Former newspaper editor Ken Owen once described President Thabo Mbeki’s political skills as “pathetic”. He could not have been more wrong.
Mbeki has outstanding gifts for instilling sheep-like obeisance in his party and neutralising and cutting down to size perceived or real opponents. As a political street-fighter whose business is winning, holding and building power, he is formidable.
In Parliament in the third week of February, during his State of the Nation address he showed why his sway over the African National Congress remains unchallenged despite the many mistakes he has made in his four years at the top.
One could have heard an order paper drop during his quiet, disdainful, slightly unctuous reply to the State of the Nation debate, delivered in the manner of a headmaster at school assembly.
Earlier in the debate the hubbub of gossiping back-benchers had almost drowned out some MPs, forcing the Speaker to step in. Strong-minded men and women such as Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, Johnny de Lange, Derek Hanekom and Kader Asmal visibly basked in his approval. At his sarcastic shafts
at the opposition, the ANC benches exploded in compliant guffaws.
Mbeki is a fearsome debater, expert at harnessing selected facts to his case, brushing aside opponents without engaging them and reversing moral onus on to his accusers. He also has an instinct for the jugular.
The universal complaint that his State of the Nation address had all but elided the pressing national issues of HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe was “puzzling”, he said.
The only possible solution to this “mystery” was that some had not read the speech. The “beating of the drums”, he suspected, stemmed from differences with the policies of the government “rather than an economy of words on our part”.
One might have thought half his speech had been devoted to these two pressing national issues instead of the lone paragraph devoted to each. And, lest anyone mistake his terseness on Aids for contrition about past error, he slipped in a defiant line about “the entire spectrum of diseases of poverty and under-development, including those associated with immune deficiency”.
The deft use of pointed silence to diminish criticism and redefine the agenda was clearest on the issue of state corruption, highlighted by both United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa and Democratic Alliance MP Raenette Taljaard. Taljaard made (and was forced to retract) a remark that the presidential entourage at the opening of Parliament resembled “an identification parade at a criminal investigation”.
With ANC MP Tony Yengeni’s fraud conviction hanging like a pall over the assembly, and Yengeni still sitting in the House, Taljaard and Holomisa presented a consolidated list of errant or accused servants of the state that included the national energy regulator, the former Civil Aviation Authority CEO, the former Spoornet CEO, a former public enterprises director, the public enterprises director general, the former Armscor chairperson, the former Denel chairperson, the SA Express CEO, the deputy president and the former ministers of transport and defence.
To Taljaard’s charge of government “limp-wristedness”, and her reminder that he had not kept his pledge about a “cooling-off” period before former ministers went into business, the president said not a word.
Mbeki’s tactic on another exposed flank, joblessness and economic stagnation, was to turn the tables by panning the opposition parties’ “market fundamentalism” and, by implication, the indiscipline of the extra-parliamentary left (“through focused and painstaking work over the past few years, we are now able …”).
The “tide has turned” theme of his State of the Nation speech was picked up to project the image of an economy rebuilt on a solid base and now straining for an assault on poverty. “We have the necessary policies and programmes further to deepen the process of the reconstruction and development of our country. We have the resources to accelerate this process. Improved capacity does exist within the public service …”
Mbeki simply blanked out the official opposition, his bête noire, referring to it once in his speech as “the DP”. But he was at his deadliest in dealing with his Cabinet colleague and Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whom he left smirking foolishly into the television cameras.
In his speech Buthelezi made the mistake of exposing his deepest longings for the respect and recognition of the ANC’s top dogs. “We need to come together as people of goodwill … I am deeply convinced that collegially we can exercise … leadership,” he pleaded. “We need to have a greater measure of respect for one another … I somehow feel the suspicions of the past among ourselves have not vanished.”
Given the rapprochement between the IFP and the DA, Mbeki was not about to give Buthelezi satisfaction. However “commendable” his call, none of the parties in Parliament, including the IFP, would relax their efforts to win power, he noted.
IFP-DA cooperation in a bid for power was perfectly natural and normal political behaviour, Mbeki purred. However, it had “nothing to do with the gathering of people of goodwill, of which the Honourable Dr Buthelezi spoke”.