AJE - update 31st Dec

Kenya is bigger than (its 2 big) presidential candidates

As I begin to type out this piece media reports reaching this part of the world state that counting at most polling stations is complete and that voter turnout was very high. That is certainly very uplifting.

However, latest media reports also state that the two big camps in this elections seem at the verge of declaring war, with their officials complaining vehemently about alleged suspicious activities. That is very worrying.

In many senses, Kenya is at yet another watershed moment where its patriots have been called upon to rise to the challenge, in this case the tough democratic challenge of choosing its next government.

Only 24 to 36 hours ago reports in Kenyan and international media were that elections were conducted in a very efficient manner save for a few incidences. However, only a few hours ago, reports changed pointing to the pockets of vandals emerging in different parts of the country, threatening to plunge the country into a dangerous downward spiral of violence.

While this may be the first time elections in Kenya have been this tight and stakes this high, its definitely not a world first. Citizens in other countries have walked down similar paths and, in many cases, portrayed maturity beyond expectation.

Only 7 years ago in the United States, George Bush and Al Gore were in the tightest election race that country had witnessed in more than 150 years. In percentage terms, the difference between the two candidates was 0.6% in the popular vote and using an electoral system, the votes were 271 versus 266. Bush won the electoral vote by a margin of 7 but lost the popular by a margin of 0.6% and yet was declared a winner. The stakes in the US were high, in many senses, much higher than in Kenya. Not only have democrats and republicans been political opponents for many many more decades (since the 1820s), but the winner of that election would then become leader of the the undisputed global economic and military superpower.

Even though there was much debate during and immediately after the announcement of the winner, did the country descend into chaos? No! Did people protest? Yes! Did they turn violent? No! Did they loot and plunder? No! Political opponents in that country, in the face of the most controversial election result in more than 150 years, displayed political maturity, having realized the nation was bigger than both presidential candidates.

Going even further back in history to the mid 1990s, in Tanzania, the ruling party at the time was going through a difficult transition period trying to choose it's next set of leadership. There was a very close contest between 2 party presidential candidates, so close it threatened the very core of party. The late Mwalimu Nyerere, at that time a retired president of both the country and party, stood from amongst the party electorate and proceeded to share some of his immense wisdom which eventually broke the deadlock and demonstrated that the internal party systems had enough political maturity to deal with democratic hurdles.

Over the last few weeks, the Kenyan presidential race has been compared to that of the recent ANC policy conference where Zuma allegedly trounced Mbeki. I say allegedly because the analogy has, in many instances, been overstated. For one, unlike our presidential election, both Mbeki and Zuma belong to the same party and have both been in the party for more than 50years, more than 30 of those in senior leadership positions. Secondly, they have both worked together very closely in various high-stake projects including, in the early 1990s negotiating with the Inkatha party during pre-election period. What may also not be common knowledge is that the ANC also (not so publicly) tasked Mbeki and Zuma to negotiate with elements of the Afrikaner military structures. Additionally, it seems most people don't realize that this close working relationship didn't end when Zuma lost his job as Deputy President of the country. In fact, every Monday since 1997 when they joined the ANC's top leadership, the two would meet with other top ANC leaders during the weekly Party's governing council meetings. Lastly, as demonstrated during the recent policy conference, the two individuals have the utmost respect for each other. Indeed when Zuma was announced the winner, they both spontaneously walked to the front of the conference hall and went on the hug before Mbeki left the stage. Of course, Zuma, during his closing speech referred to Comrade Mbeki as "a comrade, a friend and brother" This is confusing for many people who think they were sworn enemies. What they don't realize is that it was Mbeki that first taught Zuma how to use a gun in the 1970s and that the two, through the apartheid South African state's machinations, they and others were once caught in Swaziland and the two of them spent several nights in a cell together awaiting extradition and it was only through pressure from such countries as Sweden that they didn't end up South Africa. Had they been extradited, there's no doubt South Africa's liberation history would have been very different.

One of the key questions Kenyan wananchi are asking themselves is what is the way forward? Apparently the ECK has halted counting. Are we at an impasse? How long will it last? How will we survive? Does the country come to a standstill?

Kenyans have a thing to learn from Belgium which has definitely broken the world record at political impasse. On the 10th of June 2007, Belgian citizens voted in federal elections and within the next day or two it became apparent there was no outright winner therefore no new government. Immediately the first of what would develop into several rounds of negotiations began around forming a government. What was thought would take a few days, a week at most lasted more than 6 months! It is only on the 17th of December was an interim government put in place. Did the nation descend into chaos? No! Infact, save for European media houses, this remarkable display of political maturity was not carried beyond national boundaries.

