I felt bad for Thabo. So I think did many people. Though most of the delegates in the hall were too busy ululating their praise song for Nelson Mandela to have time to contemplate the feelings of their current president. The facts are straightforward: there was fog at Umtata; Mandela’s plane left late and so he arrived at the opening plenary session of the African National Congress’s national conference late.
But the consequences were more complex, and poignantly so. Mbeki was approaching the end of a two-hour speech. He had just added an unscripted phrase to a line about how opponents’ attempts to sow disunity would be defeated — ‘as will be demonstrated during this national conference” — that
attracted the largest cheer of a hitherto coolly received speech. A sense of momentum was gathering that housed the possibility of a powerful climax.
But the moment — the possibility — was stolen, eclipsed by Mandela’s regally shuffled journey to a seat at the front of the stage. It was pure theatre, more Ibsen than French farce, as the timing was, in the words of one very senior ANC official afterwards, ‘absolutely disastrous, a protocol nightmare”.
On the one hand, the speech of a president should not be interrupted in such a manner by anyone. By anyone. But Mandela is not, of course, any-one. Hence the decision, discussed in huddled fashion by a small group of ANC national executive committee (NEC) members on the stage, sanctioned by national chairperson Terror Lekota and communicated for final approval to Mbeki at the podium on a slip of paper, that Mandela should enter the vast auditorium.
The warmth of his greeting was telling — and for Mbeki inevitably and, surely, hurtfully so. He was entitled to be hurt and furious. Advised as he should have been of the proximity of the end of the speech, Mandela should have recognised the effect that his entrance would have and ordered his chauffeur to drive around the block.
After his speech had drifted quietly to a close, Mbeki brooked no ululation of his own, milked no applause, but in an act of contrasting utter simplicity, took his seat and fiddled with his now redundant speaking notes, as behind him NEC members jostled to embrace Mandela. No one approached him; it was as if he was not there. Even the three big screens above the crowd focused on Mandela, as if it was he who had just completed the president’s political report.
I have rarely seen such a painful scene of loneliness played out so publicly in politics. In emblematic fashion, it captured so much of the essence of Mbeki’s leadership style: the cold and detached intellect, the serious, calculating demeanour and the unapproachably aloof personality.
That it eschews so many of the modern fashions is in many ways admirable. Mbeki can never be accused of cappuccino politics — all froth and no substance. His speech on Monday was typical. Not a single joke; no sound bites; and a conspicuous absence of what are known in the speech-writing trade as ‘clap lines”.
The contrast with the Clintons and Blairs of this world, even Mandela, could not be greater. On one level it was both refreshing and welcome. Not even a line or two of poetry, the one rhetorical indulgence that Mbeki does occasionally permit himself.
Instead, he offered a dogged, astutely constructed exposition of the state of the ANC in government. Thus does Mbeki command the respect but not the love of his party. Perhaps the feeling is mutual. Given the strength of his hold over the party’s presidency, he was surprisingly nervous, constantly fiddling with the hard copy of his speech, a document that he seemed to prefer to look down at to read despite the fact that for once an autocue was being employed, as if to seek refuge from the glare of the attention of the 3 000 delegates.
Either he needs to practise the art of speaking with an autocue or he perhaps prefers not to hold the eye of such an audience. Given the ideological diversity of that audience, he had no choice but to choose softer tones than those of his lieutenants in recent weeks when chiding the leaders of the left, reserving harsher language for the right wing.
Combined with what was undoubtedly the most reconciliatory speech that Mbeki has ever given in terms of the many friendly gestures towards minorities such as whites and Afrikaans speakers, it raised intriguing questions of strategy.
‘Amazingly reconciliatory, too much so! It’s a dual strategy,” was the reaction of one South African Communist Party central committee member immediately afterwards.
How so?
‘Work it out for yourself.”
OK then: putting the left of the alliance in its place necessitates making friendly gestures towards capital, obviously, whites too, the Federation of Unions of South Africa, yes, and the South African National Civic Organisation.
Linked to this, Mbeki said the ANC needs to reclaim lost ground among civil society organisations. Whether the Treatment Action Campaign would survive the test of what to Mbeki constitutes a ‘genuine developmental NGO” or not, he surely had them in mind when he spoke of the ‘failure to maintain the necessary continuous contact with them as well as the weakened participation of our members in these various structures — We have to attend to this deficiency”.If ‘attending to the deficiency” means beginning to see such organisations and social movements no longer in a Thatcherite they’re either ‘for us or against us” vein, then this represents an important shift in his strategy.
Hitherto, as I have argued elsewhere*, one of Mbeki’s strategic and ideological blind spots has been to regard such campaigning entities purely as enemies rather than potential strategic allies.
But it was the various references to what Mbeki insisted on calling the ‘middle strata” that I found most telling. In a passage in the written report that Mbeki did not include in his speech, he says: ‘Our movement has the additional obligation to address the aspirations of the middle strata, even as it attends to the expectations of the working people.”
Clearly, as Aziz Pahad argued in his open-letter response to Sampie Terreblanche published a week ago, a new liberal democracy, set in a capitalist world, will inevitably produce a new middle class. Both Pahad and Mbeki are right to attack those who use this as a weapon of convenience in their attack on ANC macro-economic policy. A growing black middle class is as desirable as it is inevitable. The question is whether and to what extent that middle class becomes the predominant beneficiary of transformation, while paying lip service to the poor. In other words, having created a representative and abundant middle class, do you become subservient to its needs?
That will have been one of the chief debates during the rest of the conference this week. Two senior socialist members of the ANC, standing impishly under verdant Stellenbosch trees, admitted after the speech was over that the left’s ability to stand its ground would be quantified not in concrete.
Richard Calland is the joint editor, with his former Institute for Democracy in South Africa colleague Sean Jacobs, of Thabo Mbeki’s World: The Politics & Ideology of
the South African President, published recently by the University of Natal Press
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland