There you are at the helm of Africa’s most developed economy, and president of a country with probably the greatest proliferation of tertiary institutions on the continent. You are also leader of a nation that is at the cutting edge of realistic, post-Cold War, social experimentation. Your country is viewed by many in the developing and developed world as one that could begin to answer the many vexed questions that face humanity today.
In trying to get your citizens to realise that they are part of a generation of humanity that has been given the special task of building a brand-new republic, you challenge them to debate the large issues that face them. You pen deep and thoughtful essays and post them on your party’s website. You give seminal speeches, where you delve into the challenges that confront your country.
And all you get in return is sycophantic applause from your supporters, hysterical howls from your opponents and dead silence from those who should be taking the debate forward.
That, unfortunately, is the position in which President Thabo Mbeki finds himself. Which is a tragedy because, in Mbeki, we have a president who is more than just an administrator. We should be using the Mbeki era to interrogate our transition as vigorously as he does.
In sharp contrast to his peers around the world, Mbeki has something to say beyond the sound bites that make up presidential speak.
Sadly, it is a conversation he is having all by himself.
Each time Mbeki makes a poignant point in one of his now famous speeches or online missives, all that the nation is able to do is to sit back and marvel at his wit. “Oh, but the Chief is so smart,” one can almost hear the multitudes say in unison. Those who disagree and dare to question him are inevitably those on the right of centre, whose views are often dismissed on account of race and historical baggage.
Why is South Africa so reticent to engage in conversation with its philosopher king? Why are we squandering an opportunity that so many in the world would relish? Why is a society so rich in challenges and intellectual opportunities so lazy about thinking?
It was not always like this, though.
Not very long ago we were frenetically debating his “I am an African speech” and deliberated at length about what it was that made us African. It was also not that long ago that he shook us out of our comfort zones with his “Two Nations” address, in which he stated the indisputable fact that South Africa was comprised of a rich white enclave and a mass of black poverty. Back then, we interrogated his words, with many offering intellectual back-up for his observations while others accused him of undoing Nelson Mandela’s much- vaunted nation-building work.
But since Mbeki became ensconced in the highest seat, thinking South Africans have become a lot more circumspect about engaging with him. Instead they prefer to publicly admire his words and only utter any doubts about his hypotheses in the safety of familiar company.
There are those who argue that this flows from Mbeki’s leadership style, which is geared towards central control and a top-down approach. Many within the African National Congress argue that he is intellectually unassailable and that the rest of us plebs “just don’t understand the chief”. A simplistic answer is that his ambiguous and circumlocutional language makes it difficult to engage with him.
The truth would probably be found somewhere in a combination of many factors.
A major contributory factor is that many within his party feel inadequate in Mbeki’s presence and would rather prostrate themselves before him than have a qualitative conversation.
Which is easy to understand considering some rather rotund individuals who sit in Cabinet and whose only skill seems to be the art of guffawing.
Mbeki’s willingness to bring the likes of the guffawing individual(s) into high echelons, the heavy-handed manner in which the leftists in the party have been dealt with and the handling of “plot” allegations against three top ANC leaders have no doubt played a role in stifling discourse. As has the handling of the Aids issue, where those on the side of real science were immediately accused of undermining the president.
This reticence to converse on an equal footing, in turn, makes it easy for the leader to stamp his authority and get his own way. So what the country now has is an ANC which has abrogated its position as an intellectual leader to one man, who brilliant as he may be, is one man. The streams of ANC position papers that analysed the country’s state and postulated future paths and policy directions have dried up. Today the minimal analysis of current trends is left to position papers that are distributed by Luthuli House on the eve of the party’s five-yearly conference. From time to time we are subjected to the vulgar utterings of the likes of Dumisani Makhaye. The thinking around future policy direction is done by government policy planners — many of whom were once-upon-a-time lateral thinkers — who crunch numbers on computer programmes and emerge with mechanistic outcomes.
And the big picture is left to the president, whose word is taken as gospel by those within the ranks of the organisation.
But maybe the ANC is entitled to behave in this manner.
If a party with a rich history of intellectual prowess chooses to join the sea of mediocrity that comprises mainstream politics in the West, that is its right. And if those within the ANC are convinced that the best way to maintain party unity and drive South Africa forward is by putting their creative powers to rest until the Mbeki era is over, that is their prerogative. The rest of society, however, has no excuse not being energised by Mbeki’s musings.
South Africa has a plethora of academic institutions, staffed by — one hopes — some of the best minds in the country. Is one to assume that they have nothing to add to or subtract from what the president has to say?
We also have a dynamic business sector that is grappling with the difficult task of economic transformation. Are those who operate in the sector bereft of ideas about how this country’s economy should be optimally organised and would they rather rely on the number-one citizen to do the thinking for them? South Africa also has a large NGO sector that operates at the grassroots level where experience should be informing debate. Are they also too lazy to enter the larger intellectual terrain?
And, more pertinently, should the president be the only person leading debate in the country?
Because Mbeki has been given acres of space to knock the ball about on the intellectual field by himself, he has become prone to taking short cuts. These are evident in his dissection of the Zimbabwean situation, where he offered a convenient and predictable analysis of the reasons that country is in free fall. Mbeki’s analysis — which essentially attributed Zimbabwe’s problems to Zanu-PF’s naivety and Western deviousness in the early days of independence — served only to justify South Africa’s approach to foreign policy. However, it was by no means the full truth. And Mbeki knows that.
And in the interpretation of the arms deal final report, there were glaring misreadings, such as the role the government played in the second tier of the procurement process. Again, in a highly charged piece of writing in which he assailed the “fishers of corrupt men”, there was very little national debate on utterances that could shape the ruling party’s and the country’s attitude towards the anti-corruption effort.
Such a situation, where a nation’s thinking is done by one person, is fraught with pitfalls. It is particularly undesirable for a nation that is building a culture of accountability and where the mantra is “deepening democracy”.
They say a nation gets the leadership it deserves. We have President Thabo Mbeki.
But does he deserve a nation of sheep?