The world is agreed. From Beijing to Berlin, London to Tokyo, Moscow to Washington, and Singapore to Buenos Aires, one condition above all others is seen as necessary for African prosperity. It is the success of South Africa. That is to say, the success of the current African National Congress government.
The reasons for this view are simple. South African alone has, all at once, the industrial base, the fundamentally rational political and economic policies, and the power and moral authority to lead Africa into an era of sustained development. International consensus extends further. Growing prosperity across Africa will mean significant new trading and business opportunities for other countries and businesses across the globe. Africa is, in this respect, the world’s great unrealised market. African poverty is in no one’s interests. Speak to almost any non-African diplomat, politician or business person and this is their perspective. They are not trying to be nice in voicing it. Even less are they trying to mislead us. They are, rather, making a hard-headed assessment of our continent and its prospects. If South Africa fails if this ANC government messes up the prospects for this continent over the next 50-odd years look very bleak indeed.
Over the past week, therefore, we have listened with growing dismay to statements emanating from the ANC over international attitudes to it, South Africa and the continent. A meeting of the ANC national executive committee at the weekend provided an opportunity for paranoid talk suggesting the developed world is out to undermine President Thabo Mbeki, interfere in South Africa’s domestic affairs, and scupper the leadership role this country can play on the continent and among developing nations. Mbeki, himself, took the opportunity to release another of his ill-considered literary efforts this time in the ANC’s online newspaper ANC Today. This time Mbeki invoked a visiting Martian to caricature (and so to dismiss) concerns many South Africans, both black and white, have over the accelerating deterioration in the state of affairs in Zimbabwe. Again, Mbeki argued that white attitudes towards their black compatriots are governed it would seem he believes universally by contemptuous racist stereotyping.
It is depressing stuff. Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, the former leader of the opposition, and Heribert Adam, the noted academic, referred to it in an article in Business Day this week as “infantile racist branding”.
We agree. We said we were dismayed at this behaviour by ANC leaders, and so we are. We cannot, however, say we are shocked. We have heard and read enough nonsense from ANC leaders, over the past two years in particular, not to experience any surprise. But there is room for disappointment.
On Thursday last week, many editors and senior journalists who met Mbeki, Essop Pahad, minister in the presidency, Joel Netshitenzhe, head of the Government Communication and Information Service, and other senior government communicators left with high hopes that good judgement now ruled in the upper ranks of the Siamese twin-like ANC-government. The meeting at the Union Buildings had been characterised by a search for common ground and, more significantly, by an evident commitment on both sides to rationality.
Some of these optimists did, however, ask- on the basis of previous experience how long they could expect rationality to rule in the presidency. How long would it take before the strangely paranoid mindset so long evident at some levels of the ANC and South African Communist Party reasserted its pre-eminence? In the event, it took about 48 hours. It is now long overdue that the ANC or those within its ranks for whom rationality is a significant mediator of thought asks itself some hard questions. Is the party capable of breaking out of a racialised nationalist mindset that is never more comforted than when it can allege the existence of some overwhelming conspiracy against it? Is the party capable of breaking the mould of a national liberation movement in which unity is confused with conformity to the leader’s opinions? Is the party capable of absorbing 50 years of intellectual revision that has superseded the left’s theoretical canon of the first 50 years of last century? The discredited intellectual tradition of that period includes democratic centralism as a principle of organisation; it embraces the national democratic revolution; and it ranges from Stalin’s thinking on nationality to the idea that we can predict history’s outcomes.
If ANC leaders are incapable of moving beyond these outdated instincts and ideas then rational individuals currently within its ranks may soon finding themselves looking elsewhere for their political home. Last year during which we witnessed repeated irrational responses from ANC leaders to race and racism, to HIV/Aids and to the problems in Zimbabwe we also saw a slight, though highly significant, decoupling of intellectual strata across all races from the ANC. This process will accelerate unless there is an end to the idiotic statements that emanated from a number of ANC leaders this past week.
We are the only newspaper that has supported the ANC at every election since 1994 and for a long time before it was fashionable to do so, as well. We state again what we have said many times before. We are dedicated to the success of this country. We want and need this government to succeed. We go further to say that the ANC will succeed as a ruling party only if it permanently rids itself of those ways of thinking if necessary of those individuals that persist in nullifying the considerable advances the country has made over the past seven years by dragging it back to a bygone age and into a state of mind that risk making South Africa an idiot in the global village.