Several years ago we asked the same question:Is Thabo Mbeki fit to rule? At the time, it elicited a furious response from African National Congress representatives and a coterie of others keen to ingratiate themselves with the heir apparent to Nelson Mandela. It was deemed an unfitting question, insulting, arrogant and predictably racist.
Today we ask the question again. And we can be certain that, again, it will draw shrill cries from the praise singers in the presidency. But this time we ask it in the knowledge that it is on the lips of many South Africans, many of them dedicated members of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the trade unions. Is Mbeki fit to rule?
His 22 months in power have been disastrous. And he has no one to blame but himself. Whether in his dealings with the Aids crisis surely the gravest threat ever to confront the country his timidity over Zimbabwe, or in his dealings with the sensitive matter of race in our politics, he has made worse the disfigured nationhood bequeathed us by apartheid.
This week he has taken us across a new threshold. He has allowed the organs of state security to be deployed in defence of his leadership of the ruling party.
It is difficult to comment on President Thabo Mbeki’s utterances on e.tv this week on HIV/Aids without using language that would show immense disrespect to the high office he represents, even if not to the man himself.
Asked if he would have an Aids test, Mbeki said, no, it was irrelevant and would set an example “within the context of a particular paradigm”. But we’re already within that paradigm, Mr President. HIV/Aids is woven into our country as intimately as the virus binds itself to the DNA of those it infects.
It is affecting our economy, and across our society people of all classes and races are dying. There are persistent rumours about which eminent people have HIV the minister of health herself has publicly said that members of her family are living with the syndrome.
Nor would it be irrelevant for Mbeki to have an HIV test. Our Anglican bishops have already underlined their claims to moral authority by going for public HIV tests. For our first citizen to do likewise would be immensely relevant, whether or not he claimed his constitutional rights to privacy and declined to reveal the results.
Mbeki’s statement on e.tv sounded like someone who does not believe the link between HIV and Aids. If he really doubts it and believes that the toxicity of anti-retroviral drugs outweighs their benefits, then government policy should reflect this.
Rather than appearing as Solomonic wisdom, Mbeki’s equivocation on HIV/Aids, Aids tests and anti-retroviral drugs sounds like a dissident without the courage of his convictions.
Government’s schizoid attitude has already and is now taking a terrible toll, not only among the people smitten by HIV, but also among those in government trying to combat it.
The civil servant responsible for leading the battle against HIV broke down publicly and cried over her inability to get state action against the epidemic. If she resigns, another able warrior against the emergency enveloping South Africa will have been lost.
The underlying cause of Aids is HIV. No one has provided a plausible opposing paradigm. Until Mbeki can either admit it or rebut it, our advice to the president is to shut up.
There is, however, little prospect that he will take our advice. It is as if he fears that to admit to an error or to be found to have committed one implies, for him, some kind of annihilation as a person. How else are we to explain this unreasoned obduracy?
The same pattern is evident on Zimbabwe. He has claimed the right to public silence on the merits of the situation. This is a privilege that might be allowed if his “quiet diplomacy” had been successful. Yet his diplomacy has been a singular failure.
The dictatorship of Robert Mugabe gets ever more crude, brutal and idiotic; the Zimbabwean economy spirals with increasing speed towards total collapse; ordinary Zimbabweans’ appeals for formative action on their crisis from their South African neighbours become ever more hopeless; and the damage to the prospects for prosperity in our own country and the region becomes ever more severe.
Asked why, then, he does not pursue a different approach say, a more robust policy towards Mugabe Mbeki claims that he has, indeed, criticised the Zimbabwean leader in public and that we, or media organisations, have somehow failed to hear him.
His wriggling is undignified. Its purpose is, again, to avoid admitting to what is evidently, for him, the greatest calamity: to have been wrong. Mbeki’s most shameful contribution to our society over the past 22 months, though, has been his attempts to re-racialise our politics. He has taken the perversity of apartheid and sought to make of it a virtue.
He tells us repeatedly that all whites hold all blacks in contempt. What he hopes to achieve by doing so, we can only guess. Whatever it is, it cannot be far from a desire to sow division where the struggle against apartheid sought to create unity, to plant the seeds of a new nation in formation.
What are more certain are the results of Mbeki’s approach: black South Africans treat their white counterparts with even greater suspicion than our unhappy history might justify; whites, their capital and skills are leaving the country at an alarming rate; what Mandela made a country of hope, confident it could overcome its tremendous difficulties, Mbeki has, in just 22 months, rendered a land of fractiousness and despair.
Why? we ask. Why? We believe the answer lies in the same territory of the mind that explains the extraordinary tales of plot and counter-plot we have heard in recent weeks and months, the unsolicited denials of ambition by leading ANC figures, and the failure by brave soldiers in the struggle against apartheid to speak out now against a leader many of them now despise yet fear.
Mbeki took us across a threshold this week when he and his Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete told us, in effect, that to rival Mbeki for leadership of the ANC or the presidency of the country was both traitorous and murderous.
While trying to give the appearance of standing outside the fray, Mbeki appealed on e.tv on Tuesday night for those with knowledge of any plots to come forward with their evidence, while on the national broadcaster, the SABC, Tshwete, on the flimsiest of evidence, named three of Mbeki’s potential rivals for leadership of the ANC as, allegedly, dangers to the president’s life.
This is low, low stuff. It is the stuff of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, or of Malawi under Kamuzu Banda. Had the three named individuals been discussing Mbeki’s replacement (and we know of no evidence that they have) this would have been entirely legitimate and the very stuff of democracy.
By using words such as “plot”, Mbeki and Tshwete have created notions of gunpowder and treason. It was preceded by weeks during which we on this newspaper heard repeated stories of leaks to the SABC intended to embarrass Deputy President Jacob Zuma emanating from individuals associated with the presidency.
It came barely a month after the editor of this newspaper was told by a senior official in the presidency that, if the Mail & Guardian carried further references to the president’s sexual habits, he could expect a “personal hell”.
Matthews Phosa, Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale the three named by Tshwete are no angels. They are robust businessmen and politicians. Might we not, however, expect them also to have been accorded by the government the dignity and presumption of innocence the ANC and government have been demanding for Messrs Yengeni and others who might have benefited from the R50-billion arms deal.
The arms deal is as we predicted it would when the ANC excluded the Heath commission from the investigation into it haunting the ANC. And so it will continue to do for as long as the ANC and the government give the appearance of not promoting the fullest possible investigation into the scandal surrounding the self-enrichment via the deal of a number of senior individuals associated with the ruling party.
As we reveal on pages two and three of this newspaper today, under Mbeki’s chairmanship, the Cabinet decided in 1999 to incur what is now a R50-billion bill (and rising) for the arms deal, notwithstanding evidence before it from the Ministry of Finance that the defence purchases would seriously damage this country’s ability to take the bulk of its citizens beyond poverty.
The time is long past for members of the ANC to ask themselves whether this is the kind of leadership they want, or that the country needs. A great party is at risk of being turned into the instrument of a man caught up in his own personal rages and with so brittle an ego that he fears evisceration if he retreats on an issue or allows a recognition that he has failed.
In December next year the ANC decides whether this man should continue as president of the party. It also has the power to determine substantially whether he should continue as president of the country. At least, the time has come for the ANC to conclude that the president of the ANC and of the country should not be one and the same person.
ANC members are already asking the same question as we are: Is Thabo Mbeki fit to rule?
They now need to recover the courage to answer it. It does not follow that they are conspirators or murderers if they do so honestly.