President Thabo Mbeki’s second term as national president is not even half completed. Yet we find ourselves embroiled in an enervating and divisive succession debate riddled with conspiracy theories. Why this premature turbulence?
It is often assumed that the Mandela-Mbeki succession in 1999 was uncontested. Indeed, the name of president Nelson Mandela’s inevitable successor had been settled by 1994. But it was the content of an impending Mbeki presidency that provoked uncertainty and contest.
Some of this related to style and personality. At the 1997 Mafikeng Conference of the African National Congress, outgoing ANC president Mandela delivered an extended homily on how ”true leaders” should behave. They should work collectively, he said. They should not have favourites. They should welcome comradely criticism. Every delegate in the hall understood the allusions. Many felt uncomfortable with the excessively personal nature of the homily.
There were also powerful forces outside the ANC that sought to shape the future presidency. For instance, SA Breweries funded a project by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE). Shortly before the 1999 elections the CDE duly published Policy-Making in a New Democracy. The ”country needs strong leadership” it repeatedly emphasised. ”What the country needs is a new centre of gravity for the ANC as the leading political party in SA’s government.”
To deal with the left wing and trade unions, the CDE advocated the smashing of the ANC alliance. The public service would have to be ”radically downsized” and township non-payment for services should face ”unequivocal firm action”. The CDE saw a future president Mbeki as just the man for the job. It extolled him as the leading proponent of the growth, employment and redistribution policy, the fearless castigator of ”elements within the alliance”, the man who referred to ”radical teachers” as ”traitors and criminals”.
As for the ANC, the CDE advocated a radical makeover. The ANC would need to be transformed from a mass-based movement into a political party staffed by business school graduates. ”The ANC itself needs to become an instrument for marketing and selling the new approach … We are not suggesting that modern revolutionaries in the global village should all have MBAs, but this is a useful analogy …”
A born-again ANC would then lead a new alliance of ”the large business sector” (”government’s most important allies for effective economic reform”); emerging black business; and, for numerical weight, the unorganised rural and urban poor, members of the Zionist churches, ”people who” (the report noted with condescension) ”are not experts in the toyi-toyi or first in the queue for entitlement”.
Part of the present turmoil relates to all of this. Those who brazenly advocated an authoritarian presidential centre are now terrified that it will fall into the ”wrong hands”.
I am not suggesting the Mbeki presidency took its cue from an SA Breweries script, or even bothered to read the CDE docu-ment. However, since 1999 a powerful presidential centre has indeed been forged around a privileged axis of key ANC state technocrats and a new black capitalist stratum. This dominant axis has developed a project that, in part, bears some resemblance to the agenda of established white capital.
However, there has also always been a significant black economic empowerment (BEE) deviation from the script. We have had, then, a hybrid of market-friendly austerity on the one hand and, on the other, extravagant profligacy when it comes to projects that enrich a tiny BEE elite (like the arms procurement package, or the privatisation of Telkom).
The damage all this has done is evident. President Mbeki continually berates the ethos of self-enrichment eroding the values of our liberation movement. But it is not just a question of morality. For instance, the skills shortage and low levels of morale among teachers and nurses, highlighted in the government’s Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa, are certainly the legacy of the apartheid past. But they have also been exacerbated by austerity measures, by treating public sector professionals as ”criminals and traitors”, and by the neglect of the artisan-training potential of parastatals (in the erstwhile enthusiasm for downsizing and privatisation).
To push through this hybrid of austerity and profligacy, endless attempts to redesign a more elite-friendly ANC have been floated. I am not sure how many in the senior leader-ship of the ANC now have MBAs (and good luck to those who do), but as the recent ANC document (Contextual considerations in addressing challenges of leadership) notes: ”in the past few years … the NEC has evolved to consist of only the middle strata and business”. This, it admits, is a ”travesty”.
As a result there is a growing sense of marginalisation and of diminished inner-party democracy. There are resentments at rough handling. There is widespread rejection of market-friendly policies. There are even grudges from aspirant BEE capitalists who feel excluded from presidential touring parties to mineral-rich neighbouring countries that come the way of a charmed inner circle.
All of this surfaced dramatically at last year’s ANC national general council. It remains a debated point as to whether resentment around official handling of ANC deputy presi-dent Jacob Zuma was the catalyser, or whether the pro-Zuma campaign astutely rode the wave of discontent for its own purposes.
Either way, the challenge is now to move beyond personalities and to address the systemic issues that are prompting the turmoil. The question is not who should be president, but what kind of presidency our emerging democracy deserves.
Jeremy Cronin is deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party