Primary Coloured

The Spin Doctors

According to a report in Independent Newspapers, Stan Greenberg campaign advisor to leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Ehud Barak, helped the ANC succeed in their 1994 and 1998 election campaigns. He says he still supports them, but is begining to have mixed feelings about his responsibilty for the ANC’s chequered career these past five years – especially AIDS/HIV and South Africa’s complicity in the disaster of Zimbabwe.

“Well done on getting your election slogan into the state of the nation
and the budget speech. I counted. Four times.”
“Five. All incumbent governments use their leverage.”
“And you have the slogan emblazoned on the covers of every government
report and policy document.”
“It’s simply about getting more bang for my client’s buck.”
“Yes, we can’t afford to keep hospital beds, but you’ve got every government
department spending millions to tell the people how much they care
about them.”

Page 151

“But what’s fascinating is how many government departments have new
policy announcements to make. All of a sudden, statistics are ready for
release. And strangely, always in exactly the week the ANC campaign happens
to be focusing on that issue or that region of the country.”
“The ANC are very pleasant people to work with.” Peter smiled.

Page 152

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Yes We Can

Congratulations America!

The election of Obama will help all Americans with their nation’s tarnished self-image. I sincerely hope the country regains its self-respect. I am confident the US can stay the course in a hard battle to regain legitimacy as a prefered superpower.

If Bush has any sense he’ll close Guatanamo Bay before Obama even gets officially into office. And with control of both Congress and the Senate, Obama should at once remove all legislation that sanctions torture.

Here’s looking forward to a better century.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Politics as theatre (2)

As the overheated United States presidential election bubbles over and our own national general elections loom large on the horizon, South Africans are in for a blockbuster theatrical season in politics unlike anything seen for years.

To say ‘politics is theatre’ is not to mean this simply as an extension of ‘all the worlds a stage’ or ‘life is a great drama’. Nor is it to evoke the rather tired observation that politics is something of a circus. It is true that after an election, we have often sent in the clowns, but they can hardly be described as comic relief, rather slapstick in poor taste. As the Honourable Patricia de Lille once put it, “Politics is all about grandstanding and bashing!”

While admitting some cynicism and that much of politics is spectacle, let us deepen the analogy by teasing it out. Running an election (I discovered as campaign manager for the Independent Democrats in the 2004 election), is remarkably similar to running a show. You write scripts, we rehearse, the politicians perform them, and you get the newspaper crits in the morning in the form of editorials and political reportage. You sell the show with many of the same materials you’d use at a theatre festival – posters, flyers, brochures, and merchandise such as T-shirts. And as with any theatre show, the budget balloons out of control and seems always inadequate.

The parties and candidates even have theme songs. The manifesto is the performance’s programme, describing what turns out (more often than not) to be an imaginary world. The campaign trail is a theatre tour. The campaign is a grand production on a national stage, even though the artistic quality is low and the production values rather cheesy. Most hopefuls open out of town and work their way up to the Union Buildings.

The voters are an audience of millions; the candidates are a cast of thousands; the campaign manager attempts to direct. Anyone who has been a theatre manager knows how much internal politics is involved in such a job. And then there is the difficulty of dealing with the consequences when the actors don’t stick to their scripts.

Besides performing on many actual stages from school halls to real theatres, events – some of which are self-manufactured – serve as the stage. Responses to these – the press releases and the sound bite – are performed in the public eye on the radio, television or in print.

Finally, the election box is the box office; the election result followed by the prize giving of seats. A hit show these days seems to guarantee royalties beyond the dreams of avarice for the party’s bankable stars.

But how useful is this analogy? Let us take an obvious example of political stage management: George Bush’s dramatic landing in battle fatigues on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, while it was anchored off San Diego harbour, something most of the networks did not inform their audience of millions, who believed their President was in the Gulf.

Standing in front of the banner Mission Accomplished, he said: “Major combat operations in Iraq are over, and America and her allies have prevailed”. Talk about suspension of disbelief – that was over 60 months ago.

During the 2004 South African general election, I met Jack Straw, then still Foreign Secretary. He was professionally charming so I decided not to attack him on the Iraq war. Besides the poor man had just spent most of the week in the company of Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and was in desperate need of conversation. We discussed politics as theatre. He said the commons now had 24-hour television, and these days it was all about the camera. MPs aimed their message at the viewers, to which many spoke directly and hardly to the assembly. Tony Blair himself described Prime Minister’s question time as, quote, “politics as theatre”.

