Thought Leader's Unilateral Declaration of Amnesia

ONE CARELESS MOVE LOSES THE WHOLE GAME
Nkosana Zali

A rejoinder to “SA cannot afford a failing presidency at this time,” by Mike Trapido (Thought Leader, 31 May 2008)

The USA I know is led by George W. Bush, whose replacement we await in the November 2008 Election. Bush is serving a second term, into which he was voted by a majority thanks to an uninspiring Democrat campaign and a rejuvenated patriotism amongst a nation that was once screaming for his blood as he marched their heavily-armed sons and daughters onto the Iraqi soil, bombed it, maimed and killed countless Saddam Hussein loyalists as well as innocent civilians. The search for weapons of mass destruction would, like it had been reported before by UN bodies, prove to have been a hoax to rally the American people around a war whose mission they did not know. He defied the world and told her, short of speaking from a black stallion, that, “It’s either you are with us or against us.” Unlike the Oscar winning movies of their Hollywood, the American people could not see that the script was badly written (much like this rejoinder). They bit the bullet and hung on in there as GW Bush stuck like glue in the oval office. His troop could not stay the cause; Chirac, Blair, Howard etc. To think that he is uncomfortable now is to defy logic. He had already defied world logic, and the American logic continued to confuse because he survives to his last day in office. When it comes to Bush, what is has always been. In America what is has always been. They had done it before, impeaching their beloved Clinton but let him stay at the oval office. March their presidents out!?

Gordon Brown just came to peck as his predecessor had left him with six of a seven-roomed house on fire. He would not survive the public disdain that his countrymen had stored for the Labour Party for ganging up with Bush to fight a war that none could prove was for the reasons it was fought for. There were investigators of ‘this war thing’ that died or were suspected of having committed suicide? The British would not, like it is always said of them, stiffen the upper lip on this one. Labour was going to be punished one way or the other. Brown had signed the checks that bankrolled the troops and they even arranged a war adventure for their prince in one of these places of occupation (we thought colonialism is dead). John Major and his party had no ‘charm’ to woo the British with, giving Labour their strongest ever presence in decades. Major had been driven under by the overpowering shadow of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, whose economistic politics had come back to haunt the British years after she left office. Labour rose on the strength of their social democratic (some say, left-leaning) policies which appealed to a Britain reeling from Thatcherism whilst Major’s demise was on the back of policies that they had not conceived but had championed. The Iron Lady had done two parties in whilst in office and long after she had left it. Labour found Britain ungovernable, not in riotous terms but Thatcherism is now a world institution and governments of rich states are intuitively willed by it. (Her son now plays the puppet master on the African soil) For Gordon, things are just brown and soon nothing will ever convince the people of Britain that there will be green pastures for them in his Labour. It’s not Brown’s fault …it has always been just a fault!

My own position is that the premise of any argument, like those who fought struggles before us taught us and had observed of war, is that an understanding of a whole facilitates handling of a part because a part is subordinate to the whole. As in chess and so in war – today’s war against poverty, disease, landlessness and ignorance. And what counts above everything else more than the sentiment is the actual liquidation of these elements. The stripes are earned for fighting, not for seeing the necessity of, the war against poverty. The discomfort of leaders of Britain and the USA cannot be transplanted willy-nilly onto the South African situation. Secondly, the ANC government is, despite all odds, not failing- especially the presidency. Let me posit!

Food and petrol prices are, as economists say, influenced by exogenous factors. Rich nations subsidize their agricultural sector and tilt the market in their favour. No matter how hard-working any farmers in the developing world are, they stand no chance against their counterparts in the developed world. Demand is beginning to eat into supply, and (like the merchants they are) the richer nations tweak the prices higher to benefit from the squeeze they had built up for many moons ago. On the other hand, oil producers wash their hands of rising prices and blame the markets for the hikes. The world is not a fair place for the poor. The ANC government has arrayed a range of forces; Brazil-SA-India, Latin America and Africa, Africa and Asia-Pacific Nations to fight this world trade system that benefits only the rich.

