20/09/2008 16:26 -   (SA)

Believing in his own intellectual superiority, President Thabo Mbeki could not accept that he was not trusted implicitly, writes City Press editor in chief Mathatha Tsedu

THE demise of President Thabo Mbeki, sealed this weekend at the NEC meeting of the ANC, has its roots in Mbeki's personality.

Generally accepted as an intelligent man, Mbeki has no time for fools. If he was convinced he was right and the issue was fairly logical to him, he would not bother to explain. He expected everybody to understand.

He also believed people should trust him and that as long as he sat in the chair as president of the republic, he would do nothing that was not legal.

Failure to trust him implicitly angered him. He saw in such absence of trust an accusation that he would consciously do wrong. Many a time he has said to me "but how could this or that editor believe that about the president?" Even when he himself did nothing to explain the issue so the editor would understand, he still expected to be trusted.

It was obviously a naïve attitude and was to some extent also rooted in another problem, being cocooned in the work of the office and losing touch with ordinary people.

The office of president means your life is run by an army of officials representing varied interests. They plan your life to the second and ensure you do what they expect and only that. The result is as president you know only what is in the brief.

A man like Jacob Zuma cut through this tapestry by attending funerals and parties, which Mbeki never really did unless it was official - and he would speak and go, as told to do by his handlers.

The result was a man who was really shocked last October when ANC provinces returned a resounding victory for JZ. Again, his close aides told him they would fix it, and he believed them, refusing to stand down.

The loss at Polokwane was embarrassing and hurt him, but in typical Mbeki style he put his shoulder to the wheel and decided he would serve his term and do his best - until last Friday when Judge Chris Nicholson said what he said, and in so doing gave Mbeki's enemies the ammunition they needed.

Everything came tumbling down, and when the NEC met to endorse what was a fait accompli, Mbeki had few defenders. In the face of the ANCYL president Julius Malema's motor mouth, the ANC NEC did not have enough people to say Mbeki should be given time to get out.

The reason is Mbeki had made enough enemies and not enough friends within the organization he has served his whole adult life and which he led for 10 years.

Who are these enemies? There are at least six categories:

Umkhonto we Sizwe fighters

This group never accepted Mbeki's alleged training in the Soviet Union . They always felt the Lusaka crowd and the politicians had hijacked the ANC. Mbeki was seen as the personification of the political hijacking and marginalization of the military. Inevitable problems with integration were blamed on him, and when the time came, Jacob Zuma tapped into this disgruntlement, bringing veterans to his home in Nkandla, slaughtering a beast and chairing the gripe sessions against the man who had marginalized the military

The Ideologicals

An ANC that was never socialist became even less so under Mbeki. The GEAR policy and what it meant for this shift to the right, and the manner in which it was introduced, without any serious debate within the alliance, was seen by the left-leaning sections of the ANC, SACP and Cosatu as proof that Mbeki was moving rightwing.

From the time in exile, where membership of the SACP was important for upward mobility in the ANC, Mbeki cut down on the party's hegemony. He marginalized its leaders, particularly Blade Nzimande and Cosatu's Zwelinzima Vavi. This led to many NEC members not renewing their SACP membership, including Zuma.

This move by Mbeki was to be one of his major undoings. The antagonized and bruised leftwing linked up with Zuma when he developed his own set of problems with Mbeki. The combination unleashed a movement dedicated to his downfall. Add to these the number of individuals like Pallo Jordaan whose lack of fear to disagree with Mbeki saw them being kicked in and out of government several times.

? The corrupt and greedy

Mbeki maintained the exile view of cadres, people dedicated to the public good and joining the ANC to do just that. Of course this is no longer the case, as the many trials of corruption and media reports of same testify. This saw Mbeki launch the call for a new cadre, which would effectively have been the old exile cadre.

Struggles for power within the ANC emerged as soon as the party went into government, with provinces destabilized because chairing the province was seen as a ticket to the premiership and state resources. To stem this, Mbeki was given powers by the ANC to delink the two positions, the premier no longer had to be chairperson. It was anyone seen by the ANC president as the best candidate. Those who were chairs of provinces when this happened, such as Ace Magashule, were bitter.

