For the democratically elected leader of a country it was a strange motto but Thabo Mbeki seemed to relish it: no one likes me, I don’t care. It started as a terrace chant of defiance by fans of Millwall, the London football club loathed by rivals, and at some point South Africa’s president made it his own.
He never articulated it so bluntly, of course, but the evident disdain for what others thought of him shone through. Whether addressing the ANC party faithful or captains of industry, there would be no jokes or effort to connect, no projection of personality.
It has done him little electoral harm. Next week Mbeki is poised to win a second five-year term when he leads the ANC to a crushing victory at the polls, maintaining and perhaps strengthening its political dominance since apartheid fell in 1994. As leader of the region’s economic and diplomatic powerhouse, he is the most important man in Africa.
Curious, then, that Mbeki (62) is so unloved. In recent weeks he has reinvented his public persona by playing with children and dancing, an astonishing departure which has won rave reviews, but for a decade, as Nelson Mandela’s deputy and then as president, he abhorred the common touch. Give him an opportunity to empathise with the poor and sick and he would retreat into technocratic jargon. Give him a baby and he would plop it into the nearest lap.
”We’ve got a government of the people, for the people, by the people led by a president who doesn’t like people,” satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys said on a theatre stage last week. The audience boomed with applause. Black South Africans as well as their white counterparts are not ”wildly enthusiastic” about the president, according to Bob Mattes of the Cape Town-based polling group Afrobarometer, which is why his approval ratings of 55% trail his party’s.
Mandela’s well-documented coolness to his successor was visible again last week in their awkwardness in sharing a podium in Johannesburg. His ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, detests Mbeki. She keeps a photo of the time he knocked her hat off at a rally — she tried to kiss him, he shoved her away — tacked to her office wall like a trophy. Even his parents, ANC stalwarts, did not love Mbeki in a conventional way and encouraged him to regard the movement as his real family. Reunited after decades apart, father and son shook hands stiffly. He seldom visits his mother, though in her cupboard she has a mug with his face on it.
Why is Mbeki unloved? And does it matter? ”There was no way Mbeki was ever going to be adored the way Mandela was. So he advanced his career in a different way, by getting people to respect him, even if they did not like him,” says Mark Gevisser, a Johannesburg-based author whose biography of the president is to be published this year. ”He was the one who could advance your career, or could hold you to account.”
A western diplomat agrees, claiming that Mbeki decided in the early 90s there was no point competing for the adulation inspired by Mandela and so opted to play the technocrat and intellectual, the master of detail who would turn ANC promises of a better life for all into reality while sponsoring a pan-African renaissance.
To those who knew him in exile, as a student at the University of Sussex, a spokesperson in the ANC’s London office and a leader-in-waiting at the ANC’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, the change was startling. The young charmer who loved Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News, whose camaraderie and intellect convinced western governments to impose sanctions, and white Afrikaner leaders to accept the unsustainability of apartheid, vanished. He kept the pipe, and the penchant for Scotch, but became aloof and tetchy upon entering government.
”I was hugely impressed by his intelligence, his sense of humour. I don’t know what happened after 1994. I don’t think any of us know him,” said Uys, speaking after his one-man show.
Does the president’s personality matter? Electorally it is largely a non-issue, says Mattes, the pollster, because South Africans vote for parties, not candidates. But its impact on government policy is profound and complex, say analysts.
On one level Mbeki is refreshing. Here is a politician with no time for image consultants or soundbites. The rest of the ANC dances and sings at rallies but he is usually happier in his chair. Wooden, certainly, but if a continent needs a leader with more competence than charisma it is Africa.
Good governance is not about popularity so arguably there was no better man to deal with the horrible surprise in 1994 that the newly elected ANC government had inherited no bulging coffers to fund the houses, piped water and electricity it had promised the poor. The minority white regime had bequeathed a distorted siege economy close to collapse, which required long, painful fixing. ”Mbeki is an exceptionally intelligent man, one of the sharpest and brightest analysts I have ever met,” says Allister Sparks, a leading commentator. ”Since he was deputy president he was the one driving the transformation of the economy.”