The ANC government represents us in an SADC that is involved in delicate and strenuous but strategic talks that will reduce and remove uneven economic development and all barriers to trade between neighbours within the region and ensure free movement of people, goods and services; whilst engaged in a long-term mission to effect greater and fair trade between and amongst African countries.

What are the challenges? A poor continent, an unstable and degenerating Zimbabwe, a restive South African population that awaits good hospitals, houses, schools and jobs. There is no convenient moment, because poverty cannot oblige; it is neither magnanimous nor judicious. What are the choices? To defect or stay the cause. Run to Australia and point fingers at that pariah that you left behind across the Indian Ocean, profit from it and gain new friends or get actively involved in building a caring society whilst criticizing it where it (you and society) goes wrong. It requires that we dispose of the notion that when we swear across the fence, the neighbour will die of the noise we make. We need to embrace and deploy the enduring abilities South Africans displayed at Tuynhuys, Kempton Park and all the venues where we – the once violently polarized- negotiated a truce which we now seek to break at the sign of umvumbi – the soft rains! We cry that a storm is coming when the state of affairs is otherwise.

In Ireland, the ANC government played a noble role in mediating agreements, almost similar to Kempton Park, within an Irish family that was threatening to bomb itself out of existence. In the DRC, Burundi and everywhere this ANC government was called to share (not remake) its experiences. We cannot remember that even when the DRC went for its election the patchwork that was the resolution of its political stalemate, had continued with a very belligerent force fighting in the east (but it sought a truce when the national tide and world opinion had turned against war)? What we see in Zimbabwe is a ruling party that has been complacent over its country’s political, social and economic situation and then got rudely rattled and awakened by an opposition party whose leader is best known for his sophistry more than what practical survival package he has for his country. If everything and everybody is told as it is or they are, then Morgan Tsvangirai has not been convincing about what rescue package he has for Zimbabwe except the removal of Robert Mugabe. Politics first, then all else will follow? But that does not mean the people of Zimbabwe cannot remove Mugabe and replace him with somebody they want, even if he has no plan. The choice will have been made by them.

Thabo Mbeki is not going to make of Zimbabwe what he pleases or of Mugabe what he is not. Any mediation he is charged with does not extend his rule over to the borders of the DRC, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique and so on. It would be an international relations disaster if he was expected to rule Zimbabwe by world opinion’s decree or proxy. To install Tsvangirai because the USA says he won would stretch it and even precipitate worse onslaughts against good Zimbabweans by Mugabe’s people. The choice, though unpalatable, is to wait (Tsvangirai’s missives to Mbeki notwithstanding). The first round of elections has proven that ZANU-PF is not invincible, after all. It is in a presidential run-off, anyway!

The proposition that the ANC government will release resources to tend to the needs of the masses after the Zimbabweans have left begs the question: Are we saying that government has stopped all its programmes to attend to the daily needs of Zimbabwean exiles? When this government (irony of ironies) hosted the 2001 UN Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, a speaker took a similar line of argument and subsequently had to explain what it was that they meant to say and less about what they actually did say. As a lawyer, Mr Trapido would agree that there is an undercurrent in this reasoning. Xenophobia rests on the devouring, yet often unfounded, fear that a non-resident uses up state resources when a national is in desperate need. You might just as well accuse ‘the exiles’ of pick-pocketing!

Who are the dictators of the SADC? Where are they? Lesotho, Botswana, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia …? Give you Swaziland (and Zimbabwe if you like) but beyond that? Are we again saying more than what we just mention yet again?

I love the magical lyrics that conclude your input. It is almost guaranteed that the resolution of the Zimbabwean problem is a resolution of the South African problem. It is the right approach and it is (on a grand scale) where institutions of the PAP are directing Africa. But do you have to put a sock in it and support a resolution for Zimbabwe, and doubt successors to Mugabe before they take office. Cronyism, nepotism, self-interested dictators, and such things? It is either one is in it or is not. Despite his flaws, Mbeki is in it! He does not have one leg out of the heat, ready to jump. When we label African leaders in ways that our colonizers spoke, then it means that we have not moved. We call for progress half-heartedly. Which begs the last two questions: Why bother about change in Africa when you have concluded the worst about her leaders? Why praise that which cannot be praised (including heroic ANC leaders)?

