The appointment of his Cabinet fitted the last pieces into a power jigsaw that will guarantee President Thabo Mbeki control over every level of South Africa’s government, reports Ivor Powell
With a full minister of government attached to the Office of the President; a beefed up Cabinet secretariat to co-ordinate and oversee the implementation of delivery strategies across the various ministries; a deputy president in Jacob Zuma with no other brief than to fulfil tasks delegated by the president; as well as a set of hand- picked confidants and associates strategically positioned to effect transformational changes in key portfolios, Thabo Mbeki sits at the centre of a web of power not experienced in this country since the paranoid heyday of apartheid.
And there is little to ensure accountability in the wielding of that power.
Mbeki will also be in a position to manage the flow of government information via Government Communication Information Systems (GCIS) – set up last year within the presidency. GCIS has already drawn the ire of opposition politicians for seemingly blurring distinctions between the government and the African National Congress, and between information and propaganda in self-congratulatory pre- election advertising.
In addition, the elevation of the intelligence portfolio to a full ministry means that incumbent, Joe Nhlanhla, will be directly accountable to Mbeki. In the recent past the chain of command (in theory at least) led via the minister of justice.
Add to this already formidable battery of political powers the fact that over the past year-and-a-half, Mbeki as president of the ANC has systematically consolidated central authority within the party – often at the expense of the democratic process. For instance, the ANC’s decision to separate the election of the provincial chair from the nomination of the provincial premier has allowed Mbeki as ANC president to depose uncomfortable incumbents like Mpumalanga’s Mathews Phosa and Gauteng’s Mathole Motshekga. Indeed, as was the case with the appointment of the new Cabinet, it was only hours before Mbeki publicly announced the ANC’s list of premier candidates that even members of the party’s deployment committee were informed whose names were on the list.
The set-up could be thought to feed uncomfortably into perceptions of Mbeki as a dictator-in-waiting. Or does it?
Richard Calland of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) notes that the restructuring of the president’s office is in line with international best practice.
“Governments around the world are acknowledging the need to reclaim power in order to deliver on election promises. In the UK for instance there is a process of restructuring going on that closely parallels the recommendations of South Africa’s presidential review commission [PRC],” Calland said.
The point of such restructuring, he noted, was for heads of government to be in a position to play a strong co-ordinating function.
Much of the restructuring currently being implemented in the Office of the President was recommended by the PRC which submitted its report in May last year. Guiding the commission’s recommendations were two overriding concerns.
One was a perceived need to get government working in more aggressive and decisive ways than the benign and avuncular Mandela administration had been able to achieve – hamstrung as it was by the so-called Sunset Clauses and other negotiations agreements which made it all but impossible to kickstart the public service in the new era.
The other major concern, as the PRC report put it, was for “the formulation and transmission of a coherent national vision for develop-ment to guide the processes of transformation, reconstruction and development, democratic consolidation and community empowerment”.
The PRC recommended the creation of no fewer than seven new offices under the umbrella of the presidency.
Commenting on the need for co-ordination, GCIS chief Joel Netshitenzhe quoted Mbeki addressing the new Cabinet: “The president said it wouldn’t help much if a new clinic was built if there was no road so that ambulances were able to reach the clinic. That’s what we mean by co-ordination.”
It is still uncertain just how many of the PRC recommendations are actually going to be implemented. However, the key institution, an enhanced Cabinet secretariat overseen by Mbeki’s right-hand man, Minister in the Office of the President Essop Pahad, is already up and running, and will almost certainly see to it that the various ministries and government departments mesh into a single machine. Directors general in the new government will sign contracts with the presidency rather than their own ministers.
Meanwhile, there are also messages to be read out of the appointment of close associates and trusted members of an Mbeki inner circle to key portfolios.
