[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Gevisser on Mbeki

[Patrick Bond]

Where is Mbeki's world elsewhere?
MARK GEVISSER - Dec 23 2008 06:00

In this essay commissioned exclusively for the Mail & Guardian, Thabo 
Mbeki biographer Mark Gevisser reflects on the former president's annus 
horribilis and the uncertainties left in the wake of his unceremonious exit

"You common cry of curs … I banish you!

And here remain with your uncertainty ….

There is a world elsewhere!"

With these words, Shakespeare's Coriolanus storms out of Rome, after 
having been exiled by the tribunes of the people. The play of the same 
name is one of Thabo Mbeki's favourites, and I could not stop thinking 
about it as I watched his downfall over the past year.

Coriolanus was banished from Rome for refusing to bend to the will of 
the people. Similarly, Mbeki was banished from the ANC at Polokwane for 
his perceived high-handedness and aloofness, which came across as 
callous and disconnected. His alleged victimisation of Jacob Zuma might 
have been the rallying cause, but this accusation fell on fertile ground 
because of his perceived lack of responsiveness to his comrades and 
their aspirations.

Mbeki performed the spectacularly self-destructive feat at Polokwane of 
telling the very people whom he wished to vote him back into office that 
they were a rabble, not worthy of being at the conference in the first 
place -- suggesting that they had been easily misled and manipulated 
because they had "very little familiarity with the history and 
traditions of the ANC". So he confirmed to the delegates what the Zuma 
camp had already told them: he was an elitist who was contemptuous of 
them because they were not as educated and as informed as he.

As I look back over the past year, the defining moment of Mbeki's fall 
seems to me not to have been in September 2008, when he was fired from 
office, but 10 months previously, at Polokwane. And the realisation of 
this moment seemed to come not when he lost the election, but as he 
wrapped up his epic political report: "If we are divided, what divides 
us?" he asked.

"You!" came the answer, shouted -- somewhat uneasily -- from various 
corners of the floor. Mbeki looked up, a flicker registering across his 
habitually impassive features. He tried his question another way: "If we 
are divided, what should we do to address this challenge …?"

The delegates gave Mbeki his answer: "Go! Go!"

A few minutes later there was respectful, if restrained, applause -- and 
then the open rebellion of "Umshini Wam!".

Mbeki and his supporters had characterised the Zuma crowd as "howlers", 
as "hooligans"; that "common cry of curs". Even now, a year later, one 
of the mobilising tactics of the new opposition Congress of the People 
(Cope) is to claim this behaviour -- like the crude attacking style of 
Julius Malema -- to be anathema to the movement. It remains to be seen 
how effective this approach will be for Cope, but the evidence suggests 
that what South Africans euphemistically call "robust politics" -- the 
shouting past rather than talking to one's opponent -- has caused the 
statistically insignificant but symbolically powerful desertion from the 
ANC of the black middle class.

But at Polokwane, at least, Mbeki's failure was that he was unable to 
see that the "traditions" honed in exile-- mission-school politesse in 
the service of rigid military hierarchy and "democratic centralist" 
control -- no longer applied in the same way in a free, democratic South 
Africa. Zuma -- ever the canny intelligence operative -- understood 
this: his victory was based on his ability to have his ears to the 
ground and thus to be able to project himself as responsive, 
accountable, a man of the people.

In contrast, Mbeki's belief against all evidence to the contrary that he 
would prevail was a vindication of one of the most trenchant critiques 
of his administration: his disconnection from his electorate, 
exacerbated by the insulation that inevitably comes with high office.

I was at Polokwane and, like most observers present, I witnessed it as 
both exhilarating and brutal: the rough practice of democracy but also 
something of a regicide.

However much Mbeki might have been the architect of his own downfall, it 
was deeply distressing to witness the ire with which he was rejected. As 
I watched a younger comrade gratuitously insult a venerable elder -- "Go 
back into exile if you don't like it," he spat -- I felt I was 
witnessing not just generational rebellion, but the turning in on itself 
of a large and unwieldy family that had been held together too long by 
mutual interest rather than affection.

This reminded me of the extent to which the ANC was governed by 
atavistic emotion rather than the logic of a modern political party, 
even now, at this supposedly democratic watershed.

Later, as I listened to the accounts of the 14 hours it took the NEC to 
oust Mbeki after the Chris Nicholson judgement, I was struck again by 
how much the decisions of the ruling party were coloured by grievance 
and how the desire for vengeance, even if self-destructive, governed the 
ANC's decision to oust him.

At Polokwane and then after the Nicholson judgement, Mbeki was not 
merely defeated and then fired. He was cast out of his family -- even if 
he claimed that the "values" of this family had been usurped by 
parvenus. It should not be surprising, then, that he crashed after 
Polokwane, and that his behaviour seemed only to vindicate his detractors.

In January 2008, he was asked by the SABC whether the concerns expressed 
at the conference were legitimate. "No. Not at all," he responded, 
explaining that he avoided public places such as shopping malls because 
"as soon as people see me, it becomes very disruptive". In his last 
State of the Nation address in February he used Dickens -- "it was the 
best of times, it was the worst of times" -- to acknowledge, finally, 
that the South Africa he governed was in a state of distress and 
confusion. But, as Jeremy Cronin has acutely observed, he lost this 
opportunity to take the nation into his confidence and retreated into 
his default position: everything would be all right; he was in control.