People may have problems with the present government and our ruling party, the ANC. The ANC has a leader, Jacob Zuma, president of the ANC and working outside government and Thabo Mbeki (ex-officio NEC member of the ANC) doing business in government. If there was a crisis of leadership, the recent Polokwane Conference squashed it and placed whoever wherever. All of these other things will pass!! I am allowed to wave my magic wand, too?

Struggle Is Our Life

Mervyn Bennun: After our Kristalinacht, SA’s brave struggle faces defeat.
Business Day, 30 May 2008 PIC: wikinews.org

A Rejoinder -We can and we should defeat defeat!

Yours is an alternative voice in many ways than one. The xenophobia that has displaced so many of our African brothers and sisters in South Africa riles even the humblest amongst us. Your approach to the problem-and its antecedents- is refreshing. Refreshing because it puts back to the table the nobility of the struggle we fought to be free.

Dialogue has lately gone to cast doubt on the cause? In troubled Zimbabwe, the MDC says the people must liberate themselves from their liberators. Thabo Mbeki, the mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis, is seen as being too soft on his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, because of their struggle history. The MDC can campaign however it wants, but in the end –like in the case of liberation movements that freed other African countries- the struggle that ZANU and ZAPU fought shall remain sullied. It (this struggle) is something we are encouraged to distrust.

The xenophobia attacks in SA have invited nasty remarks. Our leaders have been correctly criticized for waking late in the day when the ‘town was burning.’ Then the leaders were likened to the African leaders of the continent who neglect their own as soon as they ascend to high office. It is said that this is exactly what happens with the so-called strugglers. They engage in gallant fights in the name of the people as a ploy to get into positions of influence so that they can plunder the resources of their countries. Look at Zimbabwe in the hands of liberators, and tell us what stops our country from going the same route when it is in the hands of liberators? The struggle is sullied.

The reflex is to blame one another for errors committed in the here and now, plan for the future and forget the past. This way, the struggle that will be fought will be against our own beliefs, values and the new direction we were intent on charting. We see the folly of our ways in the xenophobic attacks on our fellow Africans, but then we blame our ANC for the degeneration. “Attack, attack, attack!” as former Orlando Pirates FC coach, Victor Bondarenko, used to say. We attack the new country and spit on its leaders, then turn on its history as well as the graves of its fallen martyrs and spit some more. There is no value there. We cannot redeem anything! The struggle loses its meaning. Its songs serve the rage and disdain that we represent in these new times, and like some blogger we are wont to say we ‘cancel the belief that struggle is noble.’

This struggle about which Patrice Lumumba had said, “…no Congolese (substitute for South African) worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that independence has only been won by struggle, a struggle that went on day after day, a struggle of fire and idealism, a struggle in which we spared neither effort, deprivation, suffering or even our blood.

The struggle involving tears, fire and blood is something of which we are proud in our deepest hearts, for it was a noble and just struggle, which was needed to bring to an end the humiliating slavery imposed on us by force.”

Indeed nobody can fault you for feeling the way you do. But everybody should praise you for giving us ‘umkhombandlela’ (direction) in the new South Africa we are building.-

Nkosana Zali, Mogale City GP

Tony Leon possibly hates African people

When Tony Leon addressed a policy conference recently, his diatribe was as loaded as his political irrelevance.

He says that he had perceived Thabo Mbeki to be an efficient backroom manipulator, but was proven wrong (and possibly disappointed even though he had said that a Mbeki bid for presidency of the ANC would be bad news for democracy) by the ANC Polokwane conference-where Mbeki (of 'narrow Africanism') was pipped for presidency by his former deputy president in the SA government, Jacob Zuma. Can a politician's manipulation of events or anything be a virtue?


