There we were last week, engrossed in a political storm over celebrations taking place on an inconsequential Caribbean island.
Much heat was generated as a chorus led by Tony Leon and his Democratic Alliance colleagues slammed President Thabo Mbeki’s visit to Haiti and presidential advisers all but stopped short of labelling his critics racist.
As the ping-pong continued throughout the week, with nobody making much sense, the scene was set for another year in which logic takes a back seat to posturing and mindless howling in South African politics. Yes it is election year and one expects a lot of hot air to be generated, but the Haiti debate just showed how little we have moved in adding depth to our debates — lamentable in a society so rich in history, challenges and future options.
That is the nature of South African politics as defined and designed for us by Mbeki and Leon. The relationship between the two men often borders on hatred and their reaction to each other’s utterances and actions is laced with disdain.
To Mbeki Leon is nothing more than a ”white politician … who practises his craft on the African continent and ”demonstrates that he is willing to enunciate an entrenched white racism that is a millennium old”. To Leon, Mbeki is a person who overemphasises differences between the races while suppressing commonalities and one who uses ”a one-size-fits-all description of whites and the apartheid system”.
And so discourse revolves around two poles occupied by individuals with irrational attitudes towards one another, while the rational middle ground gravitates towards the poles.
Take the Haiti debacle. Mbeki was correct in wanting to highlight the 200th anniversary of the Haitian revolution.
The significance of that revolution is not just something exclusively for Haitians to remember. Nor was it, as Mbeki wanted to believe, an issue for Africans and Africans in diaspora alone. It was larger than that. The 1804 slave victory in Haiti was an important landmark in human history — one that has been reduced to a postscript.
Where Mbeki was wrong was to fall into the trap of legitimising a man who has no respect for the descendants of those heroic slaves — by visiting Haiti, sending a R10-million donation to the island’s government and then engaging in all the theatrics that accompanied the celebrations.
What is most bothersome, however, is the dismissive way he chose to relate to South Africans over the issue — a trademark of his five-year-old presidency.
First he decided to sensitise his people to this milestone event by writing an eloquently-argued article and posting it on the Internet — ostensibly in the belief that millions of South Africans would somehow chance upon it while going about their daily chores.
It was vintage Mbeki. Not for him the inconvenience of actually engaging with South Africans and telling them why this event was important enough for us to send R10-million to fund the festivities. Nor why he felt the need to head off to the Caribbean when a hop to Soshanguve normally requires much effort. The Internet is his space and nobody was going to force him out of it. It was only when controversy was swirling around the impending visit that he saw fit to write a newspaper article giving readers a history lesson on Haiti.
By the time the disastrous sojourn to Haiti was over, Mbeki quietly slipped into the country and vanished from public sight, leaving his senior bureaucrats to slug it out with Leon and other critics.
Of course Leon had a field day, accusing Mbeki of being ”disgraceful”, of ”propping up yet another international outcast” and ”of placing South Africa on the side of dictators and human rights abusers”.
It is these styles that define our discourse: Mbeki’s reclusive ”I know what is correct and I owe no explanation for what I do or say” style versus Leon’s loud, combative and unrestrained style.
They have derailed our ability to converse logically on big issues.
This manifests itself in many of the issues which have come to dominate national discourse:HIV/Aids, transformation, corruption,  Zimbabwe and now Haiti.
For instance the debate around Aids degenerated into a cacophony, largely because Mbeki adopted an incomprehensible position that perplexed much of the population. Several years on, with Mbeki defeated by common sense and popular sentiment, we are only now beginning to have rational discourse on the war against HIV/Aids (with or without the president’s involvement).
In the case of Zimbabwe we have on our doorstep a society disintegrating before our very eyes while the Mbeki government deems the best policy is something called quiet diplomacy — seemingly a strategy of gently coaxing a hard-of-hearing brute to do the right thing while also publicly proclaiming his virtues and soundness of mind.
Again South Africans have not — in the four years that Zimbabwe has been in free-fall — been able to rationally talk about that country’s dire political, social and economic troubles. All that South Africans are told is that they must trust that the king and his councillors are on top of the situation — as the sound of an entire country vanishing down the drain gets louder.
Because nobody, aside from Mbeki and a few insiders, knows what this quiet diplomacy thing is and how its effect is supposed to be measured, South Africa’s Zimbabwe debate is little more than babble.
Mbeki’s own supporters believe that the policy of the South African government is to give succour to a fellow liberation movement and to reject anyone who opposes Zanu-PF as a neo-colonial stooge. At the other end many of Mbeki’s opponents seem to believe that Mbeki himself is the architect of Zimbabwe’s woes and that he even takes sadistic pleasure in watching Mugabe brutalise Zimbabweans and wreck a country.
Unfortunately, Zimbabwe will have imploded by the time we get round to having rational discussions about what South Africans could have done to help extricate our neighbour from its crises.
If Mbeki’s style of the dismissive and unengaged leader is damaging , then Leon’s abrasive style merely compounds that. Under Leon’s leadership the Democratic Alliance rapidly moved from being a competent and mobile watchdog party to being a rejectionist entity whose task became to amplify whatever criticisms there were of the government and the ruling party.
The philosophy of Leon and his lieutenants has been to play into white fears by adopting knee-jerk positions and opposing whatever transformation initiatives the government wanted to push forward.
So when Mbeki took office in 1999 and became the type of president he has turned out to be, it was much to the relish of Leon, who saw in him a sumptuous meal to be gluttonously consumed.
It must be noted, however, that heads of state and opposition have no obligation to like each other. In a politically plural society like ours we should expect tough, no-quarter-given engagement between political opponents and ideological foes.
It is disturbing when the extent of the dislike becomes a pathology that affects the national psyche and prevents a country’s people from talking rationally about their common challenges.
Whether Mbeki likes it or not, Leon represents a significant section of the population and his party is one in which the majority of the white voting population feels comfortable. By the same token Leon has a responsibility as one largely perceived by many black people as the ”leader of whites”.
His actions are viewed in a much broader sense than those simply of a political-party leader. He too has a responsibility to engage with the president in a way that builds respect for all of South Africa’s institutions.