He was not. He all but disappeared from the public eye during a period 
in which -- unencumbered by the need to seek office again -- he might 
have been unprecedentedly bold.

It had been expected that he might step down voluntarily or at the very 
least draw the new ANC leadership into government in some kind of 
intra-party coalition. He did neither and instead continued to govern 
with only the minimum consultation necessary with his new political 
leaders at Luthuli House. Most provocatively, he went ahead with the 
controversial appointment of a new board to the SABC.

If Mbeki did "crash" after Polokwane, this was evident in his reaction 
to the two events that turned the nation in on itself in early 2008: the 
power crisis and the wave of xenophobic violence that left at least 42 
dead and thousands more displaced. Mbeki did, in fact, apologise 
publicly for the former and also made a strong statement against the 
xenophobic attacks. But in both cases his response was late and distant; 
his executive authority barely ­discernible.

Unlike Zuma, for example, he did not visit the affected areas of the 
violence, leaving the country instead to address a conference in Japan 
entitled Towards A Vibrant Africa: A Continent of Hope and Opportunity. 
More tangibly, his decision to call in the military came several days 
too late. There is a strong case to be made that the state could have 
done more to stop not only this wave of random violence on a scale not 
seen since the destabilising days before the 1994 elections, but the 
moment of intense national gloom and shame that followed.

Once more, I could not but hear the echoes of Coriolanus: "I banish you! 
… There is a world elsewhere." The ex-president's "world elsewhere", 
perhaps, was a refuge he had sought from domestic criticism throughout 
his tenure, in the arena of global diplomacy: he spent much of 2008 in 
Zimbabwe, and in his singular obsession to solve that country's crisis 
-- particularly given the hostile reaction he attracted for his refusal 
to condemn Robert Mugabe after the June 2008 elections -- he seemed 
determined to salvage his legacy on the international stage, as a 
counterweight to his domestic rejection. As has been often noted, one of 
the tragic ironies of the Nicholson judgement that saw his firing is 
that it came the day after he brokered the Zimbabwe peace deal. 
Retrospectively, however, it is evident that this deal was impossible to 
implement anyway.

"And here remain with your uncertainty": 2008 became the darkest year 
yet in post-apartheid South Africa -- because of the power crisis, 
because of the xenophobic violence, because of a gathering recession 
that began to hit consumers even before the international credit crisis 
of September. Property prices plummeted, the rand fell and there was 
evidence of the biggest emigration wave since the early 1990s.

After a decade and a half of political stability, the uncertainty 
arising from Mbeki's defeat at Polokwane played a significant part in 
this upheaval. South Africa had entered a second transition, a period 
not unlike the transition to democracy in the early 1990s: huge 
expectations from one sector of the population, great anxiety from 
another; an old executive under Mbeki that appeared to have lost its 
will to govern, a new one in the wings under Zuma trying to assert its 
authority and needing to reassure jittery markets.

One of the strongest arguments made in favour of Mbeki's ousting, during 
the NEC debate over his future following the Nicholson judgement, was 
that the president's "recall" would put an end to the uncertainty of 
this awkward interregnum. But despite the admirably smooth inauguration 
of Kgalema Motlanthe, and the skilled way the acting president -- for 
that, really, is what he is -- emphasised continuity while making some 
sharp and much-needed changes (particularly in health, justice and 
safety and security), the interregnum remained and the uncertainty grew.

Much of this uncertainty is, of course, bracing. The windows have been 
opened. Speaking publicly about the ANC for nearly the first time in 
years, Cyril Ramaphosa said that the party after Polokwane was "almost 
like a breath of fresh air" where there were "no more holy cows".

Running a campaign out of Luthuli House rather than a government out of 
the Union Buildings, the new ANC leadership is not yet locked into the 
exigencies of bureaucracy; it is in its electoral interests to be open 
and approachable, willing to talk -- and listen -- to anyone. This is in 
marked contrast to the defensive posture of the Mbeki government.

Most noticeable has been the changing profile of the country's 
legislature. During the nine months between the fall of the guillotine 
at Polokwane and the roll of Mbeki's head after the Nicholson judgement, 
the new ANC cannily realised that the one way it could assert its 
authority over the president was through this body's constitutionally 
prescribed role of executive oversight. Miraculously, the ANC caucus, 
which had been a rubber stamp for a decade, began doing its job -- 
arguably even to a fault: sending back draft legislation, challenging 
executive appointments, demanding accountability from Cabinet ministers 
and senior bureaucrats.

Had ANC legislators finally found their voices now that the allegedly 
oppressive lid of Mbeki's political control was removed, or were they 
acting as the blunt instrument of the Zuma ANC's newfound power, setting 
out to limit and even humiliate Mbeki? And the bigger question: is there 
a new accountability in the ruling party, or have the windows merely 
been thrown open for some spring-cleaning before being slammed shut 
again as the new ANC hunkers down into power?