Today politics, which the vast majority of people consume through television, with interviews and in so-called situation rooms, is essentially presented as mass entertainment. Many of us have become political media junkies.

A striking example is the recent Democratic Party’s primary contest in the USA. A neck and neck race with constant reversal of fortunes played out like the cliffhangers that mark a series of television episodes. And yet, as recently convincingly argued in the New York Review of Books, any demographic based analysis could have given you the results within a few percentage points the week the contest started – that was 6 months earlier on January 6. There were almost no surprises with Americans voting exactly according to their class, race and state profiles. The drama arose from it being played out in a sequence determined by the arbitrary order of the state primaries, performed by a whole industry of pollsters, pundits, columnists, and reporters, for an audience of avid consumers.

Similarly, when the voting results came in for our 2004 general election, the tiny Independent Democrats (ID) benefited. As the results were reported, the ID became the election story. It was purely based on which results came in first and where they came from – the large but sparsely populated province of the Northern Cape where they had a good showing, and the votes were quickly counted, and from the efficient Western Cape where the ID had a strong presence. On the national percentage boards, the ID was threatening the official opposition and it looked like an upset in our politics at first. The leader of the ID, Patricia de Lille, featured on the front pages of newspapers as the election results filtered in with the breaking news. It was a media wave they rode at the time for all it was worth. Only much later, when the enormous blocks of votes from the huge and slower counting areas of Kwazulu Natal, Soweto and the Rand started pouring in, did the ANC’s tally shoot up by millions and the ID as a percentage of the vote tumble from around 10 to 2%.

This is the dramatic distortion created by reportage, in the way a playwright might play with the chronology of how a story unfolds to heighten dramatic effect.

In quoting these examples and making what sounds like a disparaging observation that politics is theatre, I do not mean to belittle either. I wish in fact to do the very opposite.

Symbolic acts of high theatre can help the nation heal itself. Mandela having tea with Betsie Verwoerd springs to mind. The Freedom Park, which after all is funded by the Department of Arts and Culture, is another opportunity.

Politics as theatre is not wholly or necessarily negative. Theatre is quintessential to the nature of politics therefore we should acknowledge and not lament it. We should use the analogy to better understand the nature of public discourse. For this is theatre with lives – reality theatre as it were, except that the audience is in real danger. How do we go about our critical appraisal of this genre of performance?

What we need to do is demand better scripts and better symbolism from our politicians, starting with leadership by example. Barrack Obama, whose chief speechwriter is a 26-year old white boy called Jon Favreau, certainly benefits from better scripts than George Bush. This is a good thing as what we require of our politicians is what we require of our writers, they need to express our feelings and should articulate our aspirations as a nation and our lived reality which we struggle to articulate for ourselves. Favreau’s inspirations are the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.

Just as serious theatre is in trouble getting audiences, so is political content and the level of debate. Zuma’s plays, or rather his costume dramas – Basotho hats and animal hides – have a greater reach than Mbeki’s rhetorical one-act farces such as his public utterances on Zimbabwe, AIDS and Selebi to name a few. More and more we’re going for commercial populism, the footlight fanny playing to the gallery and trying to upstage the rest of the chorus line – as exemplified by the ANC Youth League. It seems once you reach superstar status, as Zuma has, you can do know wrong in the eyes of your fan club. As Miller puts it, the perfect “political leader is that smiling and implicitly dangerous man who likes you”. If Mbeki was the theatre of the obscure, then Zuma is the Grand Guignol; they’re unbelievable in hot pursuit of the unspeakable. And vice versa.

As a critic, when reviewing political theatre, several issues must be borne in mind.

Firstly, as a writer, one favours the primacy of the text, but outside the theatre one ought to be a democrat. In the case of the political script, we should look for a product of consultation and guided workshopping, based firmly in social research. Not the product of a politician who thinks they are an omniscient narrator. Our current president has spent ten years with the Zanufication of the executive, accruing far too much autocratic power without ever thinking that one day he would not control who occupied his seat. Powers once given are very hard to abrogate, though at Polokwane the ANC thankfully did re-impose some limitations.

