Mbeki-stalgia | Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred

- City Press , May 15 2021

‘If Mbeki’s removal from power was something of a regicide, this was because the ANC had ceded so much power to him that the only way to claim it back was to decapitate him’. Photo: Waldo Swiegers

“Mbeki! Mbeki!” the crowd roared when the former president entered the FNB Stadium for Nelson Mandela’s mass memorial service in December 2013. It was the first significant time he had been seen publicly on the South African political stage, following his humiliating defeat at Polokwane in 2007 and his dismissal from office the following year.

A cheer rippled through the 70 000-strong crowd every time there was a close-up of the former president on the stadium. In contrast, Jacob Zuma, his successor and the sitting president, was roundly booed.

This marked the turning point that would lead to Zuma’s own dismissal four years later – and the confirmation of a growing nostalgia for Thabo Mbeki’s presidency in much of the public mind.

Five years previously, there had been widespread support from across society for the ANC’s decision to dismiss Mbeki – from big business and the intelligentsia to trade unions and the left. While many of the criticisms of Mbeki were legitimate and healthy, the pitch of the discourse often seemed fuelled by a sense of anger and betrayal levelled at someone who had been vested with a responsibility far greater than mere executive office.

Mbeki became a lightning rod for so many frustrations. It was as if, by voting him into office, South Africans had charged him with nothing less than the custody of their dreams, and with every violent crime, with every unemployed high-school graduate, with every Aids death, he stood accused of shattering them.

If Mbeki’s removal from power was something of a regicide, this was because the ANC had ceded so much power to him that the only way to claim it back was to decapitate him. Mbeki may well have earned this fate because of his own regal behaviour. But what is remarkable about so much of the commentary on Mbeki immediately after his fall is the extent to which it ceded to him precisely the power for which it purports to critique him: it creates of him a demonic fetish for all that was poisonous, or ineffective, or mendacious in South African public life.

Thabo Mbeki - The Dream Deffered book cover.

After Mbeki’s departure, a brief “Polokwane Spring” lifted the country out of the oppressive doldrums of the late Mbeki years, which had been characterised by stifling attempts to control political discourse, an accusatory rhetoric of racism, an increasingly distant and alienated leadership of party and country, and contention – particularly over Aids and Zimbabwe. But the change of ANC leadership coincided with the global economic crash of 2008, and the economic growth that Mbeki had stewarded began to stagnate.

At the same time, evidence of Zuma’s corruption emerged, both at Nkandla and with the Guptas. By the time Zuma was being booed at the Mandela memorial, the term “state capture” was current and South Africa was in a full-fledged recession; the previous year the country had received its first credit rating downgrade since the advent of democracy.

Although the truth is more complicated, in the public mind Zuma’s corruption and the economic crisis were increasingly connected.

In my updated edition of The Dream Deferred, I argue that, in many ways, the Mbeki presidency set the table for state capture. Nonetheless, a legend started to grow around Mbeki: he was a principled and honest man with no hint of corruption; he was a gifted technocrat and skilled economist who had run the country well; he was an intellectual with a firm grip on policy, a man of vision and ideas.

Many of the scandals that loomed large in the Mbeki presidency paled in comparison with what was happening under Zuma, wrote Tinyiko Maluleke – a university professor and a trenchant public intellectual – in 2016. Maluleke was frank about Mbeki’s shortcomings, but he recalled a day in 2009 when “my office was invaded by a bunch of angry and highly politicised students” coming to plead with him to help prevent “a rumoured Mbeki institute” proposed for the campus.

He suggested they take a longer view of history, and that in 30 years or so “South African institutions would fight to become hosts and bearers of the legacy of Thabo Mbeki’s name”. He was wrong, he wrote: “It has happened much sooner.”

Indeed, one of Mbeki’s most successful legacy projects has been the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute at the University of SA; in 2020, the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs was established in partnership with Mbeki’s foundation.

As was evidenced by the cheering for Mbeki during the Mandela memorial, nostalgia for the former president was particularly strong among educated urban black South Africans, whom Zuma – a rural man with no formal education whatsoever – had derided as “clever” blacks in his 2012 campaign to be re-elected party president.

For educated South Africans, it was hard not to contrast the doltish and self-interested Zuma with the high-minded and intellectual Mbeki, a man who championed excellence and aspiration. In his years of exile, Mbeki was almost universally called “Chief”; during his years in office he was of course “President”.

Now, as the patron of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, he is addressed, rather grandiosely, as “Patron”. He had come to assume the status not only of architect but of patron, too, of South Africa’s black middle class.

Ultimately, Mbeki changed the face of South Africa in several significant and indisputable ways, even if the effects of these changes are open to debate. His black economic empowerment policies, implemented during a period of economic growth, created a vibrant new black middle class in an astonishingly short period of time – numbering a fraction of a percentile when the ANC came to power in 1994 and estimated by 2008 to be anywhere between 2 million and 5 million people, out of a total population of more than 50 million.

When his government pivoted from its more austere neoliberal policy to what it called a “developmental state”, it oversaw the extension of social grants from what had been 2.5 million people in 1999 to what would be 12.4 million in 2008. These two interventions profoundly altered South Africa’s class structure, although it could be argued that they also created two unproductive new groups of people dependent on the state for their upward mobility, the first through affirmative appointment and procurement practices, and the second through handouts.

Too often Mbeki’s critics forget – when decrying the way black economic empowerment created a few black millionaires but left everyone else in the dirt, or how it might have enabled corruption – about the hundreds of thousands of black people who entered the middle class as a consequence of his policies: not Ramaphosas or Sexwales, but bank clerks and copywriters, medics and accountants.

Certainly, these might include a fair number of unqualified civil servants who grow fat on corrupt tenders and the teachers who care more about their salaries than the social good, but they also encompass an entire generation of young, educated people who strive towards an excellence and a critical independence that is the very safeguard of South African democracy.

Mbeki transferred his quest for achievement and excellence to this generation, and it has defined many of them.

The university students who led the Fallist uprising of 2015 offered a spirited rejection of “rainbowism”, sometimes with a crudely ahistorical critique of the accommodations made by Mbeki’s generation of leaders. In truth, the students who led the revolution are both the avatars of Mbeki’s greatest legacy – the rapid growth of a black middle class – and his ideological offspring.

Author and journalist Mark Gevisser.

They were raised on his African Renaissance ideology, which they injected with the insurrectionist radicalism of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko and the anger of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mbeki strongly criticised the violence and destruction on South Africa’s campuses as “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”, but he made the connection himself, between his ideas and the protests, in his 2017 inaugural speech as the chancellor of the University of SA.

He expressed “appreciation and understanding” for the Fallist protesters, reminding his audience of what he had said to an African Student Leaders Summit in 2010, in which he had cited the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah on the need to “wake up from (the) spell (of Eurocentrism) and remake our society and our continent”.

The “regenerated African university must be the principal driver” of an “intellectual awakening”, Mbeki said, then and now, that would “empower the peoples of Africa to remake our societies and our continent”.

Re-engaging with Mbeki as I write these words means re-encountering an archive of idealism somewhat out of place in the banal and shopworn Zuma era, a lofty old-school register very different too from the woke Fallism it helped to spawn. If Mandela’s South Africa embodied the “rainbowy” ideals of reconciliation, and Mbeki’s claimed to be driven by black excellence, then Zuma’s was at worst a feeding trough for rent-seekers and at best a rowdy town hall of competing interests, driven by patronage and riven by personality, grubby with politics. In the aftermath, Ramaphosa’s is depleted, and out of ideas.

This is an edited extract from the new introduction to Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred –updated edition, published by Jonathan Ball Publishers