The African National Congress has accused the influential British newspaper The Economist of publishing ”outright falsehoods” in an article on President Thabo Mbeki.
It makes the claim in an anonymous article posted on the party’s website on Friday, in reaction to an Economist report on Mbeki last week titled ”The man with two faces”.
The article said Mbeki did not believe in HIV/Aids, had made personal attacks on ”soft targets” such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, held grudges, and used organs of the state against party rivals.
It also reported domestic critics felt he was becoming ”so over-mighty, and so intolerant of criticism, that he may undermine the vibrant democracy that the ANC helped create”.
ANC Today said its readers would recognise that the ”negative” issues identified by The Economist were exactly the same issues ”that constitute the platform of the forces in our country that are politically and ideologically opposed to the ANC”.
It said Mbeki had never said he did not believe in Aids; that he had never clamped down on debate on any issue, including Aids and Zimbabwe; had never used accusations of racism to silence his opponents; and that a claim he ordered the police to investigate political opponents was ”an unadulterated fabrication”.
”Given everything we have said, the question must arise as to why a periodical as prestigious as The Economist should lend its pages to the systematic fabrications we have detailed,” ANC Today said.
”Put bluntly — why does The Economist feel obliged to publish outright falsehoods.”
It said it had taken the ”exceptional measure” of inviting the journal to respond to the ANC Today rebuttal, and that it guaranteed to publish the response uncut on the website.
In a second piece posted on the website on Friday, the ANC again defended Mbeki’s participation as ANC president in public debate.
”He and the rest of the ANC expect that all other South Africans will engage his ideas as equals — nothing less and nothing more. As president of the ANC, he has not asked to be treated as an icon, or elevated beyond the status of being a ‘chap’.”
Attempts to silence him had nothing to do with the defence of the national space for free political discourse, but everything to do with confining that discourse within the perimeter that an ”elite” sought to prescribe.
”Participants in the lively and polemical public discourse that characterises our democracy will also have to contend with the reality, regardless of the capacity in which he serves our country, that President Mbeki ‘will be with us for many years’.” – Sapa