The ongoing Thabo Mbeki-Jacob Zuma ”saga” is an outlet for pent-up frustration and even hatred in South Africa’s ruling African National Congress as it is being released from ”a presidency of fear”, says official opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon.
In his regular on Friday internet column, SA Today, the DA leader said the Mbeki-Zuma upheaval has caused ”some anxiety among quite a few business leaders. Some fear that South Africa will start to lose its way if the ruling party begins to fragment and fall apart. Nothing … could be further from the truth.
”The best news for both our economic growth and our democratic depth is that the ruling party will be cut down to size — both through its in-fighting, divisions and fractures and through the ballot box later this year or early in the next.”
But Leon noted that a leading member of the ANC said to him recently that what could be seen in the ruling party — with squabbles over whether former deputy president Zuma should appear in court on corruption charges — of late is liberation from what he termed ”a presidency of fear”.
Leon — referring to Mbeki’s call for a commission to consider whether there is or was a conspiracy against his former deputy — said of the Mbeki presidency: ”Whatever its achievements on the economic front — which, in many ways, are considerable — it has been damaged by a sclerosis on the democratic front.
”It has tried to close down debate, stifle dissent and demonise opposition, both internally and externally.
”But whatever my own personal views and opinions, and however one might nostalgically yearn for the warmer and more inclusive embrace of the [Nelson] Mandela era, the cold winds of Mbeki-ism have not simply tried (and failed) to stamp out democratic discourse.”
The largest and most destructive campaign of the Mbeki presidency has been — he argued — its relentless and remorseless attempt to impose the doctrine of demographic ”representivity” as the alpha and omega of South Africa’s politics.
But this doctrine has turned out to be founded on a faulty premise.
”The president’s twin obsessions with race and control — a sort of racial Leninism, contradicted by the context of a complex free-market economy — overlook a more basic and profound form of exclusion within the power structures of the ANC government.”
Leon said if a leader such as Mbeki insists that he or she governs not as an individual, fallible human being, but rather as the physical embodiment of the people or the ”masses”, then he or she can never be mistaken, ”for how can the people ever be wrong in the exercise of their own will?”
”That is how some attempt to govern our great and diverse country. And that, in turn, is why so many problems that we have [over] the money, the knowledge and the will to solve [problems] are being left to fester.
”When all the heat and dust of the Mbeki-Zuma affair has settled, that sad fact will endure as a salient feature of the Mbeki presidency.” — I-Net Bridge