Jeffrey Ndumo During the Oliver Tambo Memorial Lecture, on August 11 2000, President Thabo Mbeki delivered a fierce speech which had two main themes. The first was to chastise the “black petit bourgeoisie” and native intellectuals for reducing themselves to the status of foot-lickers of white capital at the expense of a contribution to the restoration of the pride of the African majority. The second, with the help of a quotation from William Shakespeare, was to accuse a white political party leader of wittingly perpetuating racism and white prejudice. Stripped of its pretentious erudition and flexing of intellectual muscles, Mbeki’s speech reveals misconceptions, contradictions and a shallow understanding of the issues raised. Treating Mbeki’s view at face value, of course, no one can disagree with his call for a “humanist native intellectual”. But to what extent is the president really committed to this course?
The historian Isaac Deutscher once insisted that the role of intellectuals is to remain eternal protestors: to maintain opposition to the powers that be, to militate against the taboos and conventions, to struggle for a society in which nationalism, domination, exploitation and racism will at last lose their hold on the human mind. Thus, it goes without saying that to maintain opposition to the powers that be involves opposing the ruling party. Ironically, since Mbeki successfully captured the levers of political power, he has himself implemented socio-economic policies that may be regarded as pro-white capital to the detriment of the African majority. One does not need to be a social scientist to realise that the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, Igoli 2002 and other neo-conservative policies are, in fact, entrenching apartheid racial inequalities, instead of restoring the pride of the African majority. According to figures released by Statistics South Africa on income distribution, the poorest, who constitute the bulk of the African population, get only 3% of total income compared to 63% of total income that goes to the richest 20%, who constitute the bulk of the white community. The macro-economic policy promised the delivery of 409 000 jobs by 2000. As it stands, the unemployment rate is estimated at 37,6%, with certain regions experiencing higher rates – African women and youth are particularly hard hit. The majority of unemployed African people (69,2%) have never worked. This damning picture also makes a mockery of the central object of the “African renaissance”, namely, to improve the lives of the African people. Undoubtedly, if the African populace is unemployed, poor and pauperised, their dignity is highly compromised. When some native intellectuals, both within the ranks of the alliance of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the broader civil society raised opposition to these policies, they found a less than sympathetic response from our president. In fact, to the amazement of many, what they found was a president not hesitant to utilise his newly found powers to marginalise and silence these voices. Ironically, an undemocratic and totalitarian vocabulary emerged from our president’s lips – government policy is non-negotiable. So, who is really the foot-licker of white capital? One is tempted to remind the president of a point that should be fairly obvious to a leader of his calibre: that it is not his prerogative to prescribe what African intellectuals should think. Not every African intellectual, for example, needs to embrace Mbeki’s two-nation thesis – two nations, one poor and black, and the other rich and white – as an approach, to enable him/her to destroy the old and to build the qualitatively and quantitatively new. Indeed, this is a narrow and poor understanding of the complex problems confronting South Africa. There is gender, age, class and, of course, racial inequality in South Africa, which cannot simply be addressed through the spectacles of a two-nation thesis. Instead of falsely bemoaning the withdrawal of the African intellectual from the public discourse, the president would be better served to review his own policies and practices towards this social category and the African populace in general. He speaks of the need to empower these social groups while, practically, he does the opposite. While racism is self-evidently a serious problem in South Africa, Mbeki’s use of it as a political tool appears to reflect a growing insecurity on his part. Are Mbeki’s use of the race card and his attack on the “foot-lickers” not perhaps the words of a man who is increasingly insecure about the main thrust of his presidency: the implementation of conservative economic policies on behalf of a socialist liberation movement? In biblical terms, I sincerely believe that what we are dealing with here is the case of a Goliath who must make an effort to humble himself rather than allowing the Davids out there to do it for him. Put differently, without any doubt, South Africa unfortunately has a president who suffers from a delusion that I would call “superiority complex syndrome”. Jeffrey Ndumo is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. The views expressed here are his own