Then there is the African kleptocracy that Jacob Zuma will foster when he assumes office, couple that with unwanted redistribution in the economy (because Zuma, the 'demagogue', will be pleasing his union and communist friends)? Knowing that John Vorster and PW Botha, under whom his father served as a judge and Tony as a soldier, were born in Africa, does this kleptocracy refer to them as well as previous heads of state? How about Nelson Mandela?

He does not want Zuma to travel the world and reassure investors about South Africa's economic policies going forward. The reason is that 'the demagogue' holds no view on such things. Leon warns the world to be aware (and very afraid) because this uncivilised and needing-restraint Zuma will (like all Africans who are on a wild binge for acquisition of power and property) steal, loot and ...name the vice!


South African workers have for years been championing an onslaught against economic policies of the government and had found no less equal an opponent to them as central government and the DA that was led by Tony Leon. Speed up the GEAR macroeconomic policy and its austerities, he demanded. He charged that the country had a bloated civil service that needed to be trimmed down. How? Privatize state assets! Reduce the head count! For the private sector: the 'harder it is to fire, the less inclined employers will be to hire,' he would exclaim. He was in charge, the leader of the opposition. In the run-up to the 2001 local government elections in South Africa, he had announced that the ANC government could not ignore an opposition that has a defined and important constituency, whether it is a 'political or racial one.' He still saw the country in terms of races. But say affirmative action then he charges reverse racism?

Now the jobs are gone and he is no longer the DA head. Like a Wizard he has found his soul? "Why did we lose jobs in the economy?" he asked, though not in such exact words but in his usual roundabout way. I had penned a letter to the editor of a newspaper wherein I expressed my reservations about Leon's concern for the poor. Maybe I did not understand then that he admired manipulators. It is a twisted thing when a racist pronounces pity for the poor when the expression rests on a desire to aggravate their circumstances. A writer, and liberal for that matter, Pierre Manent said," Pity is selfish...Moreover, pity does not necessarily bring with it the idea of action designed to put an end to the pathetic situation that aroused it in the first place...Pity's chief limitation can be summed up briefly; it does nothing to get us out of the state of nature." In a nutshell, poor people do not ask to be pitied and they detest hypocrisy. Work with them to change their lot in action, not words!!

He tries to atone for himself by praising Zuma for his stance on crime. Yeah!? We are backward and need to be jailed, the xenophobia attacks probably prove his case? He praises Zuma for his stance on Aids. Yeah!? Remember how the slave masters called us an oversexed and promiscuous lot? People are dying of HIV/Aids...and the better the management of the disease then the better it will be for the SADC region. It is altruistic and human to want that but Leon just does not give a damn!

South Africa is going for elections in 2009, and all kinds of things are likely to be said. I bet Leon would not want to be left out of the limelight? How he pines for the 'screen of power.' But, what does it say about his successor?

South Africa can still wait a year for Mbeki to retire!

Mr President: time to go?

Your first page Comment, Sunday Times of the 25th May 2008, got me thinking. I choose to link it to your story on demands for exorcism in Germany? In a way, the Comment suggests that the country is in a grip of evil from which it could only be freed by a dignified retreat or forced removal of the State President from office. Could ‘release’ be the word that sanitizes it?

The xenophobic attacks on fellow Africans cannot and should not be condoned by all right thinking and peace-loving South Africans. The condemnation should be reinforced by stiff punishments against perpetrators that our courts can mete out for offences committed against our brothers and sisters, and against the standing of our country in the world of nations.

However, your Comment tended to conflate issues and I lost its nub somehow. Let me, from the outset, state that an Mbeki apologist, I am not. Neither am I a Zuma fan. What would my wife think if she were to find out that I took vows to be hers forever then all of a sudden I belong to another man? If the two men have camps, then everybody else is on a political excursion. Like all excursions, those who were born and lived the longest at a destination know it better than their visitors. Excursions deliver charming or nasty surprises and when the trip is over some feel like throwing up when they think of their experience whilst others ‘are just dying to go back.’ But who was born and lived the longest in the new South Africa? Who is this fourteen year old new South African who has the expertise to guide us through our many challenges? This is not a parable.

