Thabo Mbeki - Does he have a Role to Play?

There has been much discussion recently about Thabo Mbeki, with many commentators raising the view that he is an erudite man with experience in African politics.  Many have commented that he was 'recalled' unjustly, and should have been allowed to serve the balance of his Presidency.  What is remarkable is that it appears that Mbeki’s greatest failings have been forgotten, and only the better qualities are now remembered.  This is entirely understandable in the light of the performance of his successor, but it is a mistake to judge a disastrous President by the standards of a bad President.  Before the people of South Africa get carried away on a wave of enthusiasm for Mbeki, they should recall some of the points for which ex-President Mbeki was responsible.

There are two main matters, either of which, when measured against the standards of Nelson Mandela, or any Leader of a civilized nation, stand out as glaring disasters.

Thabo Mbeki, for all his erudition, insisted that AIDS was not the cause of death.  He, together with two Ministers of Health, refused to consider the introduction of a system of treatment that would minimise the AIDS crisis, insisting that eating potatoes and garlic would cure the disease.  He will be remembered for many years for his speech, declaring to the people that “AIDS is a syndrome, you do not die from a syndrome!”  The result of that disastrous stance, contrary to the views of the vast majority of experts, was that hundreds of thousands of AIDS victims were condemned to die, and remains the cause for South Africa presently being the home of the greatest number of AIDS infectees in the world.  This stance, in the view of many, is tantamount to genocide.  On this ground alone, Thabo Mbeki should be relegated to the garbage heap of history, together with others like Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and more recent perpetrators of mass killings like Robert Mugabe.  It is not unusual to hear the view that a man of Mbeki’s erudition could not have been as disastrously out of step with practically all informed opinion, that he saw the AIDS crisis as being a convenient way to solve the problem of unemployment.  This, if correct, would certainly brand him as insane, a view which does not appear now to hold water.  The question remains, however, how an intelligent, educated leader of one of the world’s great nations (then!) could have adopted a policy that was, even at that time, so out of line with science and public opinion.

Thabo Mbeki cannot be forgotten to have officiated over one of the nation’s greatest wastes of public money for the purpose of the gross enrichment of a few politically-connected elite.  The Arms Deal of the 1990s, seen in the light of attempts by a few ANC, IFP and DA politicians to cast light on the real machinations behind the decisions, was initiated in a desire to transfer huge sums of public money to private bank accounts, creating a massive expenditure on items that were of no value to the public, that made the country a laughing stock throughout the developed world, and that brought the scorn even of the suppliers of the munitions involved in the deal on the very politicians who were stealing from the public.  The senior Manager of one of the suppliers has been heard in public repeatedly referring to Mbeki and his Cabinet colleagues as ‘jungle bunnies!’  Mbeki ensured that no meaningful discussion of the transactions and the decisions behind them could take place in Parliament, the home of the ‘Democracy’ that is espoused by the ANC as the centrepoint of its policies and achievement.  He was supported in this by numerous Cabinet colleagues and even by Speaker Ginwala, a woman who would otherwise have gone down in history as a person of high moral value, and by the institutions of Democracy, such as the Auditor General.  By his conduct, Mbeki proved to the world that the ‘New South Africa’ was firmly on the path to becoming just another failed African banana republic, headed by a succession of crooked and incompetent presidents.  By his failure to uphold the noble principles of the ANC, Mbeki opened the door to the enormously high levels of corruption that the country is now experiencing.  By the example that he set, Mbeki has put the Party and the country on the path to jubilant support of convicted criminals, to their ‘deployment’ in high office once they are released after serving only a small fraction of their sentences.  By his example, Mbeki has shown that wrong, immoral and self-serving behaviour, whether criminal or verging on it, is the right standard for the newly-democratic populace to aspire to.

One cannot forget that it was Mbeki who chose the path of ‘quiet diplomacy’ that enabled Robert Mugabe to entrench his position as one of the most depraved leaders of Africa.  At a time when Mbeki had the opportunity to show the way to real democracy, he chose to take a soft line with Mugabe, setting him up as an example that the young now aspire to.  The repeated restatement of policies espoused by Mugabe and his Government, such as ‘expropriation without compensation’ and ‘nationalisation of the land’ mouthed in recent years by ignorant populists such as Julius Malema were given birth by Mbeki, the man who single-handedly destroyed the esteem that the Western World held for the ANC of Nelson Mandela.

One can also not forget that it was Mbeki who set the tone for the semi-dictatorship that the ANC Government has become, stifling all debate that might have brought a conclusion other than the one he wanted, even though that ‘want’ was no more than the result of it being the one that he had first formulated without the benefit of discussion, a process that is one of the foundations of a real democracy.  It seems likely, as South Africa drifts increasingly towards the Stalinist form of Communism, that that ‘quality’ of Mbeki is one that will earn the disapprobation of all thinking people in the years to come.