How long can Kenya's political impasse last? A few hours? A few days?

Are we in danger of disintegrating into chaos? Yes! Should we? No! For the Kenya's sake we shouldn't.

There's no doubt the stakes in Kenya the highest they have been since independence. However, we must remember a number of things. First, even though politicians and their funders have put a lot of financial and other resources into the campaigns, the bigger issue to bear in mind is that all these resources were first and foremost used to facilitate the democratic process, albeit at high personal cost. Should any politician then not remember the bigger picture as they spew vitriolic utterances against real and perceived opponents, then we the citizens should realize they could be driven by personal rather than altruistic desires.

Secondly, it would seem that perceived ethnic differences have clouded many people's abilities for rational thought. Kenya has been independent for more than 40yrs, with several generations of its citizens having grown up in a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environments. Yet as Philip Ochieng eloquently put it almost a month ago "Every time we approach the General Election, tribal emotion takes over and all our mental and manual energy goes into maligning, maiming and even killing one another. And what for? For the sake of individuals whose only service, when they enter Parliament, will be to clean up our Treasury and make us groan even more plaintively" This situation is highly undesirable. Kenya has already had painful episodes of ethnic clashes, albeit politically motivated, prior to every election since 1992. Yet the danger during this election impasse threaten to erupt into violence that would overshadow all previous incidences a thousand-fold.

Regardless of how high the stakes are for politicians, we need leaders who look beyond their interest to get into parliament and control national resources, and rather care more about the state of the nation.

We need leaders who will not incite people to taking up arms. There's a lesson to learn from the incitements by certain politicians in the early 1990s in South Africa, leading to more people dying of black-on-black violence in a period of a few years than all people dying from the apartheid machinery since the 1950s. Kenya needs a different kind of political leadership. We need leadership that is willing to, like Belgium, spend time negotiating for the future of the country. After all, many of these politicians, regardless of party affiliation are, at worst, cordial to each other whenever they meet in private and, at best, a few are actually business associates.

Kenya is not the first country in the world to experience tensions. Other nations have had years, decades and in a few of them, even centuries of tensions as a result of ethnic, cultural or religious differences that are played out in various political arena. South Africa, in the early 1990s was at a knife's edge for more than 2 years of the CODESA negotiations. This process broke down several times, witnessed the worst internal violence the country had ever and possibly ever experience and the shell shocking high profile assassination of Chris Hani. Yet, that country emerged from that tumultuous process with its first democratic election in April 1994.

Should we wait till people start burning other people's houses? Should we wait till there's a high profile assassination (as has just happened in Pakistan)? Should we watch as sections of the media spew ethnically incited vitriol? Do we remember what role the media played prior to the 1994 massacre, one of the worst incidences of genocide the world has seen in recent times?

Political maturity is realizing that we all sing the same national anthem. The second verse aptly reads

Amkeni ndugu zetu

Tufanye sote bidii

Nasi tujitoe kwa nguvu

Nchi yetu ya Kenya

Tunayoipenda

Tuwe tayari kuilinda.

Are we ready to defend, not just personal or partisan interests at huge cost to the nation? The 3rd verse reads

Natujenge taifa letu

Ee, ndio wajibu wetu

Kenya istahili heshima

Tuungane mikono

Pamoja kazini

Kila siku tuwe na shukrani.

Do we believe "Kenya yastahili heshima?" If yes, then we must go beyond partisan war mongering. We must learn from the painful lessons other nations have had to go through. We must start behaving maturely just like nations like Belgium have demonstrated.

After all, Kenya is much bigger than the sum of all its parties, and is certainly much bigger than its 2 big presidential candidates!

AJE - election assessment

AJE - inside story (part 2)

AJE - inside story (part 1)

46664 concert 1st Dec 2007 - Madiba's speech

"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Govan Mbeki (part 2)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 766 - 767

At tend minutes past two on the morning of Thursday 30 August 2001, Govan Mbeki died of congestive cardiac failure, at his home in Summerstrand in Port Elizabeth. He was 91 years old. His final request to Dr. Mamisa Chabula – his doctor and companion in the years since his release – had been to be wrapped in his favorite ANC blanket and cap. His last words, Chabula reported to the media, were: ‘Misa, its’ been a long journey.’

