South African President Thabo Mbeki arrived in France on Monday for a three-day state visit — the latest phase of a robust foreign policy agenda that has earned him status on the world stage but jeers at home.
Critics have charged that Mbeki’s busy international schedule is nothing but diplomatic gluttony, to the detriment of domestic issues such as poverty, Aids and crime that are being relegated to the second tier of Pretoria’s priorities.
”The president’s foreign visits are not a result of his taste for travel,” presidential minister Essop Pahad said recently.
”He undertakes them in the interest of the nation, the interest of the continent and, we hope, the interest of the millions of impoverished people in developing countries.”
Mbeki’s trip to France — his fourth this year — will be his third state visit in one month, following stays in Canada and India. The previous month, he visited Japan and Malaysia.
”This country’s international engagements are not going to stop, they will increase,” Mbeki told parliament on Tuesday about his time spent abroad.
Between April 2002 and March 2003, Mbeki made 30 foreign visits, including 18 in Africa.
But the South African president is under pressure to shift his focus to the national front with the approach of the 2004 general elections.
Now a staple of the global political landscape, Mbeki was virtually unknown in the international arena before 1994, when he became deputy president under former president Nelson Mandela.
Mbeki’s father Govan was a celebrated patriarch of the fight against apartheid and a prominent member of the African National Congress (ANC) leadership, before he was imprisoned along with Mandela in 1964.
It was during that time that the ANC, banned under apartheid, sent Mbeki abroad. He studied economics in Britain and political and military training in the former Soviet Union.
The ANC gave their young firebrand the job of setting up and running their offices in various African countries and later made him foreign policy spokesperson, giving him ample opportunity to develop his diplomatic skills.
After 27 years in exile, Mbeki returned to South Africa in 1990 when the ban on the ANC was lifted. The first major test of Mbeki’s diplomatic skills came under apartheid when he led an ANC delegation in secret talks with the government of FW de Klerk in 1990, talks which eventually led to South Africa’s first multi-racial elections in 1994.
In June 1999, Mbeki succeeded Mandela as president of South Africa, confronting doubts about his ability to fill his popular predecessor’s shoes.
Since that time, Mbeki has made his mark as a political figure, seeking out every possible international venue to rally for Africa’s rebirth, the New Partnership for Africas Development (Nepad) and fair global trade.
According to political analysts Sean Jacobs and Richard Calland, who collaborated on the 2002 book Thabo Mbeki’s World, Mbeki views himself as a historic international figure in a time when an increasingly influential South Africa could have significant impact on the rest of the world. – Sapa-AFP