run on the rand and caused an afternoon of chaos in the markets. Perhaps he has proven his indispensability to government. Or, maybe, it was an expensive but early signal to the “macro-populists” as he once derided the Vavi-Nzimandi axis of the left, not to “mess with Manuel”. On the other hand, as the former municipal boss of Johannesburg, JF Oberholzer, was fond of observing, “West Park Cemetery is filled with indispensable people.”
So the early days of the post-Mbeki era are far from reassuring. Indeed, given the ANC’s pride in collective politics, and its constant mythologizing of the “discipline of the deployed cadres at all levels of government”, senior ANC members and ministers have, of late, been demonstrating the reverse. They bring to mind the adage of “every man and woman for him or herself.”
Personally, I believe the governance of South Africa is better off without the high-flying of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Stalinistic bullying of Essop Pahad, the serial blundering of Alec Erwin and the fanatical anti-Zionism of Ronnie Kasrils. But, of course, the bulk of the cabinet members who remain represent a pretty shallow bench of ministers - many long past their sell-by date and others whose election to high office has always been inexplicable but for reasons of loyalty to the now-vanquished president, and various imperatives of quota-filling.
A few hours ago, Parliament brought down the final curtain on the Mbeki era when we elected his successor. At the height of my cold war with the former president over AIDS in 2001, Thabo Mbeki compared me to a Shakespearean villain, Prospero in The Tempest. As I contemplate the sad end and baleful legacy of his presidency, one is left with the distinct feeling, or emotion, that it would take several Shakespearean tragedies to do justice to the rise and fall of Thabo Mbeki: his presidency and the forces behind its collapse seem to combine the ambitions of Lady Macbeth, the jealously of Othello, the backstabbing of Iago and, ultimately in its last act, the impotent rage of King Lear.
But we should not, I believe, underestimate what the end of Mbeki and what I call “the politics of Mbekism” means for the governing party and the future politics of our country:
• First, Mbeki’s ascent to office owed a great deal to the politics of exile and his pre-eminence as an ANC prince or dauphin: primogeniture was a key asset in his preferment. In contrast, neither Kgalema Motlanthe, nor Jacob Zuma owe their rise in politics to either their parents or to their overseas experience or contacts. Both are grounded in the politics of prison and Motlanthe’s rise was forged in the furnace of an at-times militant, even Stalinist, trade unionism.
• Second, Thabo Mbeki reanimated in South African politics and gave intellectual respectability to a fairly antique nationalism, replete with lashings of race and division. He abandoned the legacy of reconciliation bequeathed by Nelson Mandela and put in its place the paraphernalia of transformation in which was embedded both corruption and cronyism. There is, of course, no guarantee that matters might not spiral downward under his successors. But in his removal from office South Africa has been liberated from the dangerous fallacy of presidential infallibility, and the overweening arrogance of office caused by the over-accumulation of power in one person and in one institution.
• Third, the brutal, but democratic, toppling of the once all-powerful president of the ANC in December, and nine months later, his even more brutal removal from the country’s presidency has unleashed a tidal wave of resentment and uncertainty. In 1990 Britain’s governing Conservative Party defenestrated their all-powerful Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, notwithstanding her economic accomplishments after 11 years at the helm. The backlash from that seismic event remained with the Tories for more than a dozen years, and four leaders later. The fact and manner of her removal divided and demoralized her party and rendered the movement once dubbed “the most successful election winning machine in the western world”, unelectable in three consecutive general elections. The British Tories are hardly comparable to the ANC, but some parallels are relevant: do not underestimate just how consequential this week and last weekend’s event will be for the politics of the ANC and South Africa. The ANC’s once-vaunted unity has shattered, its ideology is incoherent, and the walking wounded in its ranks will unleash their own revenge. We will feel the eddies and backlash flowing from recent events for decades to come.
• Fourthly, if Mbeki had far too much power, his two successors seem to have almost too little. I did not approve of “Mbekism” - racial nationalism, the over-concentration and centralisation of power and the pretensions of the developmental state. But I knew what it was. But what does Zumaism or Montlantheism stand for? They will say that they are the servants of the “collective”. And no doubt they are. But what does this mean? Is it the lowest common denominator between Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema? At a critical time for South Africa and the world, who will provide the national moral and political leadership this country requires and on what foundation will it rest?
• Finally, for the past fourteen years there has been a remarkable continuity in the basic ecology of electorate - at least in terms of its racial stratification and electoral results cleaving along lines of ethnic identity. The toppling of the ANC’s leadership and the abrupt change in the country’s national guard, and the anger evinced by many at this dramatic turn of events suggests that beneath the surface continuum, a tectonic shift will take place among the voters. At the moment it is formless and even party-less. Furthermore the centrifugal force of our politics remains an extreme form of proportional representations which militates against pre-election coalition formations. However, having tasted blood once and having the screen of power from a political Wizard of Oz, ANC cadres and MPs are unlikely to go back to their previous meek and obsequious ways. The media and the judiciary have also flexed their muscles, after a fairly lengthy slumber during much of the Mbeki presidency. That is likely to continue going forward and our democracy will be the better for it.
The end of “Mbekism” suggests the end not just of one presidency and the demise of a once impregnable political leader. It indicates that politics has changed; the arrogant assumptions and certainties of the past have been challenged. South Africa’s current uncertainty could, over time, lead to far less predictable and far more democratic political outcomes, not immediately, but certainly over time.
Well, of course, as we know 48 hours later, Tuesday’s gyrations appeared to be a witch’s brew of calculated malice by the presidency, the last kick of the Mbeki loyalists and an incoherence of tactics and an infirmity of strategy by the rest of the cabinet.
