He is at home on the international stage, but Thabo Mbeki battles to get his message through at home. Howard Barrell reports
Thabo Mbeki ends his first year as president of South Africa bearing some resemblance to Jan Smuts, the Boer general turned prime minister who led the country 60 years ago. Like Smuts, Mbeki appears preoccupied with international issues and with projecting himself as philosopher/statesman while indifferent to more pressing matters at home.
Those who have read the Smuts archive, like Renfrew Christie of the University of the Western Cape, say it shows that South Africa’s World War II prime minister was, in fact, intensely concerned with domestic issues. He was, however, useless at communicating this interest. And this failure contributed to his defeat in the whites-only general election of 1948 which brought the apartheid National Party to power. White voters who felt ignored by Smuts looked elsewhere for leadership.
The same pattern is becoming evident in the case of Mbeki. He excels in, and takes obvious pleasure in, international issues and in expressing his vision of renaissance in Africa. But, when it comes to domestic issues of more immediate concern, he appears derelict – if not in his actual interest in those matters then because he is bad at demonstrating his interest.
The cost for Mbeki has not, so far, been electoral. But there is already talk in the parliamentary caucus of the African National Congress of “drift”. An ANC MP, who wanted to remain anonymous, spoke this week of “a loss of momentum since the beginning of the year when we all seemed to know where we were going”. And an ANC provincial legislature member spoke privately of “no bloody strategic leadership for the party at all”.
Mbeki’s apparent preoccupation with matters global and philosophical may help explain the growing frequency of contradictions between what he says as president of the ANC and what the party’s secretary general says. For Mbeki’s attention is elsewhere. Whereas Mbeki will sing praises to market capitalism, Kgalema Motlanthe will say we should all learn to hate it.
Whereas Mbeki will call for the creation of a black bourgeoisie, an ANC discussion document for the meeting of the ANC’s national council in July will denounce the idea. And, whereas Mbeki will signal clearly his opposition to strike action by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) to protest against unemployment, Motlanthe will proclaim his support for it.
To the extent that Mbeki has engaged with his party, it has been to tinker, manage, balance its various factions and, occasionally, to harangue. He has, in the opinion of a number of public representatives in the party, however, not provided much leadership. One result of this – perhaps one he considers useful, albeit achieved by default – is that the party continues to be most things to most people: capitalist to some, socialist- inclined to others; Africanist to some, a paragon of non-racial virtue to others.
Who is reflecting actual ruling party thinking is, at times, anybody’s guess. And there appears to be a declining interest in international business and diplomatic circles in divining who that might be. South Africa is just not important enough – whatever leaders of the ANC and the South African Communist Party need to believe – to warrant much attention. China with a billion consumers, yes. Russia with more than 200-million consumers, vast natural resources and nuclear weapons, yes. South Africa? Yawn.
Whatever the messages given out from Tuynhuis, the Union Buildings and Lutuli House, the concrete evidence available thus far indicates that the government and the ruling party do not have the political will to accelerate privatisation, to force through painful changes to the public service and labour market regulations that they and their consultants have plainly identified as necessary, and to foster on a vast scale entrepreneurial activity among the impoverished black majority.
Moreover, the government and ruling party will not be credited with that determination and capacity unless or until they actually do those things – without a hundred ifs, buts and circumscriptions.
The law of diminishing returns applies on background briefings to journalists, business people and others. The same is true of messages reaching the majority of people. Expectations are excited by the first one or two undertakings that, say, bold economic changes are in the pipeline. But, if the changes fail to materialise, interest and credulity tail off precipitately. That is where we are at in South Africa. Verbal undertakings count for little – except, perhaps, where they came from plainly effective performers in the Cabinet such as Kader Asmal, the Minister of Education, and Mohammed Valli Moosa, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism.
Mbeki, we are told, expects Cabinet ministers to perform – and there are signs that some of the early purpose that characterised his Cabinet shortly after its appointment in June last year still survives. But until a Cabinet minister is fired for non-performance – for example, for the non-expenditure of R198-million in poverty relief by the Department of Welfare and Population Development – it will be difficult to take claims of increased Cabinet discipline seriously.
Until then, it may be similarly difficult for the millions of poor South Africans to believe that the ANC, for all its rhetoric, and the government take them and their plight seriously. Surveys show the gap between rich and poor, including that among black South Africans, has been widening.
If, as seems clear from government economic policy, the poor are expected to wait for job-creating economic growth and for the launch of a massive programme to foster small and medium enterprises before they can gain an economic foothold in South African society, they may have to wait another four or five years to see any real results. And no one has yet told them that simply and clearly. Perhaps it is time someone did – and also told them whether the government plans to create some sort of minimal social welfare catchnet until then, an idea which has support even from the Democratic Party.
A dose of realism about the immense challenge we face in uplifting the social conditions of the marginalised – and the absence of easy options for doing so – is something Mbeki is more than capable of administering to South Africans without sugar coating.
Mbeki has shown admirable grit in holding to the spirit and much of the detail of his policy on growth, employment and redistribution. To this extent, he has faced down the economic Neanderthals in the ANC and the tripartite alliance. But the challenge before him is now to follow through on policy – boldly to accelerate privatisation, restructure the civil service and labour market, and to foster an entrepreneurial culture. And to ditch or leave behind those too timid to travel the road he and his party have verbally committed themselves to. The time for such boldness is early in his presidential term, early enough to give him at least a three-year window before the next election to recover from any political damage he might suffer in the battle.
