Loose cannon Robert Kirby `The time has come for work.” The muted but somehow resonant assurance with which Mr Thabo Mbeki closed off his “victory speech” at Gallagher Estate; a speech which, uncommonly for any latter-born politician, expressed more by virtue of its restraint than its rhetoric.
To even the most gloomy of sceptics, Mbeki’s short declarative closing phrase presaged an agreeable sea-change. The fantastic and latterly desperately overplayed Mandela mythology was wrapping up. Iconic was being supplanted by practical.
How easily the varnish cracks and flakes – and how very soon. For running tight up against not only Mr Mbeki’s, but the entire ANC election covenant’s, next Wednesday sees a brazen exhibition for all to witness and pity: the gaudy manifestation of a brand of political vanity which clearly no one in the ANC sees fit to abandon.
The time has come for work, to get those jobs up and running, once and for all to obliterate the crime and despair, build the homes and hospitals. But just before we do, let’s spend a quick fifty-million rand on yet another public orgy of self- congratulation.
Let’s kick off our campaign against corruption with a presentation of just how grandiose corruption can be. The exorbitantly expensive inauguration ceremony for the president-elect of this country is a gesture of almost sublime contempt for the constituency which elected him.
It was one thing to hold a major bash for Mr Mandela’s accession. After all, he represented both first and last. South Africa’s first adequately representative government and the last of all African countries to be – to use that unsightly coinage – “democratised”. From 27 years in the pokey to state president calls for some sort of feasting. On the other hand all those years suffering away in Sussex university economics faculty doesn’t command our adoration in quite the same measure.
In some ways Mr Mbeki’s extravagance was to be expected. His inauguration will not be the first occasion on which he has given lavish expression to his muse. Only last year he hosted an advance commemoration of the looming African renaissance by hiring the entire Blue Train for a R5-million jaunt to Victoria Falls.
As Rex van Schalkwyk observes in his underprized book, One Miracle is Not Enough, it is an irksome combination of lust for money and power plus a desperation at insoluble problems, which drives politicians to corruption. Van Schalkwyk continues, “A politician without hope is not a politician without opportunity”. Hence the flight of vast percentages of post-colonial Africa’s coffers to numbered Swiss bank accounts. Hence the acquisition by, say, President Sam Nujoma, of no less than two personal jets and a helicopter, the commissioning of a new R54-million palace plus his partiality for sudden high- speed motorcades through Windhoek with armed bully-boy police clearing the motorists out of his exalted way.
I am not suggesting that Mr Mbeki intends indulging anything like these embarrassing excesses. What I am suggesting is that spending what has been loosely specified as “between 20 and 50 million rand” on his inauguration, is of an identical flavour. The singular difference between Mr Mbeki and just about every other ascending leader in Africa is that Mbeki definitely still does have hope.
It is one thing for a newly elected US president to have a splashy inauguration, but in that case it is tradition and not fashion which dictates the need. What’s more, the US does have textbooks in its schools, it does have housing for most of its people, it does have some sort of control over its crime and its womenfolk don’t know that one of their kind is being raped every 26 seconds.
Mr Aziz Pahad in headlong “defence mode” is always good for a laugh. Think back to that wonderful radio interview where he energetically vindicated the appointment to India as South African Vice-Consul of a deeply corrupt lawyer. In justification of next week’s inauguration Mr Pahad has reasoned that this will be “good for business”. Assuming he didn’t mean good for business in the catering industry, we may take it that he meant good for overseas investment.
There can’t be many intelligent observers who would disagree that by a quiet, downplayed taking over of reins which, in any case he’s been holding for the last three years, Mr Mbeki’s credibility would go down a mite better with international investors already made tentative by Africa’s past record.