Dr Chabula is a prominent Port Elizabeth personality. In her early fifties at the time of Govan Mbeki’s death, she ran the largest private practice in the township of Motherwell, was a senior city health official, had either children who looked upon Govan Mbeki as a father, and had received national recognition for her tireless activism for the reform of Xhosa circumcision rituals. When we met in her somewhat grand suburban home a few months after Mbeki’s death, she talked with the same engaging fluency about the benefits of the Malaysian Tara circumcision clamp as she did about her years with the man she identified, publicly, as ‘more of a parent than a patient to me.’

‘In all the years of dealing with the Old Man,’ she said to me, ‘I never heard him say, “I miss so and so.” But a few days before he died, he said to me, “Misa, I miss Thabo.” It was at that point I knew that he was finally going.’

The timing could not have been worse for Thabo Mbeki. In its ongoing battle with the ANC over macro-economic policy, COSATU had called a national anti-privatisation strike to coincide exactly with the UN World Conference Against Racism, which Mbeki was hosting in Durban. On the day Mbeki received the call to come and say goodbye to his father, he had posted one of his angriest blogs yet, accusing the labour union of using workers as ‘cannon fodder’ against their own liberation movement, and of joining hands with the racist right wing.

Now, as Mbeki flew with Zanele down to Port Elizabeth on 26 August to see his father, he would have read the comments in the Sunday papers, by union leaders accusing him and his government of an assault on popular democracy; of betraying its roots and selling out to a ‘right-wing middle class.’ The GEAR wars had come to a head – in the week in which Govan Mbeki was dying. Never had public acrimony between the governing ANC and its alliance partners to the left been so severe.

The Mbekis landed in Port Elizabeth at lung time; in the most difficult week, yet, of his presidency, Thabo Mbeki spent hours with his father. When I asked him, later, what they spoke about, his answer was ‘practical things’, nothing ‘spectacular’. He then reminded me, unsolicited, that ‘we were not that kind of closeness of an entity that grows up together;, and that the Mbeki children had been raised ‘to be used to being without [our parents]’ because of the dangers of their political activism. ‘But it didn’t mean the relations broke down…So my father, for instance, I can’t remember him asking any questionabout how I was doing in the ANC leadership or the government and so on. It was always assumed that unless I wanted to raise some issue with him, everything is going fine. And both parents would always insist, “Sure he’s our son, but, we surrendered him to the nation a long time ago.”

Still, Mamisa Chabula remembers that Mbeki left the Summerstrand home filled with sadness. He wanted to move his father to Pretoria, to the comforts – and, presumably, final resting-place status – of the Presidency. When the old man demurred, Dr Chabula explained, ‘Old people, when they know it’s their time, they don’t want to go to an unfamiliar environment.’

‘You have everything on earth,’ she heard the president say, talking about himself. ‘You want to help your father…’

Political satire - Hilary vs Obama

Goodnight Mr Bean

"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Govan Mbeki (part 1)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 71-72

You have been a father to all our people, but you have never been a father to me.’ This was what Nelson Mandela’s eldest daughter, Maki, said to him upon his release from prison in 1990. Her words echo Moeletsi Mbeki’s : ‘My father was busy educating the nation. We had our mother.’

But, unlike Govan Mbeki, Mandela has publicly castigated himself for not having been a better parent and husband. His biographer Anthony Sampson write that he ‘blames himself’ for the fact that he had ‘sacrificed’ his family ‘for his political purpose’, and that he underwent some kind of redemptive process while in jail: ‘He learned about sensitivities and how to handle the fears and insecurities of others, including his Afrikaner warders. He was sensitized by his own sense of guilt about the family and friends he had used during his political career.’ It was this sensitization, says Sampson, that led to Mandela’s extraordinary capacity for reconciliation upon his release.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela: the latter’s life project of personal reconciliation is unique, and Govan Mbeki was far more typical of his class and his generation in not going through a similar process of remorse – and thus self-knowledge – about his relationship with his family. Unlike Mandela, who after his release talked either with sadness or with love about his family, Govan Mbeki carried, to his death, deep and unresolved emotions on the subject, emotions he found hard to articulate.