It is possible that Mbeki is waiting until after the local government elections, likely later this year or early next, before any bold follow- through. He could, after all, do with SACP and Cosatu help in delivering ANC voters to the polls. If so, he will have to move quickly and decisively after the local government elections. For the optimal window of opportunity will close rapidly after that.
Failure to act then is likely to condemn South Africa to accelerating economic decline, and all the promise Mbeki has appeared to personify will be exposed as illusion.
In this respect, a worrying facet of Mbeki’s political personality is his evident taste for isolation. There he has been gatekept by thinkalikes such as Frank Chikane, Director General in the presidency, Mojanku Gumbi, his legal adviser, Essop Pahad, Minister in the Office of the President, and Moss Ngoasheng, his economic adviser until Ngoasheng left the presidency recently to concentrate on what has long been his main interest, his information technology company. None has shown any promise of firing the policy-maker’s imagination in his or her lifetime or of providing Mbeki with challenging advice.
“They are a mirror bouncing back at Mbeki the same image of himself,” remarked a senior businessman well- connected in government and political circles. “There is no new light getting in.”
Mbeki’s most conspicuous engagement on a domestic policy issue has been on HIV/Aids – a disaster on which he unwisely launched himself into tangled issues of detail. Only now, after some nifty footwork by his media advisers, does he appear to be succeeding in extricating himself from the mess into which he launched himself.
But in no case have Mbeki’s political morality, his judgement, the quality of the advice he is receiving, his propensity to become preoccupied with a foreign issue, the opacity of his style and his presentational shortcomings come under closer scrutiny than over the crisis in Zimbabwe.
Some financial market analysts insist that a portion of the rand’s precipitate fall over the past six weeks, and the huge net outflow of funds from South African equities and bonds, can be attributed directly to Mbeki’s failure to deliver timeously and directly two messages on the Zimbabwean crisis to the business and financial community. One of those messages was that South African foreign policy – on Zimbabwe, as elsewhere – was being guided by, among other things, the need to uphold property rights and the rule of law. The other was that his government would on no account allow Zimbabwe-style farm invasions to occur in South Africa.
There were several ways he could have conveyed these messages early on in the Zimbabwean crisis without undermining his delicate dealings with the pathologically sensitive Robert Mugabe. Yet he did not. Moreover, he missed an opportunity to do so in his address to the nation on May 4, the day the massacre of the rand really got under way on the markets.
“It’s Mbeki’s Rubicon, and he hasn’t crossed it,” a market analyst said on the evening of that address.
A reassurance that Mbeki would not allow copycat farm invasions was eventually dragged out of the president by New National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Freedom Front leader Constand Viljoen. But this came only on May 10 when Mbeki answered his first round of presidential questions from MPs in the National Assembly in Cape Town. Mbeki had, seemingly, deemed it unimportant to brief or reassure South Africans on the Zimbabwean crisis.
By then, however, wider damage had been done – among others to some democrats’ confidence in the ANC. One such democrat was Pieter Venter, the ANC’s media liaison head in Parliament who resigned from his post and the party last week over the government’s policy on Zimbabwe. Interviewed this week, he described how, as he sat in ANC strategy meetings in Parliament, he found himself silently asking a disturbing question: “If the ANC’s hold on power was ever threatened in the way that Zanu-PF’s is being, would it behave in the same way?
“From my observation of some people in these meetings and in the caucus, I eventually came to the conclusion we could easily see the ANC behave like Zanu-PF,” he said.
ANC parliamentary staff say Venter’s departure represents no loss. That may be so. But the government’s uncommunicative response – or, rather, the presidency’s response, since it has been running foreign policy on the Zimbabwe crisis – has had a profoundly damaging effect on white confidence in South Africa.
Again, there may be some in the ANC and elsewhere who would see no reason to mourn such a development. But, for cooler minds, the haemorrhage of white skills does not play well with – at very least – our national economic objectives.
There is a further level at which the Zimbabwean crisis has played out badly for South Africa. Under the rubric of the “African renaissance”, Mbeki has sought to present himself, his party, his government and South Africans as modern democrats every one, keen to prosper in the international market economy, pursuing a new way of doing things, seeking to build strong institutions, and rejecting the “big man” syndrome and the corruption of power that has bedevilled Africa and its development since the late 1950s.
Yet Mbeki’s strange backwardness about laying out publicly at least a set of democratic principles informing his policy on Zimbabwe has given the impression, in the words of the politically well-connected South African businessman, that Mbeki believes that “solidarity with old comrades from the liberation and anti-colonial struggles is more important than democracy and the welfare of a population”, in this case of Zimbabweans.
“We are being drawn back into the old boys’ club,” he said. “This has done very considerable damage to the president.”
The road back from that damage – and the missed opportunities of the past year – need not necessarily be that long. Traversing it successfully and reasonably quickly is likely to depend on at least four changes in Mbeki.
One, he may need to throw off a political lifetime of opacity and realise that communicating with, and answering to, others is not cause for irritation but the very lifeblood of electoral politics.
Two, he may need to get himself advisers unafraid to argue forcefully against his instincts and viewpoints, and able to think outside accepted parameters.
Three, he may need to take to heart the aphorism that fortune favours the bold. And, four, he may need to remind himself that his primary job is to build South Africa.
Stirring Africa and saving the world can come later – if there’s time.
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