Secondly, what we have to watch out for is the enormous difference between what is said and what is done, the easy gesture politics of today, in other words play-acting. The current paucity of accountability means that much is said and little is done. Even worse, when there is an outcry – such as that surrounding Julius Malema’s remarks about killing for Zuma – these politicians call attention to the theatricality of their statements and tell us it they’re as harmless as any line said on the stage.

We must never forget that politicians assume a public persona. They are playing a role; they are in character auditioning for votes. Much of what we see is only the shadow play. The character is there to charm and win you over. If they’re to appear on television, even the male politicians wear stage make-up. As Arthur Miller has pointed out, most people today transact emotionally more often with fictional characters on television, from soap operas to movies, than with real people. It’s a 21st century cultural phenomena easily exploited by politicians on screen.

Thirdly, we must ask: who are the producers? The fact that South Africa has no laws in place to govern political party funding should be of the utmost concern to all of us. Jurgen Harksen, Brett Kebble, Shabir Shaik, Charles Modise and various insidious underworld figures are one of many ways in which our vote is undermined.

Finally, in this post-modern world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between fiction and fact, reality and its depiction, illusion and truth, theatre and politics. As depressing and amusing as such analogies may be, we must always be aware that political realities are a consequence of perceptions, and that such perception may be only theatre.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Who Is Thabo Mbeki?

As South Africans (eagerly it would seem) wave goodbye to President Thabo Mbeki, recent events have obscured any objective assessment of the man’s legacy. This could not have been more clearly demonstrated than when on the very day of what should have been President Mbeki’s greatest triumph, closing a deal between Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, it was Mbeki’s rival and president of the African National Congress (ANC) Jacob Zuma who won his battle in court to have charges against him dropped. Mbeki came in for a blistering attack for political interference in the judicial process from just about everyone – the judge, opposition parties, the media, even his own party’s executive. Zuma’s supporters went so far as to stage a mock public funeral for the incumbent. How did the heir to the ANC end up so ubiquitously unpopular?

The point is Thabo Mbeki rose to the presidency of South Africa never having contested a popular vote amongst the rank and file of the ANC, South Africa’s ruling political party, in whose vanguard he had been for nearly forty years. He was appointed deputy president reluctantly by Nelson Mandela in 1994, and anointed president by Mandela, again with a heavy heart, in 1998. Mbeki, after 15 years as the de facto commander in chief of the country, was rejected by an overwhelming majority of his comrades at the party’s 52nd Congress in Polokwane last year. He had hoped for a similar outcome as that achieved by Vladimir Putin. Proscribed from a third term as president of the country, he wished to be the real power behind the office as president of the party. But democracy in South Africa is healthier than it is in Russia. It was a devastating and tragic defeat for a man who has had no purpose or even personal ambition, beyond his dedication to the ANC.

Mbeki was born in rural Transkei in 1942, into a family of educated communists fighting against the implacable erosion of their rights as black South Africans and the brutal attrition of their material upliftment hard won through education and brave entrepreneurship. His resilient mother, now in her nineties and still living in modest conditions in her community, is of the industrious, Christianised and elite Bafokeng lineage. His father’s people were Mfengu. Whatever one’s belief in genetic determinism might be, his heredity strikes one as deeply symbolic. The Mfengu (or ‘Fingo’ in the colonial lexicon) were expelled by Shaka’s Zulu army around 1830. The first of the Nguni to convert to Christianity and accede to be subjects of the Crown, the Mfengu became black ‘settlers’. The colony enfeoffed them in British Kaffraria as a bulwark, and enlisted them as auxiliaries, where they soon acquired a reputation for brutality. Their participation was the decisive factor in British victory during several frontier wars with the Xhosa. The Mfengu position was contentious, regarded with suspicion but jealously admired for their prosperity. During the calamitous cattle killing of 1856 following a millenarian prophecy, unswayed by superstition, the Mfengu turned the slaughter into a tidy profit by buying up the herds of broken chiefs.

