Mbeki and After: Reflections on the Legacy of Thabo Mbeki

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Wits University Press

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2001

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Published edition copyright © Wits University Press 2010

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First published 2010

ISBN 978-1-86814-502-7

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Edited by Pat Tucker

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ACRONYMS

GENERAL REFLECTIONS

1 MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY: A critical introduction

DARYL GLASER

2 MBEKI’S LEGACY: Some conceptual markers

PETER HUDSON

3 WHY IS THABO MBEKI A ‘NITEMARE’?

MARK GEVISSER

THE MBEKI STYLE OF GOVERNANCE

4 MACHIAVELLI MEETS THE CONSTITUTION: Mbeki and the law

RICHARD CALLAND AND CHRIS OXTOBY

MBEKI AND SOCIETY

5 THABO MBEKI AND DISSENT

JANE DUNCAN

6 CIVIL SOCIETY AND UNCIVIL GOVERNMENT: The Treatment Action Campaign versus Thabo Mbeki, 1998-2008

MARK HEYWOOD

MBEKI AND RACE

7 SEEING OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US: Racism, technique and the Mbeki administration

STEVEN FRIEDMAN

8 TOWARDS A COMMON NATIONAL IDENTITY: Did Thabo Mbeki help or hinder?

EUSEBIUS MCKAISER

MBEKI ABROAD

9 THABO MBEKI’S LEGACY OF TRANSFORMATIONAL DIPLOMACY

CHRIS LANDSBERG

10 THABO MBEKI AND THE GREAT FOREIGN POLICY RIDDLE

PETER VALE

NOTES

CONTRIBUTORS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For their roles in inspiring, managing and copy editing this publication I thank various members of the staff of Wits University Press, including Julie Miller, Veronica Klipp and Pat Tucker. I thank too those – including Abigail Booth, Gilbert Khadiagala, Shireen Hassim, Peter Hudson, Tawana Kupe, Sheila Meintjes, David Shepherd and Ursula Scheidegger – whose suggestions and organisational input made possible the conference upon which this book drew. The conference was also made possible by a grant from the University of Witwatersrand’s Faculty of Humanities to its School of Social Sciences, gratefully received. I thank, finally, the conference speakers, chapter contributors and anonymous reviewers for supplying what lies at the heart of both the conference and the book: intellectual stimulation and critical engagement.

Daryl Glaser, University of the Witwatersrand

August 2010

ACRONYMS

1

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY:

A critical introduction

DARYL GLASER

Is there an Mbeki legacy? Looking back at Thabo Mbeki’s presidency from a vantage point of mid-2010 an observer might easily conclude that that legacy – such as it is – consists in three classes of phenomena: mayhem caused and now needing to be repaired (policies on AIDS and Zimbabwe), batons merely passed from Mbeki’s predecessor to his successor (a functioning democracy and mixed economy) and seemingly equal-and-opposite reactions elicited among the former president’s many enemies (the internal ANC rebellion against Mbeki and subsequent efforts by the victorious rebels to establish a ‘not Thabo Mbeki’ style of governance). It is the third class – the reactions elicited – that will seem to many the most important for understanding South African governance now, and therefore to constitute Mbeki’s most palpable legacy.

This being so, why should there be a book, now, about Thabo Mbeki and his legacy? For one thing, public interest in Mbeki remains surprisingly strong – as evidenced, for example, by advance sales for books about the former president. The interest is partly (still) in the man, even as he sulks in retirement. Biographers, columnists and political scientists have felt compelled to retool as amateur psychologists the better to understand the former president’s psychic complexity. And Mbeki’s was a consequential complexity: his sensitivity to racial slight directly influenced government approaches to the AIDS pandemic and the crisis in Zimbabwe; feelings of insecurity and even paranoia arguably lay behind the former president’s efforts to run his political rivals out of town; Mbeki’s contempt for those he considered of lesser ability than himself doubtless fuelled his search for centralised command and control, his secrecy, and his stubborn refusal of unsolicited advice (Gumede 2005: 163-4, 179-82; Gevisser 2007: 230-5, 284, 440-43, 740, 793; Johnson 2009: 178-221, 233-38, 340-67).

Just as ‘interestingly’, Mbeki seemed to be more than one man: charmer of whites and race-baiter, technocrat and nationalist romantic, free-market convert and developmental-statist, globaliser and Third-Worldist, champion of the black bourgeoisie and bearer-of-warnings about society’s descent into crass materialism. What made the man tick? What else but fascination with this question could explain the turnout of well over a thousand people to the launch of Mark Gevisser’s biography of Mbeki, even as the president’s powers were waning?