As ideological and intellectual as Mandela was intuitive and emotional, Govan Mbeki found impenetrable refuge in the struggle, with its Marxist understanding of affective family relationships as sentimental, bourgeois, and ultimately distracting from the revolutionary matter at hand; of ‘the family’, then, as a political rather than a biological unit. When I asked him, for example, how he coped with the fact that his youngest son, Jama, and his grandson, Kwanda (Thabo’s son), disappeared without a trace while supposedly in exile in the 1980s, he responded once more with literature. He could not remember the name or the author of the poem or even the exact lines, but he was clear on the sentiment: ‘When you go into war, if your comrade in front of you falls off his horse, you must not stop and weep. You jump over his into battle. You learn not to weep.’

Likewise, when Govan Mbeki went off with other members of the internal leadership in January 1999 to meet the ANC-in-exile in Lusaka, he was asked by a reporter at Jan Smuts airport how he felt about seeing his son Thabo. ‘Not much finer than seeing the others,’ he retorted. ‘You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade!’ A son is mere biological appendage; to be called a comrade, on the other hand, is the highest honour.

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma (part 3)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 614

On Saturday 7 August 1993, Thabo Mbeki slipped out of an ANC meeting, accompanied by Jacob Zuma. It was a full year after Joe Slovo had published his ‘sunset clauses’ outlining shared rule, and four months after the assassination of Chris Hani by renegade right-wingers had shocked both sides into resolving their outstanding differences and setting an election date of April 1994. But if consensus had been reached inside the tent of negotiations, there were still major problems in the wilderness beyond, and Mbeki – who had become a movement’s outrider – had been tasked to deal with them. Now, on a warm spring afternoon, he and Zuma were to met Jurgen Kogl, who whisked them off, in a hired Fiat Uno, to a pigeon racing club in Lynnwood, east of Pretoria.

Kogl was connected by marriage to Afrikaner military establishment, and –in the aftermath of the Hani assassination – had volunteered to connect the ANC to the saber-rattling right wing. He had arranged a secret rendezvous at the pigeon club with three prominent leaders of the Afrikaner secessionist movement, including the military hero and former head of the South African army, General Constand Viljoen. Like an Old Testament prophet, Viljooen had come out of retirement to lead the Afrikaner people to freedom. Leaving his Standerton farm to stump across the country, he commanded huge numbers and corralled strong emotions, and boasted of the force of fifty thousand men he would be able to muster in the name of Afrikaner self-determination. He formed the Afrikaner Vryheidsfron (AVF), or ‘Freedom Front’, to mobilize the Afrikaner population in favour of a volkstaat- an independent Afrikaner state.

Political satire - former Kenyan President in the US

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma (part 2)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 603

If Mbeki’s comrades and colleagues have always been ambivalent about him – have always laced their fear for him and even dislike of him with avowed admiration – then this is clearly expressed in the way he was received at the July 1991 conference. While they were not yet prepared to anoint him Mandela’s deputy, they nonetheless accepted the absolute necessity for him to be in leadership. In the vote for the new National Executive, each of the voting delegates was required to vote for the 50 people of their choice, and 1824 of them – 93% - put Mbeki on their list. This put him just behind Chris Hani – who came first with 94.7% of the delegates’ support – and ahead of Slovo, with 89.8%.

Immediately following the conference, the new leadership gathered to select its National Working Committee (NWC), responsible for the day-to-day running of the organization. This time, in the election by their leadership peers, Mbeki came first with 66 votes and Hani second with 65. For Mufamadi, ‘it was as if the conference delegates and then the NEC were saying to Chris and Thabo, “We want both of you equally. It’s not like we’re choosing one or the other…”

But what happened next can only be described as a palace coup. It took place in the first week of August, while Mandela was away (on a visit to Cuba), as were both Mbeki and Zuma, attending a conference at Cambridge. Zuma heard about it on BBC and went rushing over to tell his comrade: the new man, Ramaphosa, had convened the NWC while they were away, and had sidelined them! Zuma had been relieved of his position as head of ANC intelligence and replaced by the UDF leader Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota, a man with no previous intelligence experience. And Mbeki had been replaced, as head of negotiations, by Ramaphosa himself.