Perhaps of greater significance to Mbeki is that the Mfengu were ultimately betrayed by the white colonists, the British government and unforgivably by the missionaries. Mbeki’s grandfather had the vote as early as 1852. He and his descendants would watch as the title to their lands was abrogated, their people pressed into slave conditions on the gold mines, and their franchise eventually revoked (by an act of law in the House of Commons one must add), all this long before apartheid came to deal the final sadistic blows by attempting to eliminate even the possibility of acquiring higher education. Thabo Mbeki has in the 20th Century recapitulated the contradictions of his ancestors in his ambivalent relationships with Africa and the West.

Mbeki chose exile in the 1960s, leaving behind his two-year-old and only son (conceived when Mbeki was 16), along with 27 students, including Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, South Africa’s unpopular and internationally ridiculed minister of health who he has ever since loyally supported beyond all prudence. Unlike many of his comrades, he would never be imprisoned by the apartheid state.

He read economics at the new, experimental and politically radicalised University of Sussex. Unfortunately, his university records are missing, his secondary school records incinerated in a fire and his class records at the Lenin Institute in Moscow shredded.

The outwardly conservative Mbeki (he dressed like a county squire in tweed and smoked a pipe) was permanently influenced by the British Labour Party. He even campaigned in the swing constituency of Kemp Town that proved vital to Wilson’s slender majority, though the black Mbeki was discouraged by the Brighton Labour Committee from canvassing door to door.

Mbeki became known as the Crown prince under the personal guardianship of Oliver Tambo, who held the ANC presidency in curatorship during its long exile while most of the elected leadership (including Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki’s distant father, Govan) were imprisoned on Robben Island. Tambo was his surrogate father, and the ANC his family, even arranging his marriage to Zanele Dlamini.

Instead of joining the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres in the African bush, Mbeki begged to complete his Masters at Sussex. He finally received military training in 1969 in the Soviet Union, a stark and uncomfortable contrast to swinging Sixties London. He became a Central Committee member of the South African Communist Party (SACP), a move that with hindsight may have been more for expediency than from ideological commitment. As the Soviets bankrolled the liberation movement, Mbeki would march in protest against the American invasion of Vietnam, but join the ‘tankies’ (as they were called) in support of Brezhnev’s crushing of Prague in 1968.

From the 1970s, Mbeki maintained a high profile, constantly on the move around the world, a pattern he has maintained to date, becoming the familiar face of the ANC amongst the international political and business elite.

After Tambo suffered a debilitating stroke in 1989 on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s release, Mbeki became indispensable in spearheading the peaceful resolution to apartheid’s dismantling. The key role he played in these negotiations was his finest hour.

The assassination of Chris Hani in 1993, the MK chief of staff and his archrival, removed the last major obstacle to Mbeki’s inexorable ascendancy. To many in the ANC, his trouncing by Zuma, feels like retribution. The MK vets were especially active in co-ordinating the show of support for Zuma outside the courts in Pietermaritzburg.

Mbeki’s ousting has simplified the debate around one revised and two new biographies, contentiously published in the run-up to the Polokwane ballot. Unauthorised political biographies, especially of an incumbent, are relatively new to South Africa and their example hard to imagine occurring anywhere else on the continent. The public reception has been unprecedented. Since Mandela, the relationship between South Africans and their President, (whether they have met him or not) is personal. Reading or writing about their President seems cathartic. Attitude rather than thoughtful examination of his policies has been the locus of Mbeki’s biographers.

Ronald Suresh Roberts’s Fit to Govern is an intellectual hagiography posing as an exegesis of Mbeki’s philosophy. Written in close consultation with Mbeki and for around $180 000 solicited from the private sector by a minister in the presidency, Roberts sets out to demolish Mbeki’s critics, egregiously caricatured as anything from “academic rent-boys of imperialism” to one “noted jihadist of neo-conservatism”.

Much of the Roberts is between quotation marks, amassed from diverse sources including third party e-mail correspondence. His scattergun approach fails to offer a coherent and logical analysis of what forms Mbeki’s opinions. He all but ignores the intellectual products of which Mbeki is chief architect – NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) and his conception of an African Renaissance. Roberts is glaringly without the persuasive credibility of Sontag, Said or even latter Chomsky.