Trevor Manuel cited “reasons of decorum” for his on-again, off-again resignation. To many it seemed the uncoordinated posturing of a prima donna. I don’t believe as experienced a politician as Trevor Manuel, who is also the world’s longest-serving Minister of Finance, could not have foreseen the punishment to our currency and the spooking of the markets which his temporary resignation caused. Well, he caused a run on the rand and caused an afternoon of chaos in the markets. Perhaps he has proven his indispensability to government. Or, maybe, it was an expensive but early signal to the “macro-populists” as he once derided the Vavi-Nzimandi axis of the left, not to “mess with Manuel”. On the other hand, as the former municipal boss of Johannesburg, JF Oberholzer, was fond of observing, “West Park Cemetery is filled with indispensable people.”
So the early days of the post-Mbeki era are far from reassuring. Indeed, given the ANC’s pride in collective politics, and its constant mythologizing of the “discipline of the deployed cadres at all levels of government”, senior ANC members and ministers have, of late, been demonstrating the reverse. They bring to mind the adage of “every man and woman for him or herself.”
Personally, I believe the governance of South Africa is better off without the high-flying of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Stalinistic bullying of Essop Pahad, the serial blundering of Alec Erwin and the fanatical anti-Zionism of Ronnie Kasrils. But, of course, the bulk of the cabinet members who remain represent a pretty shallow bench of ministers - many long past their sell-by date and others whose election to high office has always been inexplicable but for reasons of loyalty to the now-vanquished president, and various imperatives of quota-filling.
A few hours ago, Parliament brought down the final curtain on the Mbeki era when we elected his successor. At the height of my cold war with the former president over AIDS in 2001, Thabo Mbeki compared me to a Shakespearean villain, Prospero in The Tempest. As I contemplate the sad end and baleful legacy of his presidency, one is left with the distinct feeling, or emotion, that it would take several Shakespearean tragedies to do justice to the rise and fall of Thabo Mbeki: his presidency and the forces behind its collapse seem to combine the ambitions of Lady Macbeth, the jealously of Othello, the backstabbing of Iago and, ultimately in its last act, the impotent rage of King Lear.
But we should not, I believe, underestimate what the end of Mbeki and what I call “the politics of Mbekism” means for the governing party and the future politics of our country:
• First, Mbeki’s ascent to office owed a great deal to the politics of exile and his pre-eminence as an ANC prince or dauphin: primogeniture was a key asset in his preferment. In contrast, neither Kgalema Motlanthe, nor Jacob Zuma owe their rise in politics to either their parents or to their overseas experience or contacts. Both are grounded in the politics of prison and Motlanthe’s rise was forged in the furnace of an at-times militant, even Stalinist, trade unionism.
• Second, Thabo Mbeki reanimated in South African politics and gave intellectual respectability to a fairly antique nationalism, replete with lashings of race and division. He abandoned the legacy of reconciliation bequeathed by Nelson Mandela and put in its place the paraphernalia of transformation in which was embedded both corruption and cronyism. There is, of course, no guarantee that matters might not spiral downward under his successors. But in his removal from office South Africa has been liberated from the dangerous fallacy of presidential infallibility, and the overweening arrogance of office caused by the over-accumulation of power in one person and in one institution.
• Third, the brutal, but democratic, toppling of the once all-powerful president of the ANC in December, and nine months later, his even more brutal removal from the country’s presidency has unleashed a tidal wave of resentment and uncertainty. In 1990 Britain’s governing Conservative Party defenestrated their all-powerful Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, notwithstanding her economic accomplishments after 11 years at the helm. The backlash from that seismic event remained with the Tories for more than a dozen years, and four leaders later. The fact and manner of her removal divided and demoralized her party and rendered the movement once dubbed “the most successful election winning machine in the western world”, unelectable in three consecutive general elections. The British Tories are hardly comparable to the ANC, but some parallels are relevant: do not underestimate just how consequential this week and last weekend’s event will be for the politics of the ANC and South Africa. The ANC’s once-vaunted unity has shattered, its ideology is incoherent, and the walking wounded in its ranks will unleash their own revenge. We will feel the eddies and backlash flowing from recent events for decades to come.
• Fourthly, if Mbeki had far too much power, his two successors seem to have almost too little. I did not approve of “Mbekism” - racial nationalism, the over-concentration and centralisation of power and the pretensions of the developmental state. But I knew what it was. But what does Zumaism or Montlantheism stand for? They will say that they are the servants of the “collective”. And no doubt they are. But what does this mean? Is it the lowest common denominator between Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema? At a critical time for South Africa and the world, who will provide the national moral and political leadership this country requires and on what foundation will it rest?
• Finally, for the past fourteen years there has been a remarkable continuity in the basic ecology of electorate - at least in terms of its racial stratification and electoral results cleaving along lines of ethnic identity. The toppling of the ANC’s leadership and the abrupt change in the country’s national guard, and the anger evinced by many at this dramatic turn of events suggests that beneath the surface continuum, a tectonic shift will take place among the voters. At the moment it is formless and even party-less. Furthermore the centrifugal force of our politics remains an extreme form of proportional representations which militates against pre-election coalition formations. However, having tasted blood once and having the screen of power from a political Wizard of Oz, ANC cadres and MPs are unlikely to go back to their previous meek and obsequious ways. The media and the judiciary have also flexed their muscles, after a fairly lengthy slumber during much of the Mbeki presidency. That is likely to continue going forward and our democracy will be the better for it.
The end of “Mbekism” suggests the end not just of one presidency and the demise of a once impregnable political leader. It indicates that politics has changed; the arrogant assumptions and certainties of the past have been challenged. South Africa’s current uncertainty could, over time, lead to far less predictable and far more democratic political outcomes, not immediately, but certainly over time.
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