Robert Kirby loose cannon I am inspired to write this article (in ebullient defence of our worthy and misunderstood presidential representative) by the quite unseemly attacks made on his character and intellect in last week’s Mail & Guardian (“Mbeki’s malaise goes deeper than Parks”). Really! When a newspaper sinks to such murky invective simply because recently the object of its calumny has made a few quite justifiable mistakes, thrown one or two adolescent tantrums, threatened to have a few journalists flayed, then it is time for a voice of protest to be raised. This article is, therefore, proffered as both serum and alibi to a sorely abused Mr Parks Mankahlana. Much-written-about Parks last week reveals that, as a crypto-democratic mantle-dweller, he remains profoundly undervalued. I am not going to name names, but one of last week’s commentators described Mankahlana as having appeared to assume the role of “defender of the presidency and the African National Congress at all costs and even when it is unnecessary”.
Surely that is exactly what Mbeki has instructed Mankahlana to be. When a president spends about nine-tenths of his time traipsing the bowel-challenging international banquet circuit, he has to know that during his long absences there’s someone capable of cracking the whip on his behalf. As Mbeki strides the red carpets of the world he has to know that his office continues to speak in the resonant brogues of power. To put it in cruder terms, Mankahlana has to play the part of an athletic supporter for the state president’s cojones – however distant these might be. This might sound easy, but remember that Thabo’s knackers are tender and inflamed at this stage in their life-cycle, as they slowly metamorphose from globular to global. Mankahlana must be both gentle and warm.
Let us move to other slander heaped on Mankahlana last week. One of his detractors complained that Parks had told the leading international magazine Science that South Africa could not afford to supply drugs to HIV- positive pregnant women because this would result in a national rash of healthy orphans that the state would then have to support. So, what is wrong with that? And didn’t last week’s commentators realise how much naked guts it takes for a presidential representative to admit openly that his boss enthusiastically underwrites what, in candid interpretation, amounts to the mass murder of 4E000 babies a month? Even Himmler recoiled from spilling that density of truth. Above all, this last statement by Parks indicates the deep contempt in which he actually holds the concept of “spin doctoring”. Quite obviously he despises it. Mankahlana knows there’s nothing to replace good old- fashioned in-your-face honesty. He has seen how the Tony Blair style of press-manipulative government is failing. There is not a scrap of the odious, machiavellian Blair representative, Alistaire Campbell, in Parks. He tells it like it is. And now we must come, poignantly, to the dustbin bit. When I first heard about Parks saying that the Durban Aids declaration belonged in a presidential dustbin I, too, hooted with contemptuous laughter. But then I had a deeper think and went to source. What Parks actually said was that the Aids declaration would “find a comfortable place in one of the presidential dustbins”. Here was a fine example of the man’s innate subtlety. Not a single presidential dustbin, mark you, but one of many such waste disposal receptacles.
I had this vision of the president’s office, its rich carpets inhabited by ranks of homely dustbins, overflowing with fall-out from the Mbeki in-tray. All those tiresome Truth and Reconciliation Commission
reparation claims, all the yellowing Heath investigation
unit corruption reports, all those urgent requests for fresh blood supplies on the Golden Arrow bus battlefield, endless tedious petitions from disabled pensioners, all those irate parliamentary attendance memos from Frene Ginwala, the terrifying paper mountains of committee findings, relentless Mangosuthu Buthelezi memos, commissions of enquiry
abstracts, Jeremy Cronin praise-doggerel, racism conference invitations, Ronnie Kasrils lunch vouchers, directors’
strategy manifestos, free AZT offers, Congress of South African Trade Unions strike threats – the whole melancholy bangshoot. Even in subtext Parks is revelatory.
No, gentlemen, there is nothing spin- doctorish about Parks Mankahlana. There is nothing sinister in his eye, no hidden agendas prowl beneath his forthright colloquy. Parks is what he is, the epitomic figurehead of transparent government. We can all see right through him.