He does however raise important issues in need of urgent debate: policy capture in the developing world by global financial interests; the hypocrisy of the so-called liberal establishment who still refuse to face up to the nation’s ugly past; the ongoing need for revision of Africa’s colonial history. An empathetic approach would have helped clarify how South Africans talk past one another, how they lack critical self-awareness around the way they see each other. Given the country’s past, it is unsurprising that debates over major challenges facing the country – economic disparity, health, education, foreign policy – are obfuscated by unconscious racism and racial hypersensitivity from both black and white. Instead, Roberts manages to fuel those flames. Immersed in Frantz Fanon, whose oeuvre he uses as a sort of periscope to glimpse his targets, he maliciously torpedoes mostly fellow commentators, editors and journalists.

No serious analysis should take a sitting politician at his word at all times. Roberts never examines to what extent Mbeki has lived up to his high-minded speeches. Mbeki’s words are often political acts. He is adept at window dressing, gesture politics and political distraction, regularly shifting the debate from the issues – such as the crises of AIDS and crime – to debates about debate. In this, he has found a deft collaborator in Roberts. Criticism of Mbeki is dismissed as a function of an “old and largely unreconstructed media oligarchy bereft of electoral influence”. Mbeki’s recent humbling put paid to that untruth. Mbeki has been orphaned by the only constituency Roberts recognises as conferring legitimacy on his subject’s legacy. He too will, to use his own phrase “need to heed the verdicts of the South African native electorate”.

Roberts’s grossest act of disinformation is his spurious argument that “Thabo Mbeki is not now, nor has ever been, an AIDS dissident”. Besides the fact that Mbeki has with calculated neglect failed to show leadership on the HIV/AIDS pandemic and his own government’s antiretroviral rollout plan, if he is so grossly misrepresented by the media as Roberts argues, he has fuelled controversy rather than ever seriously attempting to set the record straight.

Events have overtaken Roberts. As Mark Gevisser’s handsomely illustrated and magisterial biography of Mbeki, A Dream Deferred, nine years in the writing, was poised for the presses, Mbeki couriered him an updated copy of the influential Castro-Hlongwane document that expounds both AIDS denialist and dissident positions. He said it accurately reflected his views. Mbeki wanted it to be clear-cut in Gevisser’s text that he still questioned the link between HIV and AIDS and regretted withdrawing from the debate under pressure from Cabinet.

What remain murky are the reasons for Mbeki’s intransigence. Mbeki, who unlike other African leaders such as Mandela, Kaunda and Buthelezi has not lost children to AIDS, indulges in sophistry that doesn’t grasp scientific process. Science is a systematic explanation of the world as it is experienced, not a revelation of a philosophically incontestable reality.

Mbeki’s “intellect is marked by perpetual questioning: he advances not through enthusiastic exclamation points or staccato full stops but along a line of question marks”. Gevisser’s description is also the method he employs, often concluding with a series of speculative questions, notably when touching sensitive issues that might offend his subject. I have the impression that Gevisser is trying to find a point of identification with Mbeki and perhaps offering a tacit apologia for his public probing.

Gevisser, unlike Roberts with his disingenuous glossing, sincerely attempts to understand Mbeki’s arcane positions, such as Mbeki’s paranoid outburst to an astonished ANC parliamentary caucus that he is the victim of an orchestrated smear campaign by the CIA working hand in glove with “Big Pharma”. Ironically, Gevisser creates more empathy for his subject than Roberts, whose polemical style backfires. As difficult as it clearly often was for Gevisser, he modestly states at the outset that he has tried to balance his perspective “with the voices and opinions and subjectivities of others who know Mbeki far better than I do”.

The Dream Deferred is a psychological biography taking as its theme “disconnection” (Mbeki’s own word) referring to his awkwardness in placing himself within his traditional culture, not only after returning from 27-years exile, but as a child.

Mbeki emerges from the Gevisser text as highly functional, but callously detached. Govan Mbeki was of the same ilk and during his 25-year incarceration, Thabo didn’t write to him. When the death sentence hung over his father, although mounting a 60-mile march to 10 Downing Street to highlight his plight, Mbeki stated coolly that the “revolution produces new leaders all the time”. Mbeki’s brother, Jama, was murdered, but Mbeki has not prosecuted the matter for political reasons. Jama’s widow observes, “In the Mbeki family there is no [such] family value. They believe in politics [more] than real life”. Perhaps the most moving accounts surround his only child Kwanda, which came to light in testimony given by the mother, Olive Mpahlwa, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Mbeki sent his estranged son a “beautiful watch” with his name inscribed on it, which never worked and even “the best jewellers…could do nothing”. Kwanda “just could not believe it”. He disappeared in 1981 and there is evidence to suggest a violent death. Mbeki refused to meet with Mpahlwa despite her tenacious attempts for closure.