This, Jacob Zuma would later allege, was the beginning of the ‘political conspiracy’ by enemy agents that would eventually see him charged with corruption and fired by Mbeki in 2005. The truth is that if Zuma was the victim of a conspiracy, it was one – by Slovo, Hani and their supporters, rather than by an enemy agents – against Mbeki and his entire negotiations team, of which Zuma was a part. Slovo in particular had lobbied intensively to replace Mbeki with Ramaphosa: ‘There was a deeply held feeling from JS that this guy was going to sell us out,’ one former UDF leader now on the NEC told me. ‘And we sort of agreed. Thabo’s problem was that he did not communicate properly with his own team, and so people suspected him of not giving them the whole story. He had incredible ideas – whenever he did articulate them, I found myself in agreement with him. But the problem was that he didn’t articulate them often enough. He didn’t want his ideas to be challenged, so didn’t submit them to the market. If he’d spent more time with us I’m sure he would have convinced us. But he didn’t. He was a Lone Ranger. I think he say himself like Madiba in jail. And he paid for that.’

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma (part 1)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 415

Jacob Zuma described Thabo Mbeki’s ascendancy to me as follows: ‘Because of his drafting skills, he came to command the ANC.’

Political satire - Obama vs Gulliani

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and OR Tambo

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 415

Mbeki had been Tambo’s unofficial wordsmith since the early 1970s; now that he was political secretary, the position was formalized. Mbeki’s ghostwriting career began, we will recall, when he was a little boy writing letters for illiterate peasants. Now, through speech-writing, he found in adult life the perfect vehicle for his particular combination of diffidence and intellect; his desire to put his thoughts, but not his personality, into the world. Mbeki understood-as did Tambo-that the job was particularly difficult; it required, as Barbara Masekela put it to me, ‘a new public diplomacy’ to be minted for the liberation movement.

As befitted a teacher of mathematics and a choirmaster, Tambo was notoriously precise, and believed that this was a revolutionary imperative. ‘Once he uttered a particular word, it had to communicate what he meant it to communicate,’ Mbeki told Tambo’s biographer Luli Callinicos. So perilous was the ANC’s position – so much at stake – that ‘we couldn’t allow for a situation in which it would be read differently from what he intended to say; because we had to be very precise about what you had to convey.’

The tales of such obsessive perfectionism are the stuff of ANC legend; they have an almost novelistic texture to them. To prepare for an address, Tambo would get several comrades to draft speeches for him, keeping them up all night for days on end, sending an entire draft back to be retyped because of a split infinitive or a superfluous comma. No matter how many different people were set to a drafting task, Josiah Jele told me, ‘whatever came in had to be finalized by Thabo Mbeki’ even before Tambo got to look at it. If presented with more than one final draft, the ANC leader would invariable choose Mbeki’s (although Pallo Jordan sometimes got a look-in, as did Jack Simons), and this position became a source of enviable power.

Nhlanhla told me about the first time he encountered this process, in the early 1970s, working on an address to commemorate the ANC’s 60th birthday: ‘We worked for two weeks on it. Coming from Moscow, we thought we had all the ideas. We had all the training. But here was this chap from the West!...Thabo was amazing. At the end of the day you found yourself collecting rather than drafting, and feeding into the mainstream that was Thabo.’

Once Henry Makgothi, the ANC’s education secretary, stormed out of a meeting saying, ‘It’s impossible to satisfy OR! The only one who can satisfy him is Comrade Thabo!’ Recounting this adecdote, Sipho Makana smiled when I suggested that Tambo’s protégé had taken on his mentor’s obsessive attention to detail; his perpetual air of dissatisfaction. Perhaps, Makan suggested delicately, ‘Thabo hasn’t found his own “Thabo” yet?’ It was an implication I heard again and again: there is nobody, in Mbeki’s inner circle, on whom he can rely as completely as Tambo relied on him.

‘You find this among a number of exiles,’ Frene Ginwala once said. ‘…We come out of this tradition where, our whole lives, we just work, work, work, work.’ This ethos is fetished, most of all, in the workaholism of Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki, passed on from political father to son as a gene of leadership rather than simply a character train. Listen, for example, to Sanki Mthembi-Mahanyele on Mbeki; ‘He can work throughout the day, and through the night without any problem, and the same was the case with OR. Call it culture, call it a habit if you want, of those who had to lead and direct the struggle…’

What is fascinating is how different this self-perception is from the way exiled leaders were often perceived from the MK camps – as living the easy, lazy life of aeroplanes, conference and hotels. Unlike, say Samora Machel or Robert Mugabe, Tambo spent more time lobbying the world’s capitals rather than in the bush with his soldiers, and his own family was safely ensconced in north London. And so Tambo, like Mbeki, was vulnerable to the slur; perhaps, then, the workaholism legend around both men developed as a defense against such allegations.