One is that of former safety and security minister Sydney Mufamadi to the newly created portfolio of provincial and local government. The government continues to deny any concrete plans to rewrite the Constitution to change the status of provincial government. But the failures of at least some provincial administrations to effect delivery in key portfolios like education and housing, as well as the depressing frequency of corruption scandals at the provincial level of government, argue powerfully to the contrary.
At the same time, ongoing and potentially explosive tensions between the strongly federalist Inkatha Freedom Party – which continues to aspire to a quasi-independent “Kingdom of KwaZulu” – and the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal make the portfolio one where the stakes are highest. Mbeki’s deployment of one of the most trusted members of his inner circle will ensure – as it did in the recent Lesotho crisis – that he will be in a position to influence almost directly the unfolding of political strategies in the region.
The local government element in Mufamadi’s portfolio would seem equally significant, with countrywide local government elections scheduled to take place in 2000, and demarcation boards already considering the carving up of the country into constituencies.
Again, it is in the troublespots of KwaZulu-Natal that the process is especially problematic. Under transitional agreements in the province, local and regional councils were made up of two groupings: elected officials on one hand and traditional leaders appointed on the basis of heredity on the other.
This situation is currently under review and almost certain to lead to sharp standoffs – with the ANC government seeking to extend the democratic process (and thereby break the political stranglehold of the IFP-aligned amakhosi in rural KwaZulu- Natal) and the IFP seeking to entrench their role and influence at local government level.
Equally calculated, it would seem, is the appointment of Steve Tshwete to the safety and security portfolio. With the previous administration having failed to clean up the South African Police Service (SAPS), and the growing realisation in government that drastic steps will have to be taken if any impact is to be made on crime, it is likely that Mbeki will be looking to exercise close oversight over the safety and security portfolio. Tshwete, as he has been in the past, can be expected to function as a kind of political blunt instrument against those unregenerate elements of the old security forces who continue to dominate the SAPS.
Also related to this public service clean- up is the unexpected appointment of intelligence chief Joe Nhlanhla to a full ministerial post. The appointment came against the backdrop of a spy-versus-spy ferment among the various intelligence services and the failure of government’s attempt to pull the sector together in a national intelligence co-ordinating committee.
Commissions are currently looking at ways of restructuring police and defence intelligence to dislodge old guard elements and rationalise their specific functions. Though constitutionally the role of defence and police intelligence structures are protected, it is understood that Nhlanhla has been retained to strengthen co- ordinating structures and oversee processes of restructuring.
But are we looking at an all-powerful Mbeki inner circle, with the president’s personal friend (Pahad) at its centre, a loyalist cabal inside Cabinet that directs the operation of government? Is it a case of an unfolding dictatorship-by-bureaucracy? Or just horses for courses and the honing of a leaner government machine? The answer is probably yes and no.
On one hand the arguments in favour of centralising government in a society as divided and as compromised by its history as this one are undeniably compelling.
On the other hand, there is something inherently frightening and antithetical to the democratic spirit in this degree of power being wielded largely behind closed doors and, ultimately, by a single individual.
As Idasa’s Calland noted: “The moment the president is elected in this country, he ceases to be a member of Parliament, and therefore cannot be called to account by the opposition. It will only be through minister Pahad that questions can be asked.”
The acid test for Mbeki and his administration could be the extent to which the various watchdogs of the government – the Constitutional Court and, perhaps more notably, the commissions established by his predecessor in the interests of transparency and accountability in government – are allowed to keep the government honest.
The signs here are for the most part not encouraging.
As deputy president Mbeki was deeply involved in attempts to disinfect the image of the ANC in the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission report released in October 1998.
It was also after interventions by Mbeki’s legal advisor, Mojanku Gumbi, that Judge Willem Heath was finally induced to drop plans to hold former health minister Nkosazana Zuma accountable for money that went missing in the Sarafina II debacle.
Heath’s intervention, significantly enough, came in defiance of findings by the public protector, another office appointed to second-guess the government.
Public Protector Selby Baqwa exonerated the minister in a ruling that was widely dismissed as a cover-up of politicans’ involvement.