British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he will depart from 10 Downing Street before the next election, which must be no later than 2010. He has an ambitious, well-qualified and long-serving minister of finance waiting impatiently for him to go. Sound familiar? No, it’s a silly comparison: Trevor Manuel is as loyal to Thabo Mbeki as Gordon Brown is frustrated at the delay in acquiring what is rightfully his.
Ironically, whereas Manuel’s ambition and talent face a glass ceiling at home, the world is his lobster — as they say in Liverpool. It is hard to think of a global governance job that is beyond his compass now, such is his international reputation. For Mbeki, however, the opportunities may not be so clear cut. United Nations secretary general? Perhaps. So for Blair and Mbeki both, it is all now about legacy, legacy, legacy — whether explicitly, in the former’s case, or implicitly, in the latter’s.
Blair knows that the danger is that he will go down in history as the prime minister who lied to take Britain to war. That will be his legacy — not the three election victories that gave his party the opportunity to roll back 18 years of Conservative rule, nor the progressive policies that have steadily eroded social and economic exclusion, nor the stable management of the economy that has made Britain’s the best-performing economy in Europe over the same period.
As he stands before Parliament on Friday, similar considerations of legacy form the backdrop for Mbeki. Arguably, his accomplishments can be less equivocally stated than Blair’s. His role in the negotiated, peaceful transition to democracy; the economic and political stability of the first 10 years; his leadership in Africa …
But there are two caveats. First, Mbeki’s equivalent to Blair’s Iraq: HIV/Aids and the confusion his denialism created. Like Blair with Iraq, Mbeki did the wrong thing for the right reasons. Blair believes in liberal intervention in pursuit of human security, but by breaking international law he fatally undermined the legitimacy of his cause. Mbeki believes that poverty causes people to die, and that throwing drugs at the problem is to focus on effect and not cause, to the detriment of the poor and the advantage of the pharmaceutical industry. But by questioning the link between HIV and Aids he undermined the legitimacy of his cause.
And, because his antidote to the problem is now to say nothing, he will never be able to erase it from the ledger; he must simply hope that his other accomplishments will somehow bring the scales of evaluation down in his favour.
The second issue is the question of the succession. The ‘S” word emerged last year to hang over South African politics like Lord Voldemort’s ‘Mark of Darkness” sign in Harry Potter. It lingers on, the ghost of Jacob Zuma’s political career lurking in its pale light. The build-up to the 2007 ANC national conference was always going to be rough, with the inevitable jockeying for position. But quite how rough, and how rapidly, was surprising. Indeed, it may even be that things have got to get a little worse before they can get better.
Mbeki — as president of the ANC — must find a way to settle the storm lest it blow his administration off course; last year’s events were unsettling for many public servants. In this he must make a choice: Like a great dame of the stage, does he want to leave with the audience begging unrequited for more? Or, is he secure enough to recognise that the smoothest of hand-overs, to the ablest, best qualified of successors, could yet prove to be his greatest legacy?
As we all know, time has this irritating habit of evaporating like spilt wine into the sand and it is no longer on Mbeki’s side. After Friday, he will have just three more State of the Nation speeches to make — and the last, a few months before the 2009 election, will be more swansong than annual preview. Nor will he cele-brate the thought that in 2008, after his successor is elected at the end of 2007, he will in essence be on borrowed time — someone else’s.
However much he may wish to focus on the technical solutions to the problems of the second economy, the meta-politics cannot be wished away with a magic wand.
Legacy and Succession. Of course, Mbeki will say nothing about either of these topics in Friday’s address. But, as the Spanish say, read underneath the lines. Listen out not just for the Socratic questions, but for the carefully embedded answers.
Richard Calland has returned to Cambridge for the second part of his sabbatical and writes from there