Bryan Rostron – Out of Africa
WHEN researching his official biography of Nelson Mandela, the late Anthony Sampson arrived late for lunch at my house in Cape Town in a filthy temper. “If Thabo Mbeki is going to be presidentâ€, he fumed, “he’ll have to get over his bloody insecurity.â€
That was exactly a decade ago. Mbeki was then Nelson Mandela’s deputy president and Sampson never did explain what had made him so irate. But we now know the answer to his longer-term concern. Mbeki, it seems, never did get over that insecurity.
One result is his own crushing defeat by Jacob Zuma last month for the job of heading the African National Congress. The fact that Zuma had a clear run was entirely Mbeki’s own fault. As President of South Africa, Mbeki has ruthlessly sliced his most obvious rivals and successors out of contention. Then, by insisting on standing for a third term as ANC president, Mbeki simply blocked more popular candidates from opposing Zuma.
Spectacularly the author of his own misfortune, it is the consequence of an all-too-common flaw in authoritarian leaders: a ruinous mix of insecurity and arrogance.
The ill-starred flaw of the recent ANC conference is that it did not pit the two best candidates against each other. Much of the left recklessly forgot the old adage that it’s not the man, it’s the policies. They backed Zuma despite his personal foibles simply because he wasn’t Mbeki and had nothing to lose in challenging the President openly.
The crucial factor, however, is how such personal limitations are held to account. It is here that Mbeki’s bid for a third term as party president was so ill-conceived.
He has been at pains to prove that South Africa under the ANC will not become another dysfunctional African state with leaders who cling obstinately to power. Only last week, President Paul Biya of Cameroon, who has already been in power for 25 years, announced that he intended to amend the country’s constitution to allow him to remain in office after 2011.
“There have been appeals from deep inside the country for me to modify the constitutionâ€, said Biya – an explanation remarkably similar to Mbeki’s claims that he was only standing for a third term as party leader because that was the entreaty.
It is curious how those leaders who are most unsparing with racial accusations – such as Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe – suddenly but invariably find at election times that in the entire land there is simply no one else clever enough, experienced enough or even capable enough to take their place. So they have to amend the constitution once again to remain in power well into their dotage.
It’s rather like those fairy stories where messengers are sent to all four corners of the kingdom to seek out the rightful heir to the throne. However, in the case of Zimbabwe and Chad (to pick just two examples), a plausible successor could not be found in all the land.
If I, as a white man, were to suggest that a black leader should stay on and on and on in power because there were no other Africans fit to take his place, I know what Mbeki would say. He’d denounce such a view as inherently racist and utterly demeaning to Africans. Mbeki has often, rightly, been acerbic about white attitudes. But he has also – that insecurity again? – seen conspiracies, slights and insults where others saw none at all.
Thus President Mbeki surveyed his cabinet ministers and ANC colleagues and – yes – felt he could not entrust a single one of them to lead the party.
This delusion warps most politicians who remain in power a decade or so: Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair spring to mind. In both those cases, it was pressure from party big-wigs that forced the change. With Mbeki, in a triumph of far greater democracy, it was the ANC grassroots and popular sentiment which ensured his defeat.
Yet it is ironic that, in many ways, Zuma is Mbeki’s shadow: a peasant populist mirrored against the urbane sophisticate. Zuma is accused of corruption in arms deals, yet that is probably only a crumb from the sticky cake of armaments sleaze that Mbeki has presided over and ensured will not be formally investigated.
Zuma took a shower after unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman; Mbeki has poured icy cold water over the whole AIDS crisis in South Africa with his bizarre pseudo-scientific equivocations.
The crucial question now about Zuma is less what he’s done privately – no matter how utterly inappropriate – and more about what he intends to do publicly. So far, it’s a mystery. Yet with the next president of the country not due to be chosen until 2009, no one should get carried away with only today’s headlines.
When Anthony Sampson’s biography of Mandela was published, I noticed in a footnote (on page 629) that the man most famously diced by Thabo Mbeki, Cyril Ramaphosa, confided to Sampson in a private conversation that he intended to make a comeback to politics in 10 years. OK, that was 12 years ago. But don’t overlook that ego, either.
This article is posted for debate at www.compassonline.org.uk