There is more to his interestingness than that, however. There remains a widespread sense that Mbeki cannot but have made a real difference to the way South Africa is run even now – and that this difference is not reducible to the aforementioned negative reactions to his style and policies. The Mbeki period arguably encompassed South Africa’s entire post-1994 democratic experience up to 2008. As deputy-president Mbeki exerted considerable influence throughout Nelson Mandela’s presidential tenure; according to some, he was ‘de facto prime minister’ (Gevisser 2007: 658; see also Gevisser 2007: 702; Johnson 2009: 54-6, 99-100, 137-8).

Mbeki was deeply present in establishing, even before he assumed the presidency in 1999, the coordinates of South Africa’s pragmatic but Third-Worldist foreign policy and its market-oriented economic policy. These remain, essentially, the coordinates of this country’s foreign and economic policy, notwithstanding the Left’s efforts to steer the new administration onto a more decisively pro-poor course, or indeed Mbeki’s own belated (re)discovery of the activist state. Mbeki also helped to rally, augment and empower a black middle class.

Of course, even the ‘positive’ legacies are Mbeki’s only up to a point. Some of them – notably the economic and class ones – doubtless bear the impress of structural forces like the implosion of the Soviet bloc, neo-liberal ‘globalisation’ and underlying socio-economic shifts. Mbeki was, moreover, joined by other important figures (perhaps an entire nascent elite) in exercising the choices that these structural forces left open. It is, after all, precisely the legacies most clearly stamped with Mbeki’s personal agency – notably on AIDS – that are now being decisively overthrown. The ones that endure may be those Mbeki served in part as a kind of historical vector.

It is thus not without some justification that three contributors, Friedman, Vale and Duncan, implicitly question the framing of this collection around Mbeki the man. At the same time few would deny that Mbeki the man helped to shape South Africa’s particular local reception of the ‘collapse of Communism’ and of globalisation and its particular reconfiguration of race-class relations. Mbeki was no cipher: notwithstanding the new ruling elite’s failure to secure economic power comparable to its political sway, it gained remarkably rapid control of a modern state and, for a good while, it remained in the thrall of Mbeki, kept there by, amongst other factors, the call of black solidarity, the ANC’s collective discipline and the lure of executive patronage. For about ten years from the mid-1990s Mbeki enjoyed a margin of real power to sculpt South Africa’s emerging order. That in the end he lost control of it in so many ways – see violent crime, xenophobic pogroms, service delivery protests, the Polokwane conference rebellion – does not gainsay this point.

This collection arises out of a conference held from 30-31 March 2009 on Mbeki’s Legacy, hosted by the Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, at the instigation of Tawana Kupe, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, which, together with the School of Social Sciences, joined our department in funding the event. Mbeki was, by then, ‘history’, deposed from the ANC presidency and the presidency of the Republic. Despite this, the conference was remarkably well attended throughout and received television and radio coverage.

Our idea was to organise a conference that was overall critical in tone – it is the job of academics to be critical – but something other than an anti-Mbeki polemic. We invited a number of people we hoped would defend the Mbeki record, but in the end only Siphamandla Zondi and Chris Landsberg were there to champion the ex-president (both on foreign policy issues), and of these only Landsberg agreed to contribute to the book. We also – in the spirit of the times – sought a conference that was balanced in terms of race and gender. While three black Africans of a larger number invited agreed to address the conference, none chose to contribute to the book (though others of colour have done so). Of the three women speakers, only one agreed to participate in the book.

On all these counts, therefore, there is nothing ‘balanced’ about this collection, or even (given the presence of Landsberg’s fulsome defence of Mbeki amid otherwise much more critical chapters) anything particularly coherent about it; it is a product simply of the way things turned out – of who agreed to present at the conference and who agreed to contribute to the book of the conference. With Wits University Press, the Department of Political Studies decided nevertheless to press ahead with a book, encouraged by indications of prospective reader interest. The contributors are all connected to the academic world, and some were also prominent public commentators on the Mbeki era or activists in civil society organisations during his tenure.

