If you ever felt a flare of optimism about the political and moral flavour of the Mbeki presidency, now is the time to quench it. There is no longer much doubt about what is happening to South Africa under Thabo Mbeki. Hope is being supplanted by depression, cold horror at what this dangerous, this power-hungry man and his acolytes are up to. Their covert
schemings do no good for this country and no amount of “spin” from the Essop Pahads and all the others who constitute Mbeki’s murky causerie, makes the slightest difference to what steadily is being revealed.
The latest in a seemingly endless catalogue of Mbeki violations of even rudimentary political convention is his surreptitious pardoning last week of 33 brutal killers, all of them once agents of the African National Congress or its cousin organisation, the Pan Africanist Congress. This presidential pardoning was cronyism in its most obscene form: another of Mbeki’s increasingly explicit Robert Mugabe impersonations. Will these 33 released killers become the lieutenants of Mr Mbeki’s future “war veterans”? If, in releasing them, Mbeki sought to establish a core of willing brutes to match the Zimbabwean prototypes, he couldn’t have done better. Proven thugs, one and all, and all deeply indebted to the president who set them free.
If only because it is so typical, consider the case of someone like the degenerate Monwabisi Khundulu, released last week by Mr Mbeki’s charitable hand from a life sentence in jail. In his heroic contribution to the “struggle” Khundulu, along with a gang of fellow “freedom fighters” laid ambush to the lonely farmhouse of a defenceless elderly couple and then, when they came home, mercilessly bludgeoned them to death with hammers, making off with a few of their pathetic belongings. At the time Khundulu was freshly released from prison where he’d been committed for other violent crimes. For this one he was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.
When it came up for consideration, Khundulu’s application for amnesty was denied by a Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) amnesty committee, which included a Supreme Court judge and others qualified to assess the merits of his claims. But this and other decisions of people well experienced in their obligations, indeed the due process of law itself, now appear as so much chaff to Mr Mbeki. He has now deemed the decisions of the amnesty committee and the courts as irrelevant before his own ambitions. Just like Mugabe does.
Mr Alex Boraine, once a mandarin of the TRC, was to comment on television that the Mbeki decision to release these criminals was in violation of both letter and spirit of the TRC Act itself. The Act provided more than ample opportunity for those convicted under so-called “apartheid” jurisdiction to apply for review of their court-imposed punishments — to be given a second chance as it were. One can hardly accuse the TRC amnesty committees of being too rigorous. In the opinion of many, they leaned too far in the opposite direction, what with amnesty granted, on the one hand, to police scum-life like Craig Williamson, on the other to mass murderers like the Kenilworth church assassins.
There are other repercussions to the obscenity of Mbeki’s underhand remissions. They cock an arrogant snook at an establishing young democracy; in a country wracked by violent crime Mbeki has, in effect, endorsed violent crime as a method of political expression; he has made a mockery of the judicial process. “Do what you like, Mr Policeman and Mr Judge. If I don’t agree when you lock up our party members for the vicious trespasses committed in the holy name of my political orgy, why I’ll just open the jail doors and let them walk out.”
That Thabo Mbeki is, first and foremost, a power monger has never been in doubt. At this ominous game he is proving himself the equal of such masters of power brokerage as P W Botha. Just like Botha, Mbeki has buttressed himself with a “boetie-boetie” Cabinet of obedient appointees, there for little else than to be lubricant for his often bizarre notions. And again like Botha — and Mugabe — Mbeki has demonstrated that cunning is the handiest of all presidential instruments.
President Mbeki is currently off somewhere in the world, begging bowl in hand, pleading for money to underwrite his newest fantasy, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. In their unending need to be seen as wise and good, the Tony Blairs of the world will listen and contribute because they know that backing Mbeki’s fine-sounding inducements will help them in their new avocations as liberal colonialists.
What Blair et al hear is a new and apparently reasonable voice rising out of the hellish clamour of post-colonial African politics. They should listen more carefully. As Mr Mbeki has so visibly demonstrated — be it with his absurd views on HIV/Aids, his arms deals, his blindness to corruption in his own ranks, his releasing of the 33 killers — he is of the same cast as Robert Mugabe and the rest. If the Blairs listen carefully they will hear the same lyrics. Only the key signature has changed.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby