On an overcast Saturday in March 2002 Nelson Mandela made a passionate plea for the government to distribute the anti-retroviral drug nevirapine to all HIV-infected pregnant women at state hospitals. His presentation at a watershed meeting of the African National Congress’s national executive was much anticipated. Prior to the meeting, Mandela had promised that, like ”any other loyal member”, he would raise his concerns over Thabo Mbeki’s HIV/Aids policies through party structures. As the sage elder statesman spoke, candidly stating that the government was being perceived as uncaring by stubbornly refusing to roll out the desperately needed drug, he was heckled. A startled Mandela halted, then continued, but the heckling resumed, louder and bolder and more openly than before.
Ironically, just a few weeks earlier, Mandela had complained at a meeting of the ANC’s national working committee that there seemed to be a lack of internal debate within the party. Not a single Cabinet minister, he pointed out, had opposed Mbeki’s views on Aids.
No sooner had he gone than the meeting erupted into a flood of invective against him. Senior ANC leaders accused the former president of being ill-disciplined for publicly differing from the official line on anti-retrovirals. In a charge led by then deputy Speaker of the National Assembly and fervent Mbeki loyalist Baleka Mbete, Mandela was derided as a dissident. Incumbent safety and security minister Steve Tshwete, KwaZulu-Natal leaders Dumisani Makhaye and S’bu Ndebele, as well as election coordinator Peter Mokaba, bayed as loudly. Only two national executive committee members (NEC) — MP Pallo Jordan and former secretary general Cyril Ramaphosa — defended Mandela’s right to criticise and hold his own opinions.
It was a worrying demonstration that the tenets of the ANC’s political style in exile have become the mantra of the ANC in government: centralised decision-making, unquestioning loyalty, no public criticism and pre-ordained election of leaders.
But the methods required by a clandestine liberation movement facing a ruthless enemy are not the stuff of which a vibrant and dynamic democracy is made. Democracy recognises that in difference and dissent lie strength, that loyalty has to be earned.
Pallo Jordan was incarcerated for some time because he accused the ANC’s security apparatus of abusing its power. He says: ”… the militarisation of the movement as a result of the armed struggle tilted the balance further away from consultative practices. But within those limitations the movement kept alive a tradition of internal debate and discussion that finds expression in its publications, conference documents and other records.” Jordan warns that a monolithic ANC and tripartite alliance, in which no debate is countenanced and internal dissent is suppressed, would deprive it of the ”life-giving oxygen it requires for its very survival”. In his view, ”President Mbeki and his colleagues are as alive to that danger as anyone else”.
The exile culture of policy-making has now become entrenched in the top echelons of the ANC, allowing the government to adopt highly unpopular conservative economic and social policies. The ANC’s dominance of the tripartite alliance has kept the angry poor on a short leash, but Mbeki deserves credit for his shrewd manipulation of avowed leftists into all the strategically important economic posts: the Treasury, trade and industry, public enterprises, public service and administration and labour.
If contentious policies must be explained to the masses, who better to do so than those with impeccable leftist credentials? And leftists who don’t are subject to attack. Mbeki singled out South African Communist Party deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin for humiliation when he mildly criticised the ANC for losing touch with its grassroots members. Despite being forced by the SACP leadership to offer a public apology, Cronin came in for a severe drubbing from fellow NEC members Smuts Ngonyama and Makhaye. Makhaye, an extreme Africanist, made the vicious racist comment: ”We don’t need a white messiah.” There was no public rebuttal.
ANC chairperson Mosiuoa Lekota faced a venomous attack following his public admission that Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy was having no effect on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Mbeki demanded a retraction, but to his credit, Lekota refused, insisting this was his personal opinion.
The party bosses moved to stymie his bid for the ANC’s deputy presidency at the party’s 51st national conference in December 2002, and a torrent of abuse rained down on Lekota’s head, including leaks to the media that he had not declared certain business interests to Parliament. Media leaks have become a favourite way of side-lining anyone perceived as a Mbeki critic.
These incidents brought home to every would-be party critic that not even a revered political name guaranteed immunity. Nor, as an ugly situation showed in November 2004, did a Nobel prize or a purple robe and dog collar.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has never feared to tread where angels will not go, and so it was when he delivered the prestigious Nelson Mandela Lecture. South Africa was sitting on ”a powder keg of poverty”, he said, as long as black empowerment continued to benefit only a small elite group. Tutu also lamented the fact that the culture of robust debate, which had characterised the anti-apartheid movement, seemed to have given way to servile, self-seeking flattery. ”I would have wished to see far more open debate in the ANC, for instance, on the HIV and Aids views of the president,” said the feisty cleric. ”Evidently,” fumed Mbeki in his weekly online missive, ”the archbishop thinks there is something wrong with members agreeing with ANC policies that have been decided on within the organisation’s various forums, including our national conference. He dismisses the members of our movement as ‘voting cattle of the party’.”
Many ANC leaders have complained that the NEC has become a rubber stamp. Fear of being seen as opposing or criticising the party line has become pervasive. Some members might privately express reservations about policies, but would not dare raise their doubts at formal meetings.
Essop Pahad and others have frequently asked why, if there is as much dissatisfaction with Mbeki or the government as the media suggest, do ANC leaders not express this in party forums? Why, indeed?