The “dream deferred”, taken from a poem by Langston Hughes and quoted by Mbeki, refers not only to his psychological difficulties at reconciling himself with his African identity, but also the postponement of delivering to his people on the promises of the national democratic revolution because of the inability to implement his policies. The Mbeki led ANC to date have only managed one-half of the equation – macro economic security and growth while reintroducing South Africa to the global economy. Fiscal austerity has so far failed the egalitarian dreams of the vast majority, who remain frustrated and impoverished with few prospects for economic self-determination, and who have now elected a leader susceptible to demagoguery.

Gevisser is careful not to be judgemental (and his will be the more enduring biography of those under review here), but it was published at a time when perceptions of Mbeki as President were at an all time low, even amongst his core constituencies. Many in the white community were angry at his shift in recent years from a position of national reconciliation to one emphasising racial inequality and the need for social transformation. Gevisser’s revelations were inflammatory, at the very least allowing Mbeki’s detractors to distil and verbalise their criticism. Mbeki was deemed to have overplayed his hand and hopelessly mismanaged the succession battle for the presidency.

Although Gevisser achieves a judicious balance, he is susceptible to occasional sycophancy. Mbeki’s appointment of the Hefer Commission to investigate spy allegation made by struggle veteran Mac Maharaj he writes “was a stroke of genius”. Mbeki already had the facts and evidence. The commission was simply “a public drama” “calculated precisely” (its terms were altered three times) to humiliate his challengers. Gevisser fails to realise that in so doing Mbeki undermined the judicial process, abused his executive power, and fuelled perceptions of him as a vindictive political manipulator. Conspiracy theories abound and stalk South African politics. Mbeki’s unprovable accusations of plots against him and his executive interference in Constitutionally independent structures, such as the National Prosecuting Authority, means that widespread belief in these conspiracies is not altogether irrational. The consequences are lethal to the rule of law.

William Mervin Gumede in Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC gleefully enters the fray in the style of a newspaper columnist. This is the work of a hardbitten journalist. It does not have behind it the laborious research into primary sources and the discipline of a historical biographer like Gevisser, nor his meticulous referencing, but it is informative and fluent, if somewhat inelegantly cobbled together. Gumede’s accomplishment is the collation of a large amount of material in the public domain and in this extensively updated edition he goes further in examining Mbeki’s track record and machinations in government than any other extant work. His thesis is that Mbeki and a small group of technocrat centrists imposed undemocratically upon the ANC an economic policy that embraced the Washington consensus foreign orthodox global capitalism, a shift to the right which risks splitting the ANC. Recent events in Polokwane have born out his analysis.

How the biographers differ in their approach is well illustrated by their takes on Mbeki’s controversial “quiet diplomacy” towards the crisis in Zimbabwe. Quiet diplomacy was in fact surreptitious appeasement.

In defending Mbeki, Roberts deflects the issue by crying hypocrisy: those who opposed sanctions on the apartheid government now call for them against Zimbabwe; many howling for regime change by force in Zimbabwe are against such measures taken in Iraq. Roberts is forthright that “Robert Mugabe at the height of his murderous campaign [in Matabeleland]…slaughtered an estimated 20 000 black people”, but concludes peculiarly, “Mugabe in not a genocidaire”.

Meanwhile, Gevisser has uncovered Mbeki’s close working relationship in the 1980s with Emmerson Mnangagwa, the leader of the notorious Fifth Brigade and perpetrator of the ethnic massacre (who also presided over the torture and detention of the ANC’s MK operatives in southern Zimbabwe). When Mugabe triumphed, Mbeki was quick to support him, astounding his ANC comrades who favoured Joshua Nkomo. Gevisser’s reductionism, rather lamely, places Mugabe as a father figure to Mbeki, a wayward one whom he is unable to confront expeditiously. Mugabe on the other hand outmanoeuvres Mbeki at every turn.

