Howard Barrell : Over a Barrel
What is one of the cleverest people in South Africa doing indulging so assiduously one of the vainest? Why has Deputy President Thabo Mbeki taken to bowing and scraping before Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha Freedom Party leader and minister of home affairs? Why has Mbeki been calling him Shenge, offering him exalted offices of state in secret negotiations in recent months, and declaring before the assembled IFPfaithful at that party’s annual congress two weeks ago that Buthelezi is his political senior?
True love? I doubt it. Mbeki is not given to infatuations. He is the master of the political affair, yes. Witness, for example, how many swooned under his touch during the African National Congress’s charm offensive in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He can turn it on, so to say, but he is not the kind of chap to lose control of his tap.
Moreover, there is little to suggest that Mbeki, or the ANC, needs a powerful ally in the forthcoming election. He has the kind of parliamentary majority that ruling politicians elsewhere in the world would die for. And he and the ANC are expected to win handsomely next year. Polling evidence in KwaZulu-Natal even suggests a fall-off in support for the IFPwhich, in a straight fight with the ANC, would probably mean Buthelezi would lose control of the province and suffer a fall in his share of the national vote.
Support for the Democratic Party is growing, but its new voters appear to comprise mainly disillusioned former supporters of the crumbling National Party. The DP will have difficulty turning many of them into faithful recruits convinced by its liberal traditions and project. More to the point, the DP’s penetration into the black electorate is negligible. And the far-right white parties, the Freedom Front and the Conservative Party, are still unable to put forward any serious political vision for their supporters.
This leaves the United Democratic Movement. To the extent that there may be an electoral explanation for Mbeki’s courtship of Buthelezi, this may be it.
The UDM, young though it is, is likely to be the wild card in the election. It has been making inroads into ANC support, according to pollsters. This is particularly true in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, where it could queer the ANC’s pitch for provincial legislatures. But there is no indication at this stage that support for the UDM will cause the ANC’s share of the national vote to fall below 55% – still enough to give the ANC a handsome majority in both houses of Parliament.
A more challenging scenario for the ANC, however, would have been an alliance between the IFP, the UDM and one or two other parties, such as the NP and DP, before or just after the election. These parties could have formed quite a comfortable centre-right grouping, and such an alliance could have put real pressure on the ANC, particularly over its poor delivery on key issues such as education, job creation and crime.
Mbeki’s manoeuvring in Ulundi has, however, put paid to that possibility. It would have been out of character if Mbeki had not seen the danger. For if there has been one maxim guiding his political behaviour over the past 15 years, it has been this: win over to your own side as many as you can; isolate those who oppose you to the maximum extent possible; and neutralise those who insist on remaining in between.
At a personal level, Mbeki might sometimes have needlessly alienated individuals on whom he could have relied as firm (if occasionally critical) allies. But within the broader sweep of the liberation movement and party politics he usually got it right, creating alliances which few others had the imagination or ability to construct.
In this connection, one of his and President Nelson Mandela’s prouder legacies is the avoidance of all-out slaughter and civil war in KwaZulu-Natal. Their maturity has so far helped prevent in South Africa’s most populous province the kind of savagery to which Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s hubris condemned Matabeleland between 1982 and 1984.
Yet some in the ANC, particularly those on the left in the Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), fear Mbeki may now be going too far in appeasing Buthelezi. They worry what his game plan is. Their concern is probably justified.
Media talk over the past week of Mbeki dramatically driving the SACP and Cosatu out of the ANC’s back door while inviting the IFPin at the front may indeed be “fanciful”, as one DP MP suggested this week.
Why, he asked, would Mbeki swap old, peaceable allies like the SACP and Cosatu for the IFP? After all, as an ally, the IFP would be no more reliable than the SACP and Cosatu had been; moreover, Mbeki’s own supporters and the IFPhad been killing each other for much of the past 14 years – a state of affairs he has not yet reached with the SACP.
The IFPhas at least two attractions for Mbeki. First, on policy issues, the IFPoffers Mbeki what he most needs. That is a substantial additional bloc of black voters offering him firm support on his tight spending and lending regime. In fact, the IFPwants him to move further and faster towards prevailing economic orthodoxies.
Second, the IFPoffers to take Mbeki one significant step closer to one of his central political objectives: African national unity.
Hence his misty, almost mystical invocations of the ANC’s and the IFP’scommon lineage in Ulundi. Mbeki must bring together those he feels belong together. Unless he does so, his big idea, “African renaissance”, is likely to have all the resonance of a loose hide on a broken drum.
Whereas someone like Koos van der Merwe, formerly of the CP but now in the IFP, can and does sympathise with this African nationalist project, the left scarcely has any understanding of it beyond a fear of its appeal. A profound intellectual estrangement is now developing within the ANC between the nationalists and those who see themselves as of the left. The knot that held them together is rapidly unravelling.
In the past, Mbeki has seemed to avoid dramatic political actions and gestures whenever he could; he has been more inclined to manoeuvre behind the scenes. In this mode, he would prefer to manipulate things so that the SACP or Cosatu have to decide, say, to break relations with the ANC.
But Mbeki’s earlier caution has always been in circumstances where he has been someone else’s number two, three or four. Next year he becomes undisputed number one in the country. He will not then be constrained by any elder on the issue of who, politically, he chooses to flatter, ditch, cuckold, jump into bed with or marry – and for what particular pleasure or period.