Johannesburg | Thursday
THE African National Congress on Wednesday called a Newsweek article, in which President Thabo Mbeki was criticised, a ”badly written movie script”.
ANC representative Smuts Ngonyama said the article written by Tom Masland was the ”latest episode of an ongoing crusade that aims to bludgeon President Mbeki’s image at home and abroad”.
”…this badly written movie script camouflaging as an analysis, carries all the fictitious elements of scandal, lies, deceit and betrayal with the sole purpose of creating destabilisation within the ANC, its leadership and in government,” he said.
Ngonyama said the party believed that the attack on itself and Mbeki would fail at weakening the party and what it stood for.
The ANC lashed out at Masland, accusing him of character assassination, but reiterating that it would not succeed.
”President Mbeki will not be sidetracked from dealing with real issues, like poverty affecting our country by submitting to third-grade movie scripts fit only for the dustbin of history.”
He said ”shoddy journalism” like that displayed in the article was not worthy of a decent response from the ANC.
The magazine article claimed that Mbeki’s dissent on Aids was unravelling his presidency.
It says ”South Africa’s Lonely Rebel” is feuding with allies, fighting his Cabinet and losing international friends over the issue.
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.”
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 the magazine, 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. – Sapa