The corruption issue was the most difficult for the ANC and Mbeki to deal with. The Scorpions and the police went after those fingered as corrupt, and the more they went for ANC members, the more they were accused of being used to settle political scores (by Mbeki). The manner in which the national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi's case was handled, leading to the demise of NPA head Vusi Pikoli, lent credence to the accusations that those close to Mbeki got special treatment and that they could count on Mbeki to make exceptions.

? The white liberals

White liberals can tolerate almost anything from blacks, but being marginalized out of the information loop and influence is not one of them.

Mbeki moved from being the Gucci revolutionary who could sip whisky and suck his pipe the whole night while talking international and national politics with white liberals in Dakar and Lusaka to being Machiavellian and enigmatic as soon as he stopped this contact.

Fink Haysom, for example, the legal advisor to former president Nelson Mandela, had hoped to stay on and advise Mbeki but the latter not only rejected him but brought in the Black Consciousness lawyer, Mojanku Gumbi, instead. To reject Haysom for Gumbi is not an insult any liberal can stomach.

Mbeki overruled a recommendation by then chief justice Arthur Chaskalson to fill a vacancy in the Constitutional Court in late 1998/99 with Edwin Cameron. Mbeki argued for quota and advised Mandela to appoint Sandile Ncgobo, which was done. But word had already gone out that Cameron would be appointed, and when Ngcobo's name was announced this caused a stir. Mbeki was accused of blocking "the best legal brain in the country".

When Zimbabwe went into a downward spiral and later meltdown, triggered by the forced ejection of white farmers from the land, Mbeki chose to engage the issue through what came to be known as quiet diplomacy. He came to be seen by these white liberals as uncaring because the victims were white. His strong pan-Africanist views were parodied as quintessentially anti-white. That his demise comes in the week he has just sealed the Zimbabwe deal is ironic in the extreme.

Mbeki spoke incessantly about the problem of race in the country, making his now famous two nations analogy of the white rich and the black poor. The more he said this, the more these liberals attacked him as harping on a past long gone and in the process undoing the good that the Madiba years of "inclusivity" had done.

? Africa

Mbeki firmly believes in the need for Africa to stand on her own feet and resolve her own problems. He has immersed himself in problems in various parts of the continent, including Ivory Coast , Sudan , Burundi , DRC and Zimbabwe .

Before Mbeki, problems of former French colonies were resolved in Paris , while those formerly colonized by the Brits would end up in London to make peace. Mbeki's involvement stopped this trend and the French in particular were peeved by this upstart ex UK colony muscling into their area. After all, didn't the French army actually have garrisons in these countries? They told Mbeki to back off, saying he did not understand the West African mentality. They didn't realize the insults were just encouragement for him to do even more.

Other regional leaders, like Senegal 's Abdoulaye Wade, were also angered by Mbeki, leading to a permanent state of war between the two. You could be sure that if Mbeki said anything, Wade would oppose it, as when Nepad was first mooted and Wade produced his own version, which had to be married to Mbeki's.

Libya 's Muamar Ghadaffi was another. Bent on getting Africa to agree to a united government for the whole continent, whose headquarters would be in Libya and led by himself, Mbeki opposed the move and there were even allegations, unproven, that Ghadaffi had channeled funds to Zuma to unseat Mbeki.

? Wider International

On the wider international sphere, Mbeki angered the US and UK by voting against them on a number of issues, including Myanmar and Zimbabwe .

South Africa under Mbeki was seen by these countries as not towing the line laid by them, which was unusual for a developing country. But then Mbeki's economic policies had brought with them enough tax to finance his stance. Unlike many countries on our continent, he could stand up and not have to worry that the education budget would be withheld for not voting as expected.

You could add to this list the many Aids activists who saw his denialist views as problematic. They are not his allies.

So, who were Mbeki's allies? Business in general but black business particularly. They were some of the major beneficiaries of the economic policies Mbeki engineered. The black middle class who also benefited from affirmative action and economic growth were another.

Both these groups, generally described as the thinking class, are important but also paradoxically useless in the trouble Mbeki found himself in. Happy to benefit from his policies, the two classes are no activists who would pound the streets spreading the message. They would do it by sms, and not by the old fashioned people to people talk. Unfortunately, the blue collar worker and the unemployed that comprise the majority of ANC members do not do mxit.

And so, as his situation went from bad to worse, he was virtually alone, out of touch and unable to understand both the speed and the content of the war that was sweeping him out of office in oh so an ignominious way.

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