/ 30 September 2008

Unpacking Mbeki: Villain and victim

The story goes that when Thabo Mbeki, the incoming president, was asked how he felt about having to walk in Nelson Mandela’s shoes he replied by insinuating that Mandela wore ugly shoes.

Humble leaders would have considered it an honour to walk in Madiba’s shoes, but not Mbeki. The man who would not walk in Mandela’s shoes and bask in his reflected glory before he could find his own feet now finds himself out in the cold.

Mbeki’s fall has long been in the making. The firing of Jacob Zuma in 2005 proved to be his undoing. Two years ago Barney Mthombothi wrote in the Financial Mail: ”For President Thabo Mbeki, it doesn’t rain these days; it pours … Zuma’s court appearances have simultaneously become breast-beating sessions and Mbeki-bashing exercises by his supporters. Never in the history of the movement have its members used such a squalid platform to publicly defy and denounce its leader.”

The condemnation of Mbeki’s presidency cuts across the political spectrum. The harshest criticism has emerged from within the ranks of the ANC alliance. Gone is the picture-perfect portrait of Mbeki the astute strategist, the pragmatist and the philosopher king; the reconciler, Africa’s Renaissance Man. The mask of the democrat has been chipped away bit by bit to reveal the inner mask of the authoritarian archetype whose only desire is to cling to power with whatever might he can muster. Mbeki the democrat was a product of fertile imagination and wishful thinking.

That construction of Mbeki was necessary on two fronts. First, at the time Mandela loomed larger than life. It seemed necessary to dress Mbeki in borrowed robes to distinguish him from Mandela. It was also an attempt to explain away why Mbeki was selected above popular figures such as Cyril Ramaphosa.

Second, Mbeki inherited great challenges. On the economic and cultural fronts Mandela’s presidency was a failure. The glaring racial and economic disparities wrought by apartheid were a blot on an otherwise promising country. South Africa remained the second-most unequal society after Brazil and HIV/Aids was beginning to wreak havoc in black communities. To address such challenges required someone endowed with the wisdom of Solomon. So began the making and manufacturing of Mbeki. A reassuring image of a hands-on managerial presidency would boost business and investor confidence. It did not take long for Mbeki to become the victim of image-making as he began to live the part.

The few brave souls who refused to buy into this world of make-believe exposed themselves to some virulent personal attacks. Wilmot James, an insightful scholar based at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, intimated that Mbeki’s government would require close monitoring with regard to democratic and human rights. James was roundly condemned, with some in the ANC’s national working committee suggesting that he should be fired.

Nelson Mandela had made a similar prescient observation. When handing over the reins of the ANC to Mbeki, he warned: ”One of the temptations of a leader who has been elected unopposed is that he may use his powerful position to settle scores with his detractors, to marginalise them and in some cases get rid of them and to surround himself with yes-men and women.”

Mbeki’s stroke of genius was neutralising the potential critics, the educated class, by co-opting them into this personal project. A parasitic relationship was spawned. This class affirmed Mbeki’s intellectual brilliance and he rewarded them handsomely. This was to become his downfall.

A year ago Mondli Makhanya put it elegantly in the Sunday Times: ”[W]e have voluntarily handed over our collective brain to him. He does all our thinking and our agenda setting and we just limp lamely behind him. Even when he asks us to engage with him, all we do is look upon him with awe or disdain. Without him, it seems, we cannot initiate any thinking projects.”

Yet Mbeki’s performance on key issues has been lacklustre. He presided over a dysfunctional health and education system. Corruption and crony capitalism grew under his regime. HIV/Aids is probably his biggest failure. His foray into medical science has proved deadly.

In the end Mbeki is ultimately the architect of his ruin. As Mark Gevisser, his biographer wrote, the seeds of Mbeki’s downfall were planted at an early age. He considered the Roman general, and Shakespearian tragic hero, Coriolanus, as a model for 20th-century revolutionary. ”Because he was prepared to go to war against his own people, who had become a ‘rabble’, an ‘unthinking mob’: Rome had to be purged of its rot, and he would kill his own mother in the process if he had to.”

For Mbeki it is a matter of changing society and not himself. As he disappears into the sunset, and casts a lonely shadow, Mbeki has finally come to the realisation that the statement ”the people have spoken” — an assertion that he once used triumphantly to trumpet his victory — applies to him.

Sipho Seepe is President of SA Institute of Race Relations