Which is not to say that there isn’t truth to it. Tambo’s own Swedish neurologist believes that the debilitating stroke he suffered in August 1989 was a consequence, in part, of overwork. A decade into the democracy for which Tambo martyred himself, members of the ANC exile community often expressed a concern for Mbeki by referring back to this: ‘In exile,’ Sipho Makana said to me shortly before his own death in 2003, ‘people would complain, “We get into bed, OR is burning the midnight oil; we wake up early the next morning, OR hasn’t even been to bed yet. That’s why he got his stroke,” We have the same feeling with Thabo today. He does all the drafts himself.’ The comparison was made to me so many times – from Nelson Mandela himself down to cleaning staff and drivers – that I because convinced it carried a subtext: an annoyance that Mbeki’s own obsessive perfectionism was an expression of his dissatisfaction with their work, and an anxiety that they would never live up to his expectations.

Mr Bean featuring Shaggy

"Dream deferred" - the ANC dilemna

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 690-692

It did seem, in the late 1990s, that the ANC government actually wanted a confrontation with COSATU and the SACP; that it was taking a hard line over GEAR so as to project a confidence it did not, in reality, possess, and so demonstrate that it was up to the job of governing. The ghost of Latin America loomed large among the ANC's economic managers; specifically, the 'macro-economic populism' of democratically elected rulers who had spent their economies into ruin in an effort to make good on their election promises. Mbeki and especially Manuel believed that a line needed to be drawn: a government should not be in perpetual negotiation with its social partners. The ANC thus resorted to what the economist Stephen Gelb has described as 'reform from above with a vengeance' - instituting a hard line policy precisely to show that it was not susceptible to popular pressure.

The result was a crippling contention that would hobble Mbeki's entire term in office. Mbeki suggested to me that the ANC mishandled things, in part, out of a sense of desperation and dis empowerment. But one might see the conflict as inevitable, a fracture not just between 'centrists' and 'leftists' or between 'centralists' and popular democrats', or-as the left would have it-between the workers and the new bosses, but between those whose job was to run the state, and those whose job it remained to represent the people. GEAR heralded the shattering end to an experiment in co-operative governance that had been developing since the unbanning in the 1990, and its replacement by a new hegemony - the grabbing hold of the reins of state by an ANC now in government rather than fighting for freedom.

Out of this conflict grew two competitive narratives, both emanating from within the alliance itself. The first of these extends the ANC's story of struggle, and pits an elite vanguard of forward-thinking modernizers against the appetites of global capital, the recalcitrance of an inherited public service, and the easy populism of rabble-rousers who do not understand the complexity of the global economy. It is the kind of story by which Thabo Mbeki defines himself, a story that claims to redeem the lost legacies of Africa's uhuru generation.

The opposing narrative sees the ANC government as the betrayal, rather than the redemption, of such legacies; it is a tale of weakness and cowardice at best, and venality at worst. This is the impimpi story we know, already, from the ANC's days in exile. Convinced that the ANC leadership has betrayed its own constituency through a Faustian neocolonial pact with the private sector, this story justifies its pessimism with often credible indicators of social dysfunction and increasing human distress. This story's punchline, usually implied but increasingly explicit, is that the South African majority is worse off, under an ANC government, than it had been before.

The hero and the impimpi are the two archetypes by which the freedom fighter defines his identity. And so, while these two competing narratives of the South African transition might have recourse to the empirical data of social research, they are also rooted in the soil of myth; they are thus impossible to adjudicate as they relentlessly pit indicators of progress and regress against each other. The one side will trumpet the extraordinary number of houses that the government built against all odds in its first ten years; the other will counter with the backlog that still exists. The one side will praise the achievements of social welfare grants while the other will decry the absence of a basic income grant. Statistics become chimeric, and the subjects of all this contention - the people of South Africa themselves - tend to get lost in the haze. For every retrenched worker that COSATU digs up, the government will parade a proud new homeowner who no longer has to walk twenty kilometres a day to fetch clean water; for every distressed shack-dweller the social movements claim to represent, the ANC will counter-exhibit a passionate comrade, enthusiastically going to the poslls to return Thabo Mbeki with an ever-increasing majority.

The conundrum of South African politics is that these two subjects are usually the same person, increasingly disaffected and increasingly loyal to the ANC at the same time...

