What Mbeki really said

The letter from former president Thabo Mbeki to Jacob Zuma is a stinging attack on the ANC’s criticism of breakaway leader Mosiuoa ‘Terror” Lekota, and a critique of the ‘cult of personality” around Zuma himself.

The ruling party’s secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, this week quoted selectively from the letter, suggesting it amounted to a repudiation of the breakaway group that will hold its national convention in Sandton at the weekend, but the full text of the letter, which the Mail & Guardian has obtained, is more accurately described as a defence of Lekota, an implicit attack on Zuma, and a refusal to be involved in either the party’s 2009 election campaign or the internal politics of the ANC.

‘I have noted that some in our broad democratic movement have spoken publicly, unfortunately and wrongly, saying that Comrade Terror and other have acted as they have, driven by their loyalty to me as an individual,” Mbeki writes.

Lekota has not sought his approval, he tells Zuma, nor has the ANC consulted him on how to respond, but he has informally counselled both sides to ‘address all matters that might be in contention”.

In a clear I-told-you-so moment he writes: ‘In my president’s report [at Polokwane] I warned of the grave challenges our movement was ­facing. I suggested that the conference should discuss these. This was not done. Ten months after this report was presented, I still stand by what it said.”

Among other priorities, the party, he says, must ‘defeat the actions [especially in municipalities and provinces] to remove from their positions comrades who are perceived as belonging to factions different from those which currently serve as elected leaders in — ANC structures”.

The defence of Lekota is mounted by way of an attack on the ‘cult of personality” that is clearly intended as criticism of the conduct of Zuma and his supporters.

‘During the decades [you and I] have worked together in the ANC, we have had the great fortune that our movement has consistently repudiated the highly noxious phenomenon of the ‘cult of personality’ — It therefore came as a surprise to me that anybody within our revolutionary democratic movement could so much as suggest, and therefore insult somebody like Terror Lekota, that he could act as he has, whether rightly or wrongly, driven by attachment to a personality cult.”

He goes on to ask Zuma if he can recall a moment when the movement, in the thrall of such a ‘noxious phenomenon — ceased to think, content to act in the manner of the anointed ‘personality’, such as the late Kim Il-Sung, determined for the people of North Korea!”

The implicit comparison between Zuma and the North Korean dictator is strengthened when, after a page outlining how the ANC’s leadership tradition has avoided hero-worship, Mbeki says: ‘I find it strange in the extreme that today cadres of our movement attach the label of a ‘cult of personality’ to me, and indeed publicly declare a determination ‘to kill’ to defend your own cause, the personal interests of ‘the personality’, Jacob Zuma.”

The letter makes it clear, too, that Mbeki was motivated to write to Zuma not out of a desire to distance himself from Lekota, but by anger over suggestions by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, and Zuma, that he would be required to campaign for the party ahead of the forthcoming elections.

Mbeki’s letter (PDF) Read Thabo Mbeki’s letter to ANC leader Jacob Zuma

‘— you had sent Comrades Kgalema Motlanthe and Gwede Mantashe to inform me that the ANC NEC and our movement in general had lost confidence in me — I therefore could not understand how the same ANC which was so disenchanted with me could, within a fortnight, consider me such a dependable cadre as could be relied upon to promote the political fortunes of the very same movement, the ANC, which I had betrayed in so grave and grievous a manner as to require that I should be removed from the Presidency of the Republic a mere 6/7 months before the end of our term, as mandated by the masses of our people!”

Mbeki points out that following his defeat at the ANC leadership conference in Polokwane he walked together with Zuma on to the platform to demonstrate publicly acceptance of the outcome, and resigned the presidency of the country when asked to do so.

He then demands that Zuma ‘take all necessary measures” to stop party members from blaming their former president for everything they feel is wrong with the party and the ­country. Zuma, he says, must remind party members that the ANC’s post-1994 legacy is based on ‘collective decisions” and that he must prevent them from ‘abandoning their democratic obligations by falsely and ­dishonestly pretending that the goals of the national democratic — revolution have been frustrated, if they have been, by one individual, Thabo Mbeki”.

He concludes with a call for renewal of the ‘democratic movement” based on ‘opposition to the cult of personality — the defeat of the use of violence to impose particular leadership cliques interested in winning government tenders — the defeat of the bureaucratic tendency leading to the abuse of state power for self-enrichment — the rejection of the phenomenon of the emergence of a black comprador bourgeoisie which in the context of BBBEE is ready to front for domestic white and international capitalists”.

Mbeki, himself, will be staying out of it all, however. ‘I appeal that nobody should abuse or cite my name falsely to promote their partisan cause, including how the 2009 ANC election will be conducted.”