"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.’