Cape Town | Wednesday
PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki’s dissent on Aids is unravelling his presidency, the American magazine Newsweek claimed on Wednesday.
In an article — featured on the front page of the latest edition — it says ”South Africa’s Lonely Rebel” is feuding with allies, fighting his Cabinet and losing international friends over the issue.
But, Mbeki’s office on Wednesday rejected the article, saying it was ”not worth responding to”.
Newsweek said: ”The president is in big trouble over his obstinate refusal to acknowledge the gravity of the Aids crisis in the world’s worst-hit country.
”The annual opening-of-Parliament ritual in Cape Town, which ended last week, was a spectacle of his presidency unravelling.”
The world’s ”most revered politician”, former president Nelson Mandela, had openly split with him over Aids.
The article said Newsweek ”learned” that in the aftermath of Mandela’s speech at a ceremony honouring Aids fighters with a prize named for him, in which he urged an all-out offensive against the pandemic, Mbeki’s office stopped returning his calls.
”The two men later met and papered over the incident, but the damage was done.”
That was only the beginning. After Mbeki ”once again glossed over the Aids crisis” in his annual speech to Parliament, Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi took to the floor to urge an about-face on Aids treatment.
”Newsweek has learned that Buthelezi went public only after Mbeki shut down an effort by Buthelezi to address the terrible damage the president’s Aids policy has done to South Africa’s reputation internationally.
”A month ago, Buthelezi persuaded a cabinet committee, chaired by Deputy President Jacob Zuma, to expand a top panel that advises Mbeki on Aids.”
Mbeki and ”his ally”, Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad, who chairs the Aids panel, showed up at the meeting of Zuma’s committee the following week.
”Pahad demanded to know whether Buthelezi was trying to slight him.
”Buthelezi asked Mbeki to recuse himself because the president was the issue. The cabinet ministers stared at each other wordlessly.
”Mbeki did not leave the room, and the Aids panel was not expanded.”
Asking why Mbeki was ”willing to wreck his presidency over Aids”, Newsweek said some believed it was for the sake of his economic policy.
”Above all, he is intent on improving his people’s lives by making South Africa attractive to investors. He may once have feared that rolling out an Aids treatment program would bust his austere budget, though costs have plummeted since the big drug companies caved in to popular outrage over their pricing policies in the Third World.”
But, said Newsweek, a more likely explanation ”lies in Mbeki’s life story, as a ”prince of the South African liberation struggle”.
”Adopting a maverick view and sticking to it have served him well.
”Mbeki also is used to feeling like the smartest person in the room. That was bred in the bone.
”For all his proven survival skills, Mbeki now is without a tool to free himself. Out of principle, he won’t barnstorm. He loathes the modern political arts of image and spin.
”Mbeki may be apartheid’s ultimate victim: a bright, cultivated, intellectually curious man turned inward, driven by his unique history into a job for which he is not suited,” the article concluded.
Mbeki’s representative Bheki Khumalo in the process on Wednesday of leaving for Australia to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting with Mbeki said the article was not worth responding to.
”It appears to be part of a well-orchestrated personal campaign against the president. We do not quite understand its origins and ultimate objective,” Khumalo said. – Sapa