By R.W. Johnson
Thabo Mbeki has recently set a number of hares running with his claim that the ANC has fundamentally changed since his time in power. Indeed, this is a refrain he started in 2007 when faced with a rebellious majority at the ANC’s Polokwane conference. He simply disowned them and said they were not true ANC members at all. He says that Polokwane put leaders in place “who were not ANC. You have this ANC led by people who are wearing ANC T-shirts but they were not ANC.” His explanation is that the ANC was infiltrated by “apartheid agents” – the “counter-revolution”, as Mbeki likes to call it – and they diverted the ANC from its true path, perverted its policies, looted the state, paid no heed to the new constitution, and so on.
What to make of this ? Taken at face value, Mbeki’s claim is obvious nonsense. In order to believe his story, you have to believe that 13 years after the National Party had surrendered power there was still some sort of secret apartheid state in existence, deploying its “agents” with the aim of subverting the new regime. And, given what Mbeki goes on to say about the continuing dominance of this counter-revolutionary group among today’s looting and gangster ANC leaders, the same is true today. Yet Mbeki is unable to point to a single “apartheid agent” by name, so in the more than 30 years since 1994 no one has yet been found playing this shadowy “Third Force” role.
Mbeki’s paranoia is not news and, indeed, it is shared widely. Malema loves to accuse people of being “agents” or working for Stratcom, an apartheid police organisation which disappeared more than a generation ago. The fact is, of course, that the whole NP edifice melted away very rapidly after 1994. The party itself shrank, dissolved itself, and joined the ANC. All the multiple arms of the Nationalist behemoth rapidly followed.
The Afrikaanse Studentebond, the Broederbond, the various Nationalist financial and cultural organisations and even the Dutch Reformed Church quickly lost critical mass and in many cases disappeared altogether. In their place grew Afriforum and Solidarity, wholly new organisations with different beliefs, different leaders and different functions.
The sheer rapidity of this vanishing act derived mainly from the loss of state power and the complete political collapse of apartheid. Taken together, this led to a sort of cultural collapse. There was simply no apartheid ghost state able to train, employ and pay “agents”, and there were no volunteers for such roles either. Many former members of the old apartheid security police and military establishment disappeared into the woodwork, took employment abroad or worked as mercenaries, sometimes in the employ of the new ANC state. (Mbeki himself had a detail of highly efficient white Afrikaner security operatives who would move ahead of him, casing any premises he was about to use, ensuring it was clean of any arms, surveillance equipment, and so on.)
Mbeki argues that the generation of 1994 which helped write the constitution was fundamentally different from those who followed. Indeed, he says while they practised cadre deployment they did so in a much more responsible way. This is mainly malarkey. To be sure, Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela were more principled: living their life of Struggle, they simply had to be. But there were plenty of wild men and rogues in that generation too, Jacob Zuma for a start, and anyone who knew the ANC in exile can name plenty of inappropriate cadres appointed to the wrong jobs.
Alfred Nzo, as Secretary-General, was hopeless. Seretse Choabi, as spokesman on education, left a string of bad debts behind him everywhere he went and was wild and unreliable. Steve Tshwete was a drunk. As for cadre deployment, Mbeki himself was a considerable patronage player with a good number of proteges and girl friends slotted into key positions. Whenever anyone of real talent and ability emerged such that Mbeki saw him as a potential rival – for example, Thami Mhlambiso – Mbeki did all he could to destroy him.
Mbeki’s accusation that the ANC had changed should be seen in two ways. First, what Mbeki had spent his life in was the exiled ANC where the leadership controlled all patronage and exercised iron discipline. He assumed that the ANC in power would operate in the same way. But huge numbers of locals had joined the ANC after 1990 and they were beyond the complete control of the leadership. Moreover, as the party’s activists integrated themselves into local power structures and private businesses it became effectively impossible – try as it might – for the central leadership to control everything.
And Mbeki did try hard: he managed to legislate that he as party leader would choose all provincial premiers and all mayors. When Ramaphosa left his party job for the private sector, Mbeki insisted that Ramaphosa had been “deployed” to the business world, as if the ANC controlled even that. Mbeki was trying to insist that the new, boisterous, get-rich-quick domestic ANC should behave like the exiled ANC. It was a battle he was bound to lose.
For this defied reality, which was that the party was bursting at every level with ambitious activists who saw the party as their pathway to power and wealth. Effectively, they owed their positions to local cabals and factions, to private businesses, to shady tenderpreneurs or even to gangsters. And these forces grew in power and strength throughout Mbeki’s presidency as corruption became increasingly common and gross.
Mbeki often talks as if corruption only began under Zuma, but Mbeki himself played a cardinal role in opening the floodgates to corruption by his role in forcing through the arms deal. When Tony Blair referred the British part of that deal to the Serious Fraud Office, Mbeki nearly went berserk, publicly and hysterically attacking him – for he was clearly worried about what that might reveal. Blair had no illusions about Mbeki and did not bother to reply.
And, of course, the feeding frenzy which was taking over the ANC did mean that people behaved differently. Increasingly, they were driven by financial imperatives of one sort or another, and they resented Mbeki’s attempts to centralise everything. They could see that he was doing everything, fair and unfair, to control the result of the Polokwane conference and they simply weren’t having it. They swept Mbeki aside – something which, in Mbeki’s book, simply never happened at an ANC conference, where the leadership always exercised complete control. Hence his greatly bruised conclusion that the Polokwane delegates were “not the real ANC”.
In effect, Zuma won at Polokwane not only because he had lined up the SACP, Cosatu and the ANCYL behind him, plus the Zulu bloc vote, but because he was in harmony with the rebels. He was perfectly happy to see Mbeki’s centralising rules overthrown, and he happily accepted the new ethics and spirit of the corruption-driven ANC. He exercised control via the “Premier League”: the premiers of North West, KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and Mpumalanga were all his clients and backed him to the hilt. In return they were allowed to loot their provinces to their hearts’ content. They exercised complete control over their province’s delegates to ANC national conferences, and together they always had an easy majority.
The final straw in Mbeki’s case had been his attempt to insist that he would remain the ANC’s chairman and thus would continue to dominate the party despite ending his statutorily limited two terms as president. That was a bridge too far, but Zuma tried exactly the same thing, attempting to push in his pliant ex-wife so that he too could rule indefinitely. And he too had attempted a bridge too far.
Now that another ANC presidential election is looming, Mbeki has also come up with suggestions for changing the method of election. He observes, quite correctly, that the personal suitability of presidential candidates for the office they wish to occupy has never been seriously assessed. Instead, people become candidates through byzantine struggles within their party and in the case of the ANC, money plays an overwhelming part. Mbeki rightly points out that this is no way to ensure that South Africa gets the effective executive president which it sorely needs.
Mbeki is well aware that Mandela never even tried to be an effective executive president, that Zuma was totally corrupt, and that Ramaphosa has been hopeless and ineffectual. And he also knows – the polls clearly show it – that voters regard him as the most effective president they’ve had, and that he therefore enjoys a comfortable popularity lead. So what Mbeki is clearly hinting at is the adoption of direct presidential election, so that voters themselves assess the candidates and vote one in.
In fact, as the polling which I’ve done for eTV has shown, public opinion has increasingly been shifting in favour of direct presidential election. This is a tide that’s coming in. If you imagine that such a method was adopted for 2029, how would it go? Paul Mashatile would not fare well. He is unknown outside Gauteng, is widely reputed to be corrupt, and would almost certainly do a deal with the EFF and MKP.
But Fikile Mbalula would not fare any better. He has no popular following and no real provincial base either, and he’s seen as rather a joke. Senzo Mchunu might once have been formidable but for all the fuss over police corruption, which seems likely to sink him. Ronald Lamola was once favoured but has emerged as a rather colourless ANC apparatchik who just spouts party orthodoxy. And Patrice Motsepe won’t run.
Under those circumstances a “draft Mbeki” movement would have a pretty good chance of success. Many have forgotten his AIDS madness and his huge failure over Zimbabwe, and remember only that economic growth was stronger under him.
However, for all those reasons, most of the ANC factions would oppose Mbeki. And Zuma certainly would. Ramaphosa hates Mbeki and would place obstacles in his way. On the other hand, Mbeki has been wooing Afriforum/Solidarity for years, and Malema would be happy to strike a deal of convenience with him. But Mbeki’s greatest strength would come from the man in the street. The real problem he faces is just Father Time. Mbeki will be 87 in 2029.
FEATURED IMAGE: Then president Thabo Mbeki in a stadiium in Kigali, Rwanda, undated. Image: Paul Kagame on Flickr.