This chapter offers a critical introduction to the collection, locating its contributions within a larger anatomy of Mbeki and his legacy. It is occasionally argumentative, and not all contributors will agree with all the arguments made in it; I hope they will extend their forbearance, especially where I quibble with positions they have adopted. Its length and wide (perhaps too wide) range has mainly to do with the need to cover Mbeki-related ground that our more specialised chapter contributors could not. This sweep comes at a price: not every point can be substantiated as thoroughly as would be possible in a more specialised piece. I do, though, provide sources for factual claims that are not common cause and flag – by using appropriately qualified language – propositions that are disputable or speculative.

MBEKI: The man, his politics, his world-view

Biographical essentials

Thabo Mbeki was born in 1942 in the Eastern Cape, where he spent his childhood. His father, Govan, became a celebrated ANC and Communist activist, political prisoner and founder of the ANC’s armed wing. Mbeki spent six years in domestic ANC-linked youth politics before heading abroad, on ANC instructions, in 1962. In 1966 Mbeki received a Master of Economics degree from the University of Sussex. Heavily involved in ANC work in several countries during his period of exile, he became political secretary to ANC President Oliver Tambo in 1978, director of the ANC’s Department of Information and Publicity in 1984 and head of the ANC’s international department in 1989. In the later 1980s and early 1990s Mbeki figured prominently in the negotiations that led to the democratic constitutional settlement of 1994. In 1993 he was elected chairman of the ANC and in 1994 first deputy president of the Republic of South Africa. The ANC’s Mafikeng Congress of December 1997 saw Mbeki elected as ANC president. In June 1999, following the ANC’s second election victory, he assumed office as president of South Africa. He held the ANC presidency until his ouster at the party’s conference held in Polokwane, in Limpopo Povince in December 2007¹ and the presidency of the Republic until his resignation in September 2008.

Since he was long considered an ANC heir apparent by virtue of being the son of Govan Mbeki and close associate of Oliver Tambo, both ‘ANC royalty’, Mbeki’s ascendancy seemed inevitable to many. Even so, he was not universally popular in the movement. He incurred suspicion in its armed wing (Gevisser 2007: 293-7), fell out with Communist stalwarts Joe Slovo and Chris Hani and found himself, in the 1990s, challenged for pre-eminence by, among others, former trade unionist Cyril Ramaphosa. Adroit in sidelining a string of potential rivals he finally fell prey, politically, to the coalition that gathered around one-time Mbeki man and former ANC intelligence chief Jacob Zuma.

Mbeki’s ascendancy was in keeping with the prominent role in the ANC of activists from the Eastern Cape, the area in which Bantu-speakers first collided with white settlers in the 18th century – though the Mbekis themselves were descended (on the paternal side) from the Mfengu, 19th-century refugees from Natal dispersed by intra-African wars. The ‘Fingo’ stood out as Christianised and modernising outsiders amongst the Xhosa and, indeed, were initially perceived as collaborators with the British; but this group duly experienced the bitter taste of white power, in the Mbeki family’s case in the form of downward social mobility from an earlier near-gentry status. Mbeki was (quietly) accused of packing his Cabinet and director-general posts with Xhosas (Johnson 2009: 557).

Mbeki’s rise to the presidency also signalled the ascendancy of the exiles, who, in the 1990s, competed for influence with the Robben Islanders and the ‘inziles’ – veterans of the United Democratic Front, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and other domestic formations active inside South Africa during the uprisings of the 1980s. Zuma continues the dominance of the exiles, though in ethnic terms (which matter in South Africa) his rule marks a passing of the presidential baton to the Zulus, historically rivals of the Xhosa for dominance in the ANC.

Ideology/world-view

For some of his critics and admirers alike, Mbeki was the quintessential post-ideological figure: a man who wanted, above all, to get things done, even if that meant deserting his movement’s socialist dogmas or his predecessor’s feel-good rainbowism. This characterisation does not seem quite right. Mbeki did jettison socialist goals (perhaps as early as 1979)² and, indeed, for some on the left he was an ideologue of a different kind: a ‘neo-liberal’ one, committed with a convert’s zeal to a limited state, free trade and monetary orthodoxy (‘Call me a Thatcherite!’, he invited an audience in 1996). This does not seem quite right either. It is difficult to square with Mbeki’s bemoaning of selfish materialism, his questioning of globalisation after the Asian financial crash (Gevisser 2007: 740-1, 779-80) and his post-1998 affirmation of the ‘developmental state’.

