Jakes Gerwel, the Director General of the President’s Office, is the intellectual, erudite and politically savvy former rector of the University of the Western Cape. He was apparently Mandela’s first choice for Education Minister, but turned it down, insisting he did not want a life in either politics or the civil service. He now has both: ”This is not a career move,” he insists. ”I am doing this job because Mandela asked me to. I am doing it for him.”
He sees his role as being ”technocratic, but with a need for political literacy”. He is, however, claiming a greater political role for himself as Cabinet secretary, and plans to ease the pressure off Mandela by being more of an interlocutor between the Cabinet committees and Mandela than before. Over the past year, he has become increasingly intimate with the president, and plays an important advisory role.
* Joel Netshitenzhe. Outside of the ANC, the ANC’s head of communications is hardly known; in exile-circles he is legendary as ”Peter Mayibuye”, the longtime editor of the ANC’s journal. He is of the Soweto generation, and one of the ANC’s most important intellectuals. Humble, informal and affable, he is the quintessential backroom boy, eschewing elected office. He is, in fact, the only member of the ANC’s National Working Committee who is neither a Member of Parliament nor an elected ANC official. As the presidency’s in-house NWC member and as Mandela’s chief speechwriter, he is perhaps the most important political advisor to the president after Thabo Mbeki. During a difficult discussion, Mandela will often say: ”Let’s get Joel in here. That chap always has an interesting way of looking at things.”
* Fink Haysom, the president’s legal advisor, recently came under fire, somewhat unfairly, for the cock-up over Winnie Mandela’s dismissal. He had, in fact, made sure that all the political players understood the terms under which she needed to be dismissed. A legal academic and renowned labour lawyer, he was a central member of the ANC’s constitutional committee and drafter of the constitution. All of which means that he is not simply a journeyman who writes contracts for the president. A human rights warrior, he sees his role thus: ”What makes this system different from the past is that we have a constitution. And so every executive action has to be tested against the rules, many of which are only implied.”
* Parks Mankahlana. The youthful presidential spokesman started off in information and publicity in the ANC youth league and then came to the attention of ANC leadership working in the ANC media office during the election. He is bright and accessible and, quite unusually for a propogandist, refreshingly frank. ”Look, the president makes my job easy,” he says. ”He’s a highly marketable product. He also tends to anticipate problems well before they come.” Those who deal with him regularly complain that he is sometimes disorganised: given the fact that the president works out of three offices in three separate cities, who can blame him?
* Ahmed ‘Kathy’ Kathrada. As Mandela’s parliamentary councillor, Kathrada is, in theory, the president’s formal political advisor. In Mbeki’s office, Essop Pahad plays this role more actively; Kathrada functions more as an intimate companion and sounding-board for the president. This causes some consternation among some ANC leaders, who would prefer to see a more effective operator in so critical a position.
According to Mac Maharaj, who was on Robben Island with both of them, ”Mandela once told me that, ‘When you are a leader, everyone tells you what they think you want to hear. Kathy is the one chap who holds up an honest mirror to me. There is no distortion. I get up and look in the mirror and it tells me exactly what I look like. He enables me to look at myself as others see me but won’t tell me.”’
For his part, Kathrada feels that ”the youngsters in this party take this whole respect for elders thing too far. I keep on telling them: don’t be afraid to confront the Old Man. In fact, he really appreciates it.”