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=All that is solid now melts into air around Mbeki=


 * Karima Brown, Business Day, 27 November 2007**

When President Thabo Mbeki, in the twilight of his days as head of the most powerful political organisation on the continent, considers his legacy, he may reflect on these words: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

The sentence, written by Marx and Engels to describe the destructive but revolutionary effects capitalism had on preindustrial societies, cannot have been forgotten even by an Mbeki who has allowed his Marxism to lapse over the past 17 years. And, since 1996, Mbeki has, of course, done more than any leader in modern SA to release the power of capital to shape his presidency and his country.

Now, ironically, all that was solid in that legacy begins to melt into thin air. All that we thought to be holy, or at least sacrosanct, is profaned by multiple assaults or manifest failure. And the African National Congress (ANC) exhibits an impatience with its own elected leader that has not been seen in the organisation since the ousting of Alfred Xuma in 1949.

This impatience was perhaps best displayed at the weekend, when ANC branch members nominated Jacob Zuma as their preferred candidate to lead the party. With this move, the grassroots effectively showed “Mbeki the door” as the Star newspaper headline so succinctly put it. As the incumbent and with the added advantage of commanding state power, Mbeki should ordinarily not have had to wage this kind of titanic battle to secure his nomination for the presidency, albeit for the third time. Mbeki should have walked this contest with ease. After all, Zuma was at a disadvantage and perhaps even remains the underdog. Not only did Zuma have to scale the legal hurdles that confronted him during his rape and corruption trials, there is of course still the very real possibility that a new set of charges will brought be against him. Yet ANC members chose him over Mbeki to lead the ANC. While it is true that only someone who can command a mass base such as Zuma could take on a sitting ANC president, the ANC membership’s decision to nominate Zuma tells us more about Mbeki’s failures than it does about Zuma’s strengths.

Of course, it is one thing to be nominated, but quite another to get elected, as South African Communist Party chairman Gwede Mantashe likes to remind me — and he should know. In 2002, Mantashe could not even make it past the nomination process for a position on the ANC’s national executive committee. But that was then. Going in to Polokwane, Mantashe has been nominated for the powerful secretary-general position and has managed to secure the backing of powerful ANC forces, and not just the left in the tripartite alliance. This suggests an even more crucial point: that the ANC membership no longer believes that Mbeki is the man to lead the party.

The ANC’s impatience with Mbeki is nothing new. After a decade in which the ANC seemed all too willing to defer to the government, the party has begun to show it is prepared to reassert its authority. This came to a head at the party’s policy conference earlier this year, when ANC members proposed that any future ANC president be stripped of the power to appoint premiers and executive mayors.

Furthermore, Mbeki’s control of the party has been greatly reduced in the aftermath of the Zuma saga and other convulsions. The party’s national general council showed in 2005 that ordinary ANC members had grown tired of policy imposition from the top, which is what characterised the adoption of the government’s macroeconomic strategy and other crucial policy since 1996.

While lobbying is no doubt going to intensify in what remains of the run-up to the ANC’s presidential succession battle, what is evident is that Mbeki no longer enjoys the confidence and the trust of the very ANC to which he has dedicated his entire life. In the end, the quote from Marx that “nothing is as constant as change” holds true, even for Mbeki.


 * Brown is political editor


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=3069495**

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