In effect, that meant dumping the ANC’s cherished notions of central planning and wholesale nationalisation in favour of conservative, pro-market policies. Ten years later poverty and unemployment are worse but there is a new black middle class and an economy that is stable and poised, according to the government, to deliver jobs and hope.
Mbeki knew the ANC’s coalition partners in the trade unions and Communist party would not forgive him but he went ahead anyway, according to one observer, adding that his one-time rival for the leadership, Cyril Ramaphosa, would have cared too much about popularity to pull it off. The same thing happened when Mbeki lobbied the movement to swap armed struggle for negotiations. ”It was hugely unpopular among his own comrades, nearly ended his career, and yet he was proved right. He often acts as a prophet in the wilderness,” Gevisser says. ”His career is full of conflict. Even though he was the crown prince he always had to fight for his own position.”
Born into modest means in rural Eastern Cape, from boyhood Mbeki was groomed for leadership and apprenticed to a series of father-figure grandees, including Oliver Tambo. The problem, according to one observer, was he grew up treating relationships in terms of power and ascendancy and divided people into those to be buttered up and those to be intimidated. Now he is president there are fewer to butter up.
Some white South Africans worry over time their country could slide into a Zimbabwe-style one-party state, but Mbeki’s businessman brother, Moeletsi, says democracy is secure. ”Governments in South Africa don’t have so much power.”
Even so, it was unfortunate the president narrowed policy debate, according to Judith February of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. ”The Mbeki style is ‘I know what’s best for the country’.” One issue, HIV/Aids, has wrecked confidence in his judgment. An estimated 5,3-million South Africans have the virus, and some 600 people die daily. Mandela ignored the pandemic in office but hopes were high his successor would respond. Instead Mbeki, the walking encyclopaedia unafraid to be unpopular, fell for dissident scientists and crypto-scientists who denied HIV caused Aids, and warned that anti-retroviral drugs could shorten rather than extend lives.
Civil society groups and medical organisations were blocked from setting up treatment projects even as drug prices tumbled. Hundreds of thousands were dying on his watch, to the horror of a world which had feted the ANC, yet still Mbeki stayed firm. ”He was inhibited by statements he made in the past and couldn’t go back. It was a serious blunder,” says Sparks. Under pressure Mbeki ”withdrew from the debate” and this month the state finally started a national treatment programme — just in time to neutralise HIV/Aids as an election issue.
Some critics suspect the president wanted to spare the exchequer by letting the virus decimate the poor and unemployed. Others think he was sincere in challenging mainstream science and that he remains convinced he will be vindicated. Either way, the saga left the impression that if people did not like the president, he felt the same about them.
Now comes the twist. In the past few weeks of campaigning, the candidate Mbeki appears reborn. Instead of orating at rallies he has been canvassing door to door, visiting townships, sitting on floors, listening. It has been a shrewd rebranding exercise but appears to have awoken something. Long after the sun has sunk and television crews have left Mbeki has continued, eager to engage with ordinary folk. To his surprise and delight some have cheered and jostled to touch him.
South Africans have glimpsed another leader, one who cares what they think, and for that they seem to like him. The shame is he could have endeared himself long ago if only he had cared enough — or had confidence enough — to try.
Life in short
Name: Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki
Born June 18 1942, Idutywa, Queenstown
Education Lovedale Institute, Alice; St John’s high school, Umtata; University of London; Sussex University
Family Zanele Dlamini, wife since 1974
Career African Students Organisation leader 1961; ANC Youth organiser 1961-62; six weeks’ detention, Byo 1962; left South Africa 1962; ANC offices, London 67-70; military training, USSR 1970; assistant secretary, ANC revolutionary council 71-72; acting ANC rep, Swaziland 1975-76; ANC rep, Nigeria 1976-78; ANC NEC member 1975; re-elected 1985; ANC information and publicity director 1984-89; head, department of international affairs 89-93; ANC chairman 1993; deputy president of South Africa 1994-99; president 1999-
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