”Do you have Aids?” I asked. Most politicians would have slammed the phone down, but not Peter Mokaba. No, he said, he was the victim of a propaganda plot by drug companies. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Mokaba always embroiled me in marathon discussions, at times in the plush lounge of his Wendywood home. Exhausted and exasperated though I felt after every encounter, I often rang him. Unfailingly, he would speak.
As I am shunned by most African National Congress leaders, his openness was refreshing. ”I’ll engage, even if I don’t agree with you,” was his refrain. He rarely offended and if he did he would apologise. ANC health secretary Saadiq Kariem recalls that, after accusing health committee members of being anti-ANC, he called to say sorry.
Mokaba’s views were close to those of party leaders and his devotion to President Thabo Mbeki absolute. Cyril Ramaphosa was never in the running as president, he said, adding: ”We made the plans to field Mbeki in Cyril’s house.”
Mokaba was instrumental in getting Mbeki elected as ANC national chairperson before the Bloemfontein congress, paving the way for his election as deputy president. The competition, Mokaba insisted, was always between the ”towering intellectuals”, Mbeki and communist leader Chris Hani.
Mokaba, ANC Youth League president, first approached Hani, who refused because he could not lead the South African Communist Party and the ANC. Mbeki, he said, was a reluctant nominee. He had spent hours talking to Zanele Mbeki to persuade her husband.
His lobbying powers were phenomenal. After stirring controversy on Aids last year, Mokaba told me the ”tripartite alliance” was dead. The ANC was Marxist; the unions, infiltrated by ultra-left elements, had deviated. This became the dominant ANC view.
His attempts to lobby support on Aids were less successful. He claimed co-authorship of the infamous ”Castro Hlongwane” document that declared that anti-retrovirals killed Parks Mankahlana. Asked if Mbeki was among the authors, Mokaba responded in his usual probing manner: ”What makes you think so?” Well, the document quotes Keats, one of Mbeki’s favourite poets. ”I quote English poets all the time,” he retorted.
Considering his obsession with Aids, I wondered if he was infected. His friends told me he suffered from a kidney ailment. He often visited sangomas, saying his interest was academic. In one of our last conversations he denied the existence of the virus, but not the disease.
I last saw him at Walter Sisulu’s 90th birthday bash. Looking healthy, he quipped: ”I see you’re after my friend Tony [Yengeni]. No problem; you’re doing your job.”
I’ll miss him. The ANC could do with more of Mokaba’s openness.