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 3)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 707-708

When I asked Mbeki about his differences with Mandela while in office, he conceded only one real problem: conflicting approaches to racial reconciliation. Mbeki felt that the way Mandela dealt with the issue negatively affected his own acceptability as his successor, and thus his ability to effect real transformation. South Africa just could not 'sustain a view of national reconciliation of the kind of which the media approved' and with which 'Madiba co-operated', he told me. I have seldom seen Mbeki as exercised, or as impassionated, as when he spoke about this:'You just couldn't do it! It was wrong! Just wrong!'

It all came to a head jsut a few weeks after the Saro-Wiwa affair in February 1996, when the rand crashed on the back of unfouded rumour that Mandela was dying. A Sunday Times editorial drew attention to the vulnerability of the South African economy and its dependance on Mandela's wellbeing: the collapse of the rand was 'a reminder that his extra-ordinary stature as a peacemaker and conciliator remains the pivot of international confidence in our future'. And given that 'we carry on our backs the burden of Africa's failure', Thabo Mbeki was just not up to the job of maintaining Mandela's legacy: 'He simply does not inspire confidence...Where Mr Mandela projects warmth of spirit and generosity, Mr Mbeki appears manipulative and calculating...Where Mr Mandela inspires affection, even love, Mr Mbeki evokes uncertainty and fear.'

...

For Mbeki, the Sunday Times editorial was the sharpest example yet of the 'one good native' syndrome. Referring to it a few years later in his online newsletter, he wrote about how 'the cynics and the sceptics...tried to scare the people about their future...pretending that President Mandela, with his 'magic', was the only person capable of guaranteeing the better future for our country...' Now in office, Mbeki seemed to fix his political psyche on two things; first, that, despite national reconciliation, whites were still racist in that they did not believe that blacks were equal to the task of running the country; second that he would prove them wrong.

Political satire - Kibaki and Raila

AJE - Everywoman part 2

AJE - Everywoman part 1

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 2)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 702-704

Even if Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki did not find, in each other, some imagined political father and son - or even, more simply, a comfortable intimacy - they developed an effective working relationship. This is evident in the way Mandela handed over so much of the stuff of governance to his deputy, and in their agreement on the key issues: most notably, as we have seen, on economic policy, and on how to manage the political fall-out with their alliance partners.

Inevitably, given Mbeki's history as the ANC's ranking diplomat, their first major public clash happened in the arena of foreign policy, and although it appeared to be a brushfire - lit with callous malice by the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha - it pointed to a problem that would become the fault line of their relationship, and would eventually cause it to break down almost entirely.

Not suprisingly, given the 'ugly shoes' dynamic, this problem had to do with reputation: specifically, the way the negative press about Mbeki seemed to accumulate in an almost inverse proportion to the adulation heaped upon his superior. Mbeki called it 'Mandela exceptionalism' when he was being polite; 'the one good native' when he was not. It went like this: Africa was a basket case, and Mandela the only good leader ever to come out of it; once he went, South Africa would sink like the rest of the continent into the mire of neo-colonial corruption and decay. It seemed to Mbeki that Mandela was actually colluding in the world's impression that he was 'the one good native', the consequence of which was the perception that all other blacks - Mbeki included - were incompetent.

Kenya's first lady slaps an mc during a state function

Political satire - Kenya's president and first lady at a sevens rugby match

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 1)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 699-700

The overriding legacy of the Mandela presidency - of the years 1994 to 199 - is a country where the rule of law was entrenched in an unassailable Bill of Rights, and where the predictions of racial and ethnic conflict did not come true. These feats, alone, guarantee Mandela his sanctity. But he was a far better liberator and nation-builder than he was a governor. In contrast, Mbeki marketed himself as the technocrat, truth-telling antidote to the madness and the magic - the scattershot celebrity - of the Mandela era.

Mbeki saw his mission as effecting real transformation - the flip side to the coin of reconciliation, as he repeatedly - even it this meant disrupting the comfort of the white South African population Mandela had gone to such lengths to reassure. Mandela will go down in history as the man who, like Martin Luther King before him, gave the world a dream, while Mbeki's legacy is both more complex and more substantive: on his watch, South Africa found itself strung between deferring the dream and redeeming it.

A key difference between the two was Mbeki's eschewal of a kind of African paternalism that prevailed in the ANC despite its progressive political traditions. 'OR was a daddy,' a prominent member of the ANC said to me. 'It's like that with Madiba too. He makes it his business to know the names of your wife and children and to ask after them, even if he has never met them. Thabo doesn't do that. And so, among some comrades, there might be complaints that he doesn't invite people to sit and talk, "under the tree", like the old African patriarch'.