Mbeki’s victory in having many of his allies elected to the NEC at the Mafikeng conference in 1997 was reprised at Stellenbosch in 2000. Independent voices in the NEC, who were critical during the Mandela administration, have been stilled by the retribution against dissenters since Mbeki took office. He and his lieutenants are in total control of the party machinery. The party leadership frowns on any attempt to mobilise support to remove national or local officials. Unless the ANC leadership sanctions this, it is rejected as factionalism.
Not even Oliver Tambo had as much autonomy as Mbeki. He was often taken to task over lack of consultation with the NEC, and on one occasion, while still in exile, an emotional Tambo even tendered his resignation after being harshly criticised for failing to consult party members.
Cabinet ministers almost never challenge Mbeki, lest they lose their privileged positions. Parliamentarians, too, have been cowed into submission. Several back-bench rebellions have been quashed. Through the use of patronage and punishment, a higher premium has been placed on blind loyalty than principle, and some ANC members are skirting perilously close to cult worship.
Already there are party apparatchiks who have turned themselves into ”Mini-Me” clones by studiously adopting Mbeki’s dress, speech and mannerisms. Privately, a number of ANC leaders vehemently disagree with the president’s stance on Aids, his quiet diplomacy in Zimbabwe and the government’s economic policy, but such admissions are rare and, without exception, prefaced with the warning that ”you didn’t hear it from me”.
It should be of the gravest concern to all who support democracy that Mbeki has no compunction about mobilising the full resources of the state to crush political opponents. Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi issued a statement during the furore over the alleged plot to oust Mbeki in which he warned: ”Cosatu cautions against any attempt by state organs, including the police, to involve themselves in legitimate internal political contests; such action is both unconstitutional and, in effect, illegal.”
The fallout over the infamous arms deal has done incalculable damage to the much-vaunted goal of transparency. The most dramatic public spat followed accusations by former anti-corruption czar and public prosecutions director Bulelani Ngcuka of bribery involving Deputy President Jacob Zuma and his erstwhile financial adviser, businessman Schabir Shaik. In its most serious volley, Ngcuka was fingered as an apartheid-era spy; an allegation which resulted in the Hefer commission.
Throughout one of the greatest dramas of his presidency, Mbeki remained silent, apart from lashing out against those who alleged the arms deal was tainted and accusing the media of stoking public perceptions that the government was corrupt.
Appointing the Hefer commission could turn out to be one of Mbeki’s shrewdest political manoeuvres. Long before the first witness was called, the president had access to every intelligence file on Ngcuka and knew that the spy allegations were spurious. However, they gave him an opportunity to pull the political plug on two people he perceived as political opponents: Mac Maharaj, whose alleged private criticism of his leadership style had long irked Mbeki, and Jacob Zuma, whom he suspected of becoming a rival within the ANC.
Entering its second decade in government, the ANC faces the dilemma of wanting a strong, centralised national leadership to steer the country to a more equitable future, based on the flawed assumption that those at the top know what is best for every region, city, town, village and farm.
All too often, democratic centralism, or ”vanguardism” — which the ANC has adopted as its operational model — serves only to perpetuate the notion of a small group of people operating in the name of democracy, but in fact taking decisions and enforcing them without a mandate from the electorate.
There are valuable lessons for the ANC in the decline of the Congress Party of India and in what some refer to as ”Zanu-fication”, or the danger of a dynamic, popular national liberation movement becoming steadily disconnected from its constituents once in power, as has happened with Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe.
Former MP Pregs Govender condemns disturbing signs that the ANC’s proud tradition of debate has been reduced to ”groupthink”. She says, ”Groupthink is the celebration of the individual above the collective in its naive and unquestioning acceptance of the leader as infallible. It renounces the courage that demands we be honest with those we love, even if they may not like what it is we have to say; loyalty has to be defined not in terms of the party hierarchy in government, but in terms of the poorest.”
Mbeki: Unravelling the mystery
President Thabo Mbeki sells books, according to several publishers in South Africa. Two weeks ago Zebra Press released William Gumede’s Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. Marketing director Janet Larsen said 6 000 copies have already been sold. ”We are seeing the most remarkable response.”
Since 2002 Thabo Mbeki’s World: The Politics and Ideology of the South African President has sold 3 100 copies. The book, written by Richard Calland and published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press and ZED Books (United Kingdom), will be reprinted, as all copies have sold out.
Life and Times of Thabo Mbeki, authored by Jovial Rantao and Adrian Hadland, sold 7 835 copies since it was first published in May 1999. Two more biographies about Mbeki are in the works, one by Mark Gevisser and another by Ronald Suresh Roberts.
Jonathan Ball Publishers, which is handling Gevisser’s version, has not received a manuscript, but editor-in-chief Barry Streek is optimistic about the work. ”In the case of Mark Gevisser, everyone knows he’s got a distinctive writing style.”
Reedwan Valley of STE Publishing says that he thinks analysing Mbeki poses a challenge to authors. ”I think it’s premature to write a definitive biography because he’s in the middle of his term,” said Valley.
Political biographies aren’t as popular as fiction, notes Jill van Zyl of Exclusive Books. However, there are readers who are curious about political leaders, especially Mbeki. ”He still remains a bit of a mystery.” — Tiffany Sakato and Cheri-Ann James