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.