The president’s failure to act decisively is paralysing his office, writes Anthony Holiday
Join the poolside circle at the home of one of Gauteng’s black elite. Get over any astonishment you might feel at the opulence of the cars in the driveway. Ignore the importunate ringing of cellular telephones. Attend instead to the typical chatter of this band of arrivistes, in which talk of politics so readily combines with speculations about market prospects, and you will detect the emergence of a crucial consensus.
It is a consensus that is no less important for being shared by white elites around dinner tables from Houghton to Constantia. It comes to this: President Thabo Mbeki quite apart from any of his other foibles, faults and failures is unfit to lead South Africa because he is paralysed by the disease of indecision to a degree that is killing the legitimacy of the presidency and blighting the future of the entire nation as a result.
This judgement has, in the main, been generated by the state of our currency. Unsurprisingly, people in the top tiers of business and the professions no matter what their colour, culture or class origin are no longer so easily disposed to be soothed by well-worn assurances from the Treasury’s Maria Ramos or the Reserve Bank’s Tito Mboweni to the effect that there is no financial crisis because “the economic fundamentals are in place”. For what, in my estimate, is an increasing body of opinion among the affluent, that mantra provides no path around the fact that the rand has plunged to nearly 30% of its real effective exchange rate since early last year. In the light of this statistic alone, anybody might be forgiven for wondering exactly what Ramos and company would be prepared to call a crisis.
While theories about probable causes of the rand’s descent abound, it would take a very eccentric pundit indeed to opine that the plight of Zimbabwe and Mbeki’s failure to intervene in the situation more decisively had nothing whatsoever to do with the former phenomena. This being so, anxieties about Mbeki’s fitness for the post of National Helmsman were excited to further heights by the spectacle of our first citizen, in apparently blithe disregard of the chaos cooking up on his country’s northern border, preoccupied with talks on the Middle East held at a luxurious Cape wine estate. Given that not a single member of Israel’s governing party, Likud, was present at this symposium (although a sizeable contingent of Mbeki’s Cabinet and close advisers were), how does one escape the conclusion that our president pretends to concern himself with “more weighty matters” because he cannot make up his mind what on Earth to do about what is happening in his own backyard?
And right in his own living room, so to speak, there is the Aids pandemic, with South Africa at its epicentre. Here, too, the perception grows of a leader who fatally lacks determination, unless it be the determination to determine absolutely nothing. It would be difficult to exaggerate the harm Mbeki has done to his image and the image of his office, at home and abroad, by his pretense at “keeping an open mind” on the cause of the plague and consequent refusal to treat it as what it is the gravest national emergency we have ever had to face. Now there is talk (and surely at least some of the publicity advisers at Union Buildings must have heard it) of “genocidal dithering”. There are rumblings of rebellion around this issue in the very circles where Mbeki most needs to be assured of a modicum of loyalty.
All these discontents were made more or less inevitable by conditions that Mbeki himself was party to creating. He chose to adopt a radically centrist leadership style that placed the chief instruments for decision-making in his office, thus creating a “buck-stops-with-me” persona for himself. He, further, enthusiastically assisted in creating a black middle class, who have rapidly learned to share the managerial ethos espoused by their white colleagues. The heroic figure of that ethos is the chief executive officer, whose job it is to take decisions. If he makes the wrong ones, his cohorts may or may not forgive him once or twice. But he must make decisions rapidly or his days as a CEO will be short indeed.
This is the unenviable position in which Mbeki finds himself. He is not a CEO. He is not a manager of any sort. Indeed, during his years in exile, he was notorious for mismanaging his appointments diary. What he is in reality, is an extremely sensitive and hyper-cautious politician, who sees complexities and dangers in every situation he confronts. He is, moreover, a politician tasked with governing one of the most heterogeneous and complex societies on Earth. The dangers that terrify him may sometimes be imagined, but they are often real. It is small cause for wonder that his response so often is simply to freeze.
The president can draw little comfort from knowing that he is by no means the first South African leader to land up in this dilemma. BJ Vorster tinkered frantically with the edifice of “grand” apartheid, left him by Hendrik Verwoerd, in order to meet the demands of bankers and industrialists that the costly structure be torn down. He masked his indecision by bluster and brutality, until his reign was ended in the indignity of the Information Scandal.
That scandal, you will recall, brought PW Botha to power to face the same demands and threats from big business as had been his predecessor’s lot. Botha, too, fulminated, while he hesitated. Remember his “Rubicon” speech of March 1985, and the way the rand tumbled as he spoke and wagged his finger in the world’s face?
But Mbeki can scarcely be consoled by these examples. What the vacillations of Vorster and Botha ultimately brought about was the end of an era, the crumbling of a rotten structure, the collapse of a house of cards. If his inability to take decisions causes the non-racial democracy Mbeki helped build to meet the same end, what can take its place?
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government and at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris