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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Special Interview Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters New hand on South Africa's tiller
By Gail Gerhart *
Mandela and grandson
Shares on the Johannesburg stock exchange jumped a reassuring 180 points on the day voters went to the polls to make South Africa's change of leadership official. Three weeks later, optimism is still running high as Thabo Mbeki settles into the Union Buildings in Pretoria, introduces his new cabinet, and prepares to show the country -- and the world -- that South Africa after Nelson Mandela is still a going concern.
A new hand on the tiller, particularly in a country so recently emerged from decades of strife, might ordinarily inspire more of a wait-and-see mood -- especially when the helmsman is a backroom political figure without a conspicuous popular constituency. Indeed, beneath the post-election euphoria, a current of cautious scepticism can be discerned, both among insiders who have known Mbeki for years, and among members of the public who are now scrutinising him seriously for the first time. That he is the man-of-the-hour there can be no doubt. But is he a leader for the long haul, one who can go beyond rhetoric and symbolism to actually deliver on his party's promise of "A Better Life for All"?
Mbeki served a long apprenticeship in politics. Born to middle class, political parents in the Transkei in 1942 (his father is a Xhosa-speaker and his mother a Sotho), he joined the African National Congress Youth League as a high school student. In 1962, the same year that Nelson Mandela began his marathon prison ordeal, Mbeki left South Africa for exile. He completed a master's degree in economics at Sussex University while pursuing an interest in nineteenth century English poetry on the side. He spoke from ANC platforms, and also joined the South African Communist Party, the ANC's close ally, with which it long shared an overlapping membership. In due course he underwent a military training programme in the Soviet Union and a stint at Moscow's Lenin School, both de rigueur for serious revolutionaries earmarked for leadership in the party, which in those days considered itself the intellectual engine room of the ANC.
Mbeki's ascent in the ANC's exile bureaucracy began after the movement's landmark 1969 conference in Morogoro, Tanzania. Alternating between administrative posts and diplomatic assignments in Swaziland and Nigeria, he rapidly made his mark as a shrewd and tactful problem-solver. By 1975 he had been co-opted onto the ANC's national executive committee, and soon began serving as speech-writer and chief assistant to ANC President Oliver Tambo. So close were the two, and so high was Tambo's regard for his protégé, that insiders began referring to Mbeki as the "crown prince" -- a notable distinction for a man who had not yet turned 40, in an organisation where age and seniority normally received far more than their due.
For Tambo, a non-Communist, Mbeki's membership in the Communist Party politburo was a useful link, particularly for as long as there was any prospect that military clout -- for which the ANC was dependent on the eastern bloc -- might hold the key to future power. By the mid-1980s, however, Pretoria had forced Samora Machel to shut down the ANC's Ho Chi Minh trail through Mozambique, and the ANC's military wing was facing odds that increasingly looked insurmountable.
Meanwhile, turmoil inside South Africa was pushing the Afrikaner establishment to send out secret feelers to see if the ANC would talk about talks. Tambo and Mbeki moved stealthily onto the negotiation track, leaving the militarists to carry on haranguing the rank and file about mobilisation for an armed seizure of power. When the Soviet Union's withdrawal from military entanglements in southern Africa left the ANC's army high and dry in 1989, the organisation -- thanks largely to Mbeki's skilled manoeuvring -- had already quietly prepared the ground to negotiate a settlement from a position of maximum political advantage. This turn of fortune did not endear Mbeki to the ANC's militarists, much as they had to concede the brilliant success of his effort. Even some of the organisation's ordinary exile members, despite the joy of returning home after the ANC's unbanning, harboured a sense that somehow they had been manipulated, or even denied the outright victory to which they had always felt entitled.
When Mandela replaced the ailing Tambo as ANC president in the interim years following February 1990, Mbeki was left without a secure patron. He had always felt estranged from his authoritarian and emotionally aloof father, Govan Mbeki, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment with Mandela and had now re-emerged as a senior struggle veteran. In any case, Mandela and the elder Mbeki had spent years on Robben Island not speaking to each other because of political arguments and rivalries. Senior communist kingpin Joe Slovo, a close confidant of Mandela's, regarded Mbeki the younger -- quite correctly -- as an unreliable party member, in contrast to the charismatic and hugely popular military hero, Chris Hani. Also competing for Mandela's mantle was the astute and ambitious Cyril Ramaphosa, primus inter pares among the non-exile opposition leaders, head of the fomidable National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and shining star of the muscular Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the ANC's chief spokesman at South Africa's constitutional negotiations.
After Hani's murder by right-wing assassins in 1993, Ramaphosa emerged as the popular favourite for the position of first deputy president at the time of the country's freedom election in 1994. But it was Mandela's call, and he chose Mbeki. Both Ramaphosa and Mbeki are men of outstanding intellect and political talent, but Mbeki had devoted his life to the ANC, whereas Ramaphosa was a relative newcomer. Moreover, Mbeki had been the choice of Tambo, Mandela's former law partner and closest political comrade.
Becoming Mandela's heir apparent in 1994 ought to have relieved Mbeki's anxieties about job security, but it did not. As day-to-day decision-making gradually passed into his hands, he used his growing access to the levers of power to sideline four popular and ambitious provincial premiers. To help compensate for his own lack of a domestic political base, and to prevent her from taking her large following elsewhere, he brazenly pandered to populist diva Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. More often than not, loyalty rather than proven ability seemed to determine his choice of advisers. Criticism from the white-dominated media drew hypersensitive reactions from Mbeki and his staff.
ANC insiders attribute Mbeki's mild paranoia to his years of experience in exile politics with its intrigue, secrecy, and authoritarian chains of patronage and command. Some believe that emotional deficits in his childhood fostered insecurity and a reclusive nature, leaving him with a manner that exudes charm but no warmth, and a style that inspires respect but little affection. Whether he will now outgrow his defensiveness and modify his public persona to cultivate a common touch, nobody can predict. If he can deliver, these problems may prove to be of little consequence. History would have judged Richard Nixon, a leader with similar traits, a very successful president, had he not allowed his obsession with enemies to drive him into a tangle of colossal blunders.
The past now is prologue, the future everything for millions of South Africans who still live with poverty, unemployment, crime and daily exposure to gross inequalities of wealth and opportunity. South Africa's constitution gives Mbeki two five-year terms to find and implement workable solutions. He has told the electorate that he means business, and no one can doubt that the ANC's landslide at the polls gives him a powerful mandate for bold policies.
Three trade-offs with enormous policy implications face Mbeki's government: justice versus racial reconciliation, African advancement versus the ANC's historical commitment to colour-blindness, and growth versus equity in the economic sphere. On the first two, Mbeki has sent strong signals that he will shift away from the emphasis on reconciliation and nonracialism that marked Mandela's tenure as president, as well as Mbeki's own masterful but not always popular manoeuvres to woo whites from the mid-1980s onward.
On the growth-equity dilemma, although Mbeki speaks eloquently of easing the plight of the poor, his clear choice is for policies that put economic growth first, with faith that a rising tide will lift all boats. This preference has not endeared him to the trade unions that have dominated the ANC's left wing since the fade-away of the Communist Party. But by nominating COSATU's president for a provincial premiership, Mbeki moved to throw the unions off stride before the ink was even dry on the ballot papers. "Mbekiavelli" one pundit dubs him. And as the euphoria passes, the nation settles back for a game of wait-and-see.
* The writer teaches political science at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of four books on South African politics.