Mbeki was (is) a pragmatic ideologue. His pre-1994 role as an ANC diplomat and publicist demanded that he maintain connections with parties as diverse as Black Consciousness, Swedish social democrats, American liberals and, later, the white South African establishment. Attuned to the balance of forces, Mbeki could read the meaning of white military power and Soviet decline. He eschewed the romantic maximalism of guerilla comrades like Chris Hani. But his pragmatism served an ideological world-view, one that influenced both his goals and methods. That world-view changed in pattern and hue over time, but it retained some important shaping elements.

Thus Marxism-Leninism remained visible, even as the socialism ceased to be. Mbeki was brought up in a communist family; an SACP member from early 1961 or 1962 until 1990 (Gevisser 2007: 148), he was elected to its Central Committee in 1970, received ideological and military training in Moscow in 1969-71 and, for a while, was groomed as a future SACP leader. ‘M-L’ was visible most obviously in Mbeki’s vanguardist approach to politics and governance, which are considered in more detail below. It was much less evident in his market-friendly economics. Ironically, though, Marxism-Leninism helped Mbeki to justify his accommodation of capitalist globalisation and his commitment to fostering a black ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’ (Gevisser 2007: 462-4; Johnson 2009: 79). The communist two-stage theory of revolution explained the priority of ‘national democracy’ over socialism and, correspondingly, why the ANC should remain a nationalist rather than become a socialist organisation.³ ‘Scientific’ Marxism stressed too, with Mbeki, the importance of objectively analysing the balance of class forces in determining what was possible at a given conjuncture; Lenin, in particular, offered Mbeki a vocabulary for attacking ultra-leftism (an ‘infantile disorder’, according to Lenin). Here was Marxism-Leninism as per the Lenin School, but emptied of its socialist content.

Mbeki’s other ideological strand is radical anti-colonial nationalism. In his case this manifested itself in pan-Africanism and, more generally, in a racialised Third-Worldism. Mbeki insistently attributed Africa’s failings to European colonialism, offered solidarity to leaders in the South under attack from the West and tried to launch an Africa-wide ‘Renaissance’. For some leftist critics (e.g., Patrick Bond [2004]) Mbeki’s pan-African, Third-Worldist and anti-imperialist positioning was simply his way of ‘talking left’ while ‘walking right’, especially economically. Certainly, Mbeki showed little interest in the statist socialism and pre-capitalist communalism punted by earlier generations of leftist African nationalists. But few who have perused Mbeki’s online screeds, or who have tried to make sense of his actions and silences, can doubt that he held his anti-colonialist stance with a sincere bitterness. It is a merit of Landsberg’s exegesis that he takes Mbeki’s foreign-policy idealism seriously. Whatever one thinks of Landsberg’s defence of Mbeki’s foreign policy, it proceeds from a correct premise, that Mbeki possessed and acted on a world-view, one that joined realism to a politics of Third-Worldism and racial redress. While Vale is more (properly, in my view) critical of Mbeki-era foreign policy, he is arguably too quick to reduce it to neo-liberal and realist calculations. If human rights came second in Mbeki’s foreign policy this was probably due as much to the former president’s ‘idealistic’ notions of racial and South-South solidarity as it was to calculations of South Africa’s interests, economically conceived or otherwise.

The prominence of race in Mbeki’s world-view requires special attention. The puzzle, for many observers, lay in his apparent metamorphosis from affable Anglophile into prickly racial nationalist. Visible as a significant concern already during his deputy-presidency, race became a central motif of Mbeki’s presidency. In various ways and forums he came to champion a world-view according to which whites at home and in the North were now, as ever, determined to exploit and degrade Africans – to impoverish them; use them as fodder in medical experiments; stereotype them as violent, venal and lustful; impose upon them heartless Western values and to prove they were incapable of self-government. Africans appeared in his account as a warm and communal people, wronged by Western evildoers, collectively morally pristine prior to their corruption by white violence and materialism, and still very much victims.

Why this apparent racial turn? It is proper to acknowledge one likely stimulant to it: the fact that, years after 1994, whites in South Africa remain disproportionately economically powerful, materially privileged and – in a good many cases – unreconciled to black rule. There is also the fact that, for all its post-1950 non-racialism, the ANC never abandoned its commitment to the liberation of ‘blacks in general and Africans in particular’.

But there appears to be more at work than these facts in Mbeki’s own transmogrification into racial nationalist. It now seems likely that he was never the straightforwardly westernised non-racialist some whites imagined they saw in the 1980s. Mbeki’s pre-1994 diplomatic role may have required him to overplay his Western side even as, inwardly, he felt a powerful urge to ‘reclaim his Africanness’ (Gevisser 2007: 574-5).