Gumede puts it down to cynical and petty Africanist politics and incompetence. He lambastes Mbeki for having “squandered countless opportunities to make a difference in Zimbabwe”, and his policy is a “gross betrayal of blacks in Zimbabwe and everything that the liberation movement fought for”. He cites how Mbeki’s hand picked team of election observers shamefully declared the manifestly unjust 2002 election that returned Mugabe as free and fair, even though Mbeki’s own unofficial observer team reported widespread violations.

Perhaps the greatest, and to date still not fully excavated danger to his reputation, will arise from the corruption surrounding South Africa’s R60-billion armaments purchase. It was Mbeki who championed the deal, closed down the parliamentary investigation, bullied the parliamentary caucus in to kow-towing to the executive, and who now stands accused of selective justice and is himself implicated in impropriety. At a crucial moment in establishing South Africa’s fledgling democracy, Mbeki sent all the wrong signals.

Mbeki’s departure has ramifications well beyond the borders of South Africa. On his legacy, the jury will be out for some time still, his successes at present obscured by his monumental blunders.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Fighting to the death for Zuma

I feel compelled to state that I am disappointed by Blade Nzimande’s comments on the Constitutional Court’s ruling yesterday on the admission of evidence in the Zuma corruption trial. By casting aspersions on the integrity of the court he is inciting his followers to unlawful action.

Furthermore, we must not forget how two years ago Cosatu and Zuma’s supporters called Judge Hilary Squires a white Rhodesian when he found against Schabir Shaik, once again impugning a court’s integrity when they didn’t like the outcome.

“Abe, would you say my uncle is capable of stopping at nothing to get
what he wants?”
Abe was thoughtful. “Some say the counter-revolutionaries want to
cheat him out of the presidency. He won’t lie down without a fight. And I
tell you, we will follow him to the death. Yes.”

Page 238

And so the character in my book of Uncle Moses Nozulu is set to lead his people out of their new enslavement. This was written a year before Julius Malema and other incendiaries started calling for the ultimate sacrifice to get their man in. The character of Abe is an MK veteran who has been left high and dry since democracy.

Your uncle must lead this country and finish our national democratic revolution.”
“Will you now tell me what my father is hiding from me?”
“No, I cannot. It is my comrade’s honour. But, I feel the time is approaching
when you will find out.”

Page 273

And so, roll on the court case….

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

From Cambridge, Massachusetts

While in Boston these past few weeks the never-ending Democratic Party primaries are inescapable. Last night Jay Leno quipped that after the upcoming Indiana and North Carolina, then West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon, Montana and South Dakota, Obama and Clinton are going on to contest in Europe . . . The audience roared with laughter. This reminded me of a not-altogether-flippant passage in a story of mine – about how the rest of us in the world that have not been annexed or invaded by the US (American Samoa and Hawaii have voted; there are primaries still to be held in Puerto Rico and Guam; let’s not mention New Mexico, California etc !) but who have to live with the results —

“Since you guys brought up the subject,” I responded. “We too – as in the rest of the world – get stuck with the morons you always elect – so personally I think the whole world should vote for the American president.”
“Cool,” said Scott.
“Look, the world has what? 6 billion people, and something like 200 000 American voters? That’s 30 to 1. Maybe each nation at the UN should have a vote for the American President that counts according to the number of people in their country – and since we believe in self-determination, let’s make the world constituency worth – I don’t know – perhaps 15% of the electorate. So 200 000 people in the rest of world make up just one vote in the American election. It could still swing the result and be an important constituency. I’ve thought about it.”
They both stared at me for a minute. Kate had an intense look.
“I like you!” she said.
“The Republicans will rig the vote,” said Scott.

excerpt from Macho in Cancun by Brent Meersman

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Our children

Shocking figures released in a report this week by the Medical Research Council has hit the headlines. 75 000 children die in South Africa every year before they turn five, making South Africa one of only 12 countries — along with Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Kenya, all ravaged by war and HIV-Aids — with a rising child mortality rate. See The Times

and in the novel:

“The Eastern Cape has the highest infant mortality rate and it’s getting
worse! But the people here are not statistics. They are people! You know,
the consultants tell me not to talk to a black audience about corruption.
That it is a white problem. It is not. It is the biggest problem for the poor.
Corruption is why service delivery is so bad.”

