We are past hoping for big moments from President Thabo Mbeki; we have watched him let too many slip by. And this year he suffers from the additional handicap in that, whatever he chooses to say in his state of the nation address on Friday, he will be watching his back. The party he no longer controls, and which wants to control him, will be listening intently.
Mbeki is likely to play it safe, as he did in opening the ANC’s Polokwane conference, numbing his audience with a catalogue of statistics on the government’s achievements. But even a bravura performance is likely to serve only as a reminder of missed opportunities in the past nine years.
The marching bands, the motorcades, the press of dignitaries and hangers-on that surround the president’s address to Parliament are beginning to suggest a gaudy crust around a hollow centre. For many there will be a stronger feeling of disjunction, of the pageantry disconnected from the realities of South Africa, than at any stage since 1994.
The power crisis bodies forth the political uncertainty that has had the country on tenterhooks for months. And an increasingly nasty set of economic indicators is ratcheting up the anxiety to levels we have not felt since the early years of the transition to democracy. Systemic failures across the state are now making themselves felt at every level of society and seriously undermining confidence in South Africa’s future.
Even if he were capable of making a clear-eyed diagnosis of this situation, however, there is not much Mbeki can offer by way of solutions. Not even hope is his to bestow. The future belongs to other people — centrally including the new leaders of the ANC.
Still on cloud nine because of their party coup in December and intent on entrenching their newfound power in every corner of the country, they should start thinking about the state of the nation, too. It is time for them to reflect on what president Zuma, Motlanthe or Phosa will say when Mbeki’s successor stands at the pulpit in the National Assembly. At present there is little to suggest that the new national executive committee has any concerns beyond blocking Zuma’s trial and the trench warfare that will precede party list conferences and next year’s national election.
Closing down the country’s most effective crime-fighting force, the Scorpions, and banning Sunday liquor sales seem to be flagship initiatives of the new ANC. Limited priorities indeed for a crew taking over the ship of state that is springing leaks from stem to stern.
Fixing the electricity system will be complicated enough, but it is a relatively easy task compared with getting value from our very substantial education and health budgets. Finding engineers to repair collapsing water networks will be much less taxing than staffing the bureaucracy with competent, incorruptible men and women who do not serve at the whim of individual politicians.
Whatever the state of the ANC — more anxious and divided even than the country at large — it remains the custodian of an extraordinary trust. It’s time its leaders looked up from their factional battle plans and confronted the sheer scale of their responsibility to the mass of South Africans.
Self-congratulatory twaddle
This week the Southern Africa Development Community issued a celebratory statement praising President Thabo Mbeki’s mediation in Zimbabwe and claiming Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change have agreed on everything except minor procedural issues.
Poppycock. What we know for a fact is the MDC announced that the talks are deadlocked over a future constitution, an enormous stumbling block; and that a candidate opposing Mugabe has been threatened with violence. Zimbabweans are about to enter another flawed election, which predictably will return Mugabe as president for another five years.
That the SADC could describe lack of agreement on the constitution as a procedural matter defies belief. Is this the best South African leaders can do for ordinary Zimbabweans facing 25 000% inflation, chronic staple food shortages and 80% unemployment? Mugabe has managed single-handedly to destroy Zimbabwe’s formal economy; that economic activity continues in any form is owed almost entirely to remittances by expatriates in South Africa and elsewhere. Ask the people if ‘good progress†has been made.
The political conditions in Zimbabwe were graphically highlighted by Simba Makoni’s announcement that he will contest the election. A war veteran immediately warned him that ‘traitors should know Zanu-PF has a history of dealing harshly with their kindâ€.
With the opposition fractured and denied access to the state-owned media; collective punishments such as Operation Murambatsvina visited on opposition strongholds; the MDC barred from canvassing in rural areas and forced to seek police permission for all meetings; and many opposition leaders and supporters forced into exile, Mugabe will win next month’s election even if the poll itself is free and fair.
But that will not confer legitimacy on his regime or bring Zimbabwe back into the community of nations. Mbeki’s mandate was to mediate conditions for a genuinely democratic election leading to government reforms and a serious endeavour to tackle Zimbabwe’s economic and political meltdown. To that extent, he has failed.