Ivor Powell
Some time last year those in the inner circles of the African National Congress and the party’s official spin doctors took to referring to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, in a seemingly hubristic way, as “the president”.
It was only when you challenged them, insisting that the president’s name was Nelson Mandela and that his tenure in office had another year to run, that they would, rather grudgingly, concede the rider … “of the ANC”.
The decision to promote Mbeki to the president-in-waiting before the elections was taken at the ANC’s national conference in December 1997. With the prospect of Mandela’s retirement from the political scene – and faced with media speculation about whether Mbeki was statesman enough to “fill his shoes” – much discussion focused on how Mbeki could be promoted as the man for the job.
Out of these discussions a two-part strategy was born, sources close to the process told the Mail & Guardian.
On one level Mbeki was promoted as heir to Mandela, and an intellectual and political philosopher of note via his sponsorship of the notion of the “African renaissance”.
The other part is what we are seeing in ANC campaigning: the image of Mbeki as the man who will lead the country through the next five years, when transformation will build on the transition of the Mandela years. The ANC is selling Mbeki’s political strengths, his wisdom, his humanity and his caring.
“All the qualities we are building our campaign around are there in the president,” says ANC representative Thabo Masebe. “We just needed to bring them out.”
Others are less sanguine, suggesting that a public persona has been constructed to supplement what Mbeki lacked. The memory is frequently invoked of Mbeki physically recoiling on television from the touch of a child during a special broadcast for World Aids Day.
But since early last year, television watchers might have noted that Mbeki has handed over the keys to more houses that government has built than the rest of the ANC government put together; he has also opened more taps; he has connected more electricity; and presided over the creation of more jobs.
Mandela has more and more taken a back seat, relegated in election posters to teaching South Africans to do the “Madiba jive”.
The ANC’s elections committee decided that, after the formal launch of its campaign, all election material would feature Mbeki as party leader and president-in-waiting. He is smiling; he is confident; in some images a visionary of sorts, looking into an unspecified distance.
In contrast to the ANC’s confident campaigning, opposition parties appear to be more concerned with the shortcomings of the government than with their own strengths. The Inkatha Freedom Party wants to “make South Africa governable”.
The New National Party rallies under the slogan “Let’s Make South Africa Work”. For its part the Democratic Party is selling an image of defiance and is building its campaign around the personality of its leader. But here the guiding image has DP leader Tony Leon with his arms folded, a steely gaze in his eye as he looks out over the legend: “The guts to fight back”.
He looks more than a little like one of those World Wrestling Federation characters … the Corporate Avenger maybe.
But the problem for the opposition parties is that in the face of a governing party as powerful as the ANC, the slogans are open to misinterpretation.
Fight back? Against what? Democracy?
Governable? Like it was in the homelands era?
Make South Africa work? Like it did in the good old days?`