"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma and the arms deal

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 675-676

While Thabo Mbeki was strong-arming the South African economy away from state spending and towards fiscal austerity, he presided over a parallel process that did exactly the opposite. From 1996 to 1999, he chaired the cabinet subcommittee on arms procurement that put together and approved the purchase of R30 billion worth of military hardware. The ‘arms deal’, as it became known, eventually cost the South African taxpayer almost double that figure owing to the unstable rand; it also mired the ANC government, at the very moment when it was re-establishing moral rule in South Africa, in an interminable bog of messy corruption scandals and investigations, forcing Mbeki to fire his deputy, Jacob Zuma, in 2005, and implicating Mbeki too in multiple allegations of impropriety.

It has never been suggested, by even his bitterest foes, that Mbeki is personally corrupt. But if the arms deal became the poisoned well of post-apartheid South African politics, then it was Mbeki himself who initially – even if with the best intentions – contaminated the water. He championed the arms deal from the outset, with an ardour quite remarkable in one so skeptical of military expansionism during his own time as a freedom fighter. And as the allegations multiplied, he became increasingly strident in his defence of it.