Academics and commentators have suggested in many newspaper articles and on one book about Mbeki that an objective study on his presidency can only be done after he has left office. It is now suggested that he should Blair! Maybe that will hasten a study, which is what interests me, though I wonder which president he will be compared with? Mandela, who served a term? Will it be apartheid leaders? Or will we just look at leaders who led nations in transition? Then the next leader of South Africa, if they serve two terms, will be studied against his or her predecessor, Mbeki.

This call for the State President to step down comes from some leaders of the ANC and its alliance partners. Lately a business leader has joined this call because of a ‘vacuum created by two centres of power’. (When this was posted, the demand had been dropped by Cosatu) The Sunday Times makes its call for Mbeki's resignation for different reasons. But are they different? The suggestion to have a senior leader of the ANC (presumably its Deputy President) take up the reins until the next election is telling!

The Sunday Times could be tabling an innocent proposal, due largely to influences of its independent watchdog role, the vaunted objectivity and its progressiveness. Politics is a different terrain, the editors know that though, and its science teaches us that concepts and notions are not always innocent. Often when ordinary folks like us, and the editors of Sunday Times, make such comments as ‘the president must go’, we propel to heights unimagined what his adversaries have set in motion. One does not need to state verbatim what adversaries to another have said, or blame mere coincidence when you end up holding the gun in another’s war. It is dangerous when that appeal is an emotional one, contingent, for instance, on a subjective understanding of what is South Africa’s lack of ‘international influence’? Adversaries to Mbeki will benefit from something that uncritical, that does not compel and is very much un-Sunday Times? For the paper, the Comment was business unusual! I work on the supposition that the Sunday Times is no Mbeki adversary? It could be … nothing wrong with that. But at least be bold and declare that to remove anything that could be considered surreptitious in the Comment. Or is it starting to put its colours to the mast? Is this something that could verily be the Sunday Time’s own transition?

I doubt that members of the ANC will be persuaded by the tack your paper took on this matter. Even attempts at an extreme exposition; ‘lying’, ‘incompetent’ or ‘women giving birth amid the horror’, the Comment –genuinely founded on xenophobia and its effects on the country- held up a false problem that wants to suggest that the ANC is a blind movement that will let an individual, Mbeki, squander years of its painstaking reconstruction of this country. Essentially, that is what the charge is. It is an unconscious one, nonetheless. It says that the ANC has failed the country for the nine years of Mbeki’s rule, so a call for his removal (without objective assessment of his nine years) is a call for the removal of the ANC as a ruling party – despite an assuaging proposition that its parliamentarians (assumed bored until given an assignment by the media) should vote him out and let the Speaker or Chief Justice do this or that to arrest the morass (i.e. exorcise us). In its diligence, the Sunday Times provides guidance because where there are no leaders there are no cadres?

This other thing, that this transition to new leadership should be pegged prominently in the manner you (or even the ANC leaders who speak on the matter in their personal capacity) have, goes to cast aspersions on the ability of the ANC to transition. Rudiments show that even ANC branches have been transitioning on an annual basis, now they will do so biannually. Contests for leadership become robust and when change of guard should occur, it happens smoothly. Nobody runs away with a branch because they lost. To argue otherwise reduces a branch to a thing, its members to something lifeless and without faculties. Extrapolation therefore says that we reduce the country to a thing, its people to something lifeless and without faculties (especially the capacity to think). The paper does point to an outcry that made Mbeki decide on bringing in the army to stem internecine xenophobic attacks on our African family. We are not dead. How can we let one of 46 million of us loot our aspirations and brains? He must be very powerful! Mbeki might run it, but will not run away with the country because Polokwane outcomes did not favour him. It is a paranoid reaction to seek change in the number one office now. I am sure the point needs to be made. The president of the ANC can sing and dance, but I wonder if he would like your tune? Well, Mbeki will be gone in less than a year. So, do we need this? Got me thinking.