Page 289

Kennedy continued, “It shocks me that since apartheid ended, life expectancy has dropped, and infant mortality rates have risen! Some say this is because nowadays statistics are accurately reported. But we’ve been collecting accurate data since 1997 and this terrible trend continues, especially among the poor. Under apartheid, black lives were not held to have much value. We must not now allow economic apartheid to do the same.”

Page 201

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Campus row

The sorry saga of the racial incident at the University of Free State Reitz residence has dragged the whole country down.M&G report

“It is up to you, the university students, to keep idealism alive in our
society. Apathy and cynicism have overtaken many of our youth.”
Several of the students were playing with their cellphones, sending text
messages. Why had they bothered to come? Charlene folded away her
speech.
“I see very few black students here,” she said, sharpening her tone. “Do
you talk to each other? I don’t mean the smart, young black students who
come from private schools, and are the sons and daughters of the middle
class, but do the white students sitting here talk to the quiet ones? The
ones you see on campus, looking lost – the ones here on bursaries. How
are we going to build a nation, when the youth aren’t even integrating?”
The fidgeting stopped.

Page 245

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Vote of No Confidence

What would Charlene Kennedy do about the Eskom situation?

I’ve been wondering what the leader of the Social Democrats, until recently a fictional party, would do about the leadership crisis in the country. Charlene Kennedy would certainly have the audacity to move a motion of no confidence in the President and his cabinet. Not the government mind you, but the President and his dithering cabal. I can hear her in her office, “No, the President must go! His whole drinks cabinet must go! He thinks he can just say sorry for a disaster like this?”

She’s right of course. You can’t do much worse as a government than half your country’s economic growth rate overnight. If ever there was a case for firing, this is it. No need to go to the CCMA.

And the reason – paralysis of vision – Thabo Mbeki’s ideological stupidity, smart Alec Erwin’s parsimony and the supercilious Trevor Manual with his galling arrogance. Allowing neither the market to find a solution, nor investing as government. Starving the country of infrastructure while squirreling away kickbacks and spending on prestige projects. In fact in the book Kennedy asks,

How does it benefit the people of this country to see….Eskom…dumping tens of thousands more jobless people on our doorsteps?…. How long before our electricity grid collapses, the way the railways collapsed in the UK?

Page 143

On the day the President delivers his State of the Nation address (hopefully not 62 pages), Kennedy might bump into the Minister for Public Enterprises on the stairs into the National Assembly, she might ask, “So Minister, do you think this is sabotage?”

But the ANC has many ways of killing a motion before it gets to the floor. And yet who knows, now that the Speaker has rocketed to top position in the opposite faction, it might just be too tempting not to let Kennedy have her vote.

I can picture Charlene moving her motion in parliament. The official opposition green with envy at not having thought of it first, but having no choice but to support the motion. Gritting their teeth though, as they want the current President to stick around as long as possible and keep the revolutionaries at bay.

But now we must take a flight into fantasy. Kennedy opens her statement in the assembly, “As we saw in Polokwane, his own party has lost all confidence in his presidency and his cabinet. The whole country wants change. It is the constitutional right of this assembly to choose the President. It is high time that Parliament asserted that right, that the members of this august house exerted their powers of ultimate oversight. We entrusted the President with a bright future and he has switched off the lights. He must go!”

The ANC MPs with those enormous residuals on their Mercedes Benzes and those ballooning private school fees for their children, see the writing on the wall if they don’t rally now behind the new power in town. In a resounding vote parliament removes the President.

Many events in Primary Coloured have come true, let’s hope the sequel is out soon.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Anticipating Polokwane

A couple of passages in Primary Coloured are worth quoting, now that Polokwane is over and Zuma is clealry in the ascendant.

The most dangerous time is when a regime tries to set itself right, to
change course. Each redress, each admission of failure gives more ammunition
to its detractors. We’re not far off from that with the succession
debate looming. The ANC has only managed half the post-apartheid situation,
and they’re beginning to realise it. COSATU and the Communist
Party are not going to keep sending their members as voting fodder for
much longer, without some concessions . . .

Page 16

“. . . the ANC continues to feel the first shudders of the succession battle as the President ineptly mismanages the process with the alliance partners,” Noviwe concluded reading Zandi’s piece. The timing could not have been worse, she realised. But Bulelewa simply sighed.

Page 126

Bookmark It

Hide Sites