The occasion is a famous speech by Vladimir Lenin to Soviet troops in Moscow’s Sverdlov Square, May 1920. A grainy picture shows the Bolshevik leader leaning dramatically into his words, his hands planted firmly on a wooden podium. To the side, perched against the podium, Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev peer out over the massed soldiers.
Look again. Same picture, more grainy. And more podium. But no Trotsky and no Kamenev, both of whom fell out of favour with the revolutionary leadership and met violent deaths.
The Soviets elevated the airbrushing of history to a fine art, but victors’ desire to change the course of history — retrospectively — was neither invented by them nor did it end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Midway through the George W Bush years the Washington Post exposed how there had been systematic ”scrubbing” of government websites. ”President Bush announces combat operations in Iraq have ended”, read the headline above his May Day speech. But the insurrection proved stubborn, and — look again — the headline now reads: ”President Bush announces major combat operations in Iraq have ended”. A one-word change, but not a minor one.
Of late president elect Jacob Zuma has indulged in similar revisions, first at the ANC’s Siyanqoba rally ahead of the elections, where Kgalema Motlanthe had pride of place and Zuma gave effusive praise to Nelson Mandela. And then again in Parliament on Wednesday, where Zuma promised to lead the country towards the realisation of Madiba’s inclusive vision, and to build on the work of ”my long-time friend, comrade and brother”, Motlanthe.
But he saved not a phrase, not a word, for Mbeki.
Were Zuma to have wished for the better part of the past decade that Thabo Mbeki did not exist, he could be forgiven for it. And were he to want to walk tall in his own shoes, and not ever to be compared with Mbeki as president, it would be understandable.
But Mbeki — the brilliant, the good, the bad, the terrible — exists, a fact no amount of wishful thinking can change. Mbeki has a legacy. His government built the houses and supplied the water and electricity that Zuma’s ANC leveraged during the election campaign for every brick, litre and volt it was worth.
Mbeki also left a legacy of corruption and underperformance in crucial areas such as education, crime and health. Let that be a lesson for Zuma’s incoming administration.
Zuma promised in his speech to Parliament to avoid being ”over-defensive” in his dealings with the opposition. If our new president is to lead in confidence, able to confront the nation’s many challenges head on (unlike Mbeki, who retreated into a pseudo-intellectual cocoon of inaction), he would be well advised not to be over-sensitive over matters of his predecessor’s legacy.
For if he is, he may find it hard to resist the temptation to sweep away any policy, principle or person bearing Mbeki’s mark, regardless of quality or competence — throw the baby out with the bathwater. May Zuma discard the bad, but build on the good.
A wide delivery
For genuine cricket lovers the Indian Professional League offers minor interest, principally including the re-emergence on a world stage of former greats such as Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist. But for the most part it is an utterly forgettable, one-dimensional slogfest that mainly serves to showcase the greed, vulgar bling and gigantic egos of the moneybags who gave it birth.
The league is personified by its brash and ruthlessly ambitious creator Lalit Modi, the president and managing director of India’s multibillion-dollar industrial conglomerate Modi Enterprises. As reported in our Sport section this week, Modi employs a television liaison executive, whose function is to ensure that the camera pans to him as required, and has instructed the Âproduction crew to show him whenever he ”interacts with people”.
The IPL could be regarded as harmless bread and circuses, were it not for the threat its record viewership and sponsorship sales pose to other forms of the game, both in terms of popular support and of player availability. The ICC has so far mercifully resisted its demands for an exclusive slot in the Future Tours Programme, but such pressure can only grow. Smaller boards of control, such as those in the West Indies and New Zealand, have already voiced concerns about the IPL’s impact on player development and their fragile finances.
South Africans have turned up to the games in fair numbers and seem to have enjoyed the razzmatazz, although the competition is not aimed at the local market and its Indian-based franchises have no meaning for locals. Through their incessant demands, IPL officials have succeeded in antagonising many local administrators and media people. The tournament’s financial benefits to the country are also highly questionable — indeed, it will leave some of our larger venues out of pocket.
South Africa is a ”beneficiary” of the tournament purely by virtue of historical accident, and will not host it in the future. We are excited by the deepening ties between South Africa and India, in commerce, in culture and in tourism, and we hope they grow apace, but we won’t miss the IPL.