The split in Mbeki’s persona between cosmopolitanism and return-to-the-source yearning may originate, or so Gevisser’s biography implies, in the ambiguities of the educated and relatively well-off Mbeki family’s insider-outsider status amongst the ‘red’ Xhosa (2007: 49-52). During his 1960s British exile Mbeki engaged appreciatively with the ideas of W E B du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X and established links with Black Consciousness activists. Later he fell out spectacularly with his one-time mentor, the white revolutionary Joe Slovo (Gevisser 2007: 220, 314-27, 384-5; 459-70). Mbeki forged a tacit alliance with Africanists during his 1990s rivalry with the non-racial left and inziles and resented white support for Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership ambitions (Gumede 2005: 39; Gevisser 2007: 604-10, 639-47). As President, Mbeki was eager to escape the shadow of the iconic Mandela, whom he privately accused of not doing enough to help blacks (Gumede 2005: 53-7; Gevisser 2007: 707-12). He found in white racism a reassuring explanation for phenomena he found disconcerting, notably the medical-scientific claim that Africans were victims of a lethal disease sexually transmitted within their ranks and the criticism to which he was subjected over his policies on AIDS, Zimbabwe and the arms deal. To these factors reinforcing his race consciousness must be added his alliance with elements of a rising black middle class eager to displace class-struggle rhetoric with a more congenial rhetoric of racial competition.

Governing style

Mbeki was the elected leader of a democratic state, one that has (at least until the advent of recently proposed media restrictions) been amongst the more plausible African exemplars of Huntington’s ‘third wave of Democratisation’ (Huntington 1991). But to his many critics Deputy President, later President Mbeki appeared to be an authoritarian figure trapped (comfortably housed, some leftists might contend) in a liberal-democratic (or ‘bourgeois’) institutional shell. He personified in these critics’ eyes a politics of centralisation, paranoia, aversion to criticism and indifference to the pain of his fellow citizens. Mbeki, from 1994, led a centralising trend evident in, among other moves, the high-handed imposition of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) economic strategy in 1996, the top-down deployment of cadres to ANC-controlled provinces and municipalities from 1997 and the creation of a super presidency from 1999. His authoritarianism found expression in broadsides against real or imagined critics, delivered at Tripartite Alliance organisation conferences or in his online column, and directed sometimes at individual citizens; and also in plotting, some of it involving the state security apparatus, to sideline perceived rivals. Mbeki talked and, more occasionally, acted in ways that seemed threatening to many in the media, judiciary, opposition parties and organised civil society.

Part of the explanation for Mbeki’s undemocratic ways surely lies in his ideological lineage. Marxism-Leninism and radical nationalism pulled him, and the ANC, towards authoritarianism. The model proffered by earlier Marxist-led anti-colonial movements legitimated a conception of the ANC as the embodiment of a revolutionary mission and people. Both ideologies encouraged a distrust of political pluralism, formal democracy and the idea of a neutral or non-partisan state, favouring, in its stead, a unitary and purposive conception of the state, one that looked to inclusive mass mobilisation behind a shared historical task rather than to open-ended contestation amongst competing societal projects.

Leninism and left-inflected nationalism jointly supplied a vocabulary for tarring critics (black, white, left, right) as ‘reactionaries’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘agents’. (We catch an early glimpse of Mbeki’s view of dissent in his enthusiastic endorsement of the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 [Gevisser 2007: 184, 260].) The impress of Leninism can be seen also in Mbeki’s preference for vanguardism over populism (‘better fewer but better!’, he admonished his hostile audience at Polokwane, in Lenin’s own words) and in his commitment to democratic-centralist party organisation. Lenin’s ruthless strategic realism could only have encouraged Mbeki’s own personality-rooted preoccupations with power and conspiracy. Mbeki never repudiated the liberal- and social-democratic Constitution negotiated in the early and middle 1990s, but his Leninism and radical nationalism surely help to explain the kind of cavalier attitude to constitutionalism that the Calland and Heywood chapters show – in detail – to characterise the former president’s tenure.

How much this matters depends, in part, on where one is coming from. Hudson’s theoretical contribution raises provocative questions about the appropriateness of a standard liberal yardstick for measuring Mbeki’s record. Hudson’s hope is invested in the possibility of more radically transformative metrics. For this editor at least, the clear implication of Duncan’s and Heywood’s contributions is that repressive (or illiberal) aspects of the Mbeki government were as likely to be directed at radically transformative critics of ANC rule