Particularly in the way delegates slavishly followed either an "Mbeki 
list" or a "Zuma list" at Polokwane, there are indications that this 
might be a mere changing of the guard within the ANC rather than the 
birth of a much-needed new political practice; that new systems of 
patronage are merely establishing themselves as loyalties shift from one 
group of leaders to another. The clearest indicator of this, 
post-Polokwane, was the sham way that Parliament "consulted" over the 
dismantling of the Scorpions, when it was clearly following a resolution 
issued at Polokwane. The unit may indeed have been used by Mbeki to 
target his adversaries, but ANC parliamentarians failed to offer any 
compelling reasons why they had disbanded the unit entirely rather than 
immunising it from political interference.

Much of the unease of this second transition -- the anxiety, but also 
the expectation -- has, of course, to do with Zuma himself. And Mbeki 
stands accused of having bequeathed to the country this particular 
uncertainty -- because of the way he mismanaged both the investigation 
into Zuma and the political fallout arising from it, and because he did 
not step aside at Polokwane for someone else to take on Zuma. It is 
worth recollecting that much of the Zuma vote at Polokwane was an 
anti-Mbeki one. Mbeki's decision to make himself available for a third 
term as ANC president mobilised support against him by people who were 
at best ambivalent about Zuma, but who were determined that the ANC 
should not fall victim to that graveyard of African democracies: the 
ruler-for-life syndrome.

Now that Zuma leads the ANC, the uncertainties grow. Primarily this: 
will our next president be running the country and standing trial 
simultaneously? And if he lands up not standing trial, at what cost will 
this be to our constitutional order? Other questions follow: what is 
Zuma's actual commitment to the rule of law? Is he deploying the 
well-worn demagogic two-step of social conservatism and political 
radicalism just to win votes, or will the dance set the tone of his new 
government? How will he steer economic policy through the straits of an 
international economic crisis while still meeting the needs of his own 
increasingly expectant constituency?

What, ultimately, does Zuma actually believe and to whom will he be most 
indebted -- the populists and the left who brought him to power, or the 
businessmen who bankroll him? Or, having been all things to all people 
during a campaign -- hey, he is a politician after all -- will he be 
able to ascend to statesmanship, forging consensus between sectors of 
the ANC alliance (and broader society) that have been warring for over a 
decade now?

As I look back on 2008, I find myself troubled by one particular 
question about Zuma: why, after so intense a leadership battle, did he 
not take the job himself after Mbeki was fired? The argument that 
Motlanthe has more experience is nonsense: Motlanthe had been appointed 
to the Cabinet barely two months previously, while Zuma had been a 
provincial minister for five years and deputy president of the country 
for another six. No: the truth is that Zuma declined the presidency 
because he was not, yet, in control of the ANC he now led -- as was 
evidenced by the way he lost the debate over Mbeki's fate (he did not 
want him to be fired) -- and because of his own ambivalence towards power.

Zuma has yet to prove that he is driven by the kind of visionary mission 
that powered his predecessors, Mandela and Mbeki, rather than by the 
appetites of his many sponsors and the need to overcome his own 
travails. And despite the personality cult that has developed around 
him, he remains divisive, even within the ANC. The now dominant "Zuma 
camp" finds itself needing to manage its own fault lines: between those 
who would, as they publicly said, kill for the ANC president, and those 
who had backed him to get rid of Mbeki but now worry that they are 
saddled with a candidate too compromised to run the country effectively.

Where, in all of this, is Mbeki himself? When Coriolanus was banished 
from Rome he raised an army among Rome's enemies, the Volscians, to sack 
his home town. Many in the ANC see Mbeki as the hidden hand behind Cope 
and accuse him privately of doing something similar. Thus the shrillness 
and anger from many ANC leaders and comrades: working off the paradigm 
of a family or a secret society, they perceive Mbeki and his apparent 
agents as what would have been known in the old days as verraaiers. This 
is self-deception: the ANC midwifed Cope itself, by firing Mbeki 
unnecessarily, seven months before he would have stepped down from power 
anyway.

At the time of writing Cope has an alleged 400 000 members, although its 
leaders are inarticulate, its brand untested and its policies 
undeveloped. Yet the birth of this new political party is surely one of 
the most salutary benefits of our current uncertainty: the collapse of 
the de facto one-party state and its replacement by the possibility of a 
real choice for black South African voters. The ANC can no longer lay 
claim to being the sole legitimate representative of black South 
Africans and must compete in the open market of ideasthat is democracy.

Mbeki's entire life was the ANC and the collapse of the old struggle 
hegemony is probably the last thing for which he would want to be 
remembered. But wherever Mbeki's "world elsewhere" might be -- an 
African leadership institute at Unisa; a life as an international 
mediator; a redoubt in Riviera where Cope's lieutenants gather under 
cover of night -- the birth of this new political party is very much 
part of his legacy, whether he had a hand in it or not.

Mark Gevisser's abridged and updated second edition of Thabo Mbeki: The 
Dream Deferred will be published by Jonathan Ball in 2009 He is also 
working on a new book, The Second Transition