An intelligence operative who has worked closely with Mbeki for many years used strikingly similar language:'If people dislike Mbeki, it's because he is the anti-patriarch. He doesn't have a family. He's not a "who's your daddy?" kind of guy. He doesn't want to be anyone's daddy. He wants to engage with you as an equal, and you're useless, he'll tell you. He's not going to protect you or soften things for you because you're his child and he should thus feel an obligation to nurture you.'

People obeyed Mandela because they loved him, because he was their benevolent father: Mbeki could never command allegiance from such a wellspring , and so he needed to earn it elsewhere - people had to respect him, even fear him. If Mandela, the patriarch, loved us despite our many flaws. Mbeki required us to prove ourselves to him. If Mandela was a passionate player, Mbeki would have to be a skeptical and rather aloof observer.

SA Magistrate goes AWOL

A case where a magistrate continued to draw a salary while allegedly attending traditional classes to being a Sangoma will no doubt rekindle the debate about the extent to which the South African civil service can continue to accommodate public servants that want to honour their African traditions.

An article on the issue has just been published by the SA Times

Magistrate gets boot after 9-month Awol
Philani Nombembe	Published:Dec 09, 2007
Parliament has fired a magistrate who absconded from work for nine months and kept drawing a salary. Themba Mathyolo is the first magistrate to be sacked for failing to arrive for work at the New Law Court in Port Elizabeth. Colleagues presiding over civil cases at the court last saw him at his desk in February. Mathyolo made a brief reappearance in May to deliver a stack of medical certificates, from nine doctors, who treated him for a variety of ailments, including flu and headaches. He continued to draw his salary — R350 000 a year — between March and November. Court officials tried in vain to contact Mathyolo and eventually reported him to the Magistrates’ Commission. “He failed to report for duty since February 28. The Magistrates’ Commission recommended that he be removed from office on the basis of misconduct due to his failure to report for duty,” said Danie Schoeman, secretary for the commission. Lamla Makaba, a senior magistrate at the court said: “There are rumours that Matyholo went to train as a sangoma but he did not submit any leave forms for that.” Mathupa Mokoena, chairman of Parliament’s select committee on security and constitutional affairs confirmed that Mathyolo was fired last month. “The Magistrates’ Commission reported Mathyolo’s disappearance to the committee and requested that the minister [of Justice] should remove him from office. I wrote him a letter and sent it to his house. He was supposed to respond within 21 days but did not and as a committee we considered the request to remove him from office,” he said. “We were informed by the court that it had heard from family members that he had gone for a ritual to become a sangoma,” said Mokoena, adding that Mathyolo was entitled to appeal against his dismissal. Port Elizabeth attorney Francois Swanepoel said several cases which Mathyolo had been presiding over would have to go to trial again, entailing “ lengthy waiting periods and involves incurring of further unnecessary legal costs”. Efforts to get comment from Mathyolo proved fruitless. There's no doubt this is a developing story and more is yet to come.

"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa in the early 1990s

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
pg. 605

Cyril Ramaphosa was a decade younger than Mbeki, Hani and Zuma. Of these three, the one he most closely resembled was undoubtedly Mbeki. Both were blessed with a formidable intellect and a preternatural strategic nous; both, too were adored by the media and respected by the establishment - Mbeki by the white politicians and businessmen with whom he was tasked to interact; Ramaphosa by the mining bosses he had met across a decades' worth of bargaining tables. Both masked ruthlessness with charm. But whereas Mbeki shied away from conflict, Ramaphosa - never losing this charm or even raising his voice - seemed to relish putting the knife in. He was not much taller than Mbeki, but significantly stouter, and something about his bigness of personality - his large, easy laguh and backslapping affability - made him fill whatever space he entered. You would be aware of Mbeki in the corner of a room and would be drawn to him for an intense one-on-one encounter; Ramaphosa, however, would be the first person you would see upon entering, usually surrounded by a shimmer of admirers, easy to great but hard to pin down. Ramaphosa came across as voracious and welcoming. Mbeki as ascetic and skeptical. And whereas you often felt you had to prove your work with Mbeki, Ramaphosa instantly made you feel like you were the most important person in the room. In their different ways, though, neither man encouraged intimacy; both were notoriously inscrutable. In their different ways, too, both were focussed and ambitious.

Political satire - Kenya's president and first lady

Ida Odinga speaks