Native+Paranoia+of+Mbeki,+R+W+Johnson,+Wall+Street+Journal



=The Native Paranoia of Thabo Mbeki=


 * By R.W. Johnson, Wall Street Journal, 7 December 2007**

South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki risks a humiliating defeat within his own party, the African National Congress, which may even see him ejected from office before his term ends in May 2009. In the run-up to the national Polokwane conference in a fortnight, his arch-rival Jacob Zuma has crushed him in nationwide intra-party elections and the media are preparing the public for a Zuma presidency.

Mr. Mbeki appears an increasingly isolated figure. He has angrily shrugged off suggestions that he withdraw his bid to continue as ANC party head and seems to be in a state of denial over Mr. Zuma’s impending triumph. He still has too much power not to be feared but much of the old public deference is gone. The word here is that Mr. Mbeki’s circle of advisers has shrunk to one or two intimates. Newspapers are full of quotes by anonymous cabinet ministers, expressing their doubts about the man they once followed blindly.

What worries people is that his judgment and behavior have become increasingly erratic. Recently he startled a public gathering by asking what “tik” was. Tik is a heroin derivative widely used in the Cape. There has been massive press coverage about the hideous damage the drug has done to many young people, frequently causing violent and criminal behavior. It was as if the President lived in another country, was only visiting here and asking the sort of innocent questions that tourists may ask.

Similarly, when at the last ANC policy conference the rank and file made it brutally clear that they did not want him to soldier on, that they wanted to avoid having two centers of power (i.e. Mr. Mbeki as state president and Mr. Zuma as party president), Mr. Mbeki’s response was, let’s say, bizarre. He immediately rushed to a TV camera to express his willingness to continue if the people twisted his arm to do so.

“It’s as if he’s Joan of Arc, listening to strange voices. He’s certainly not listening to ours”, said one bewildered cadre and former admirer.

For years now Mr. Mbeki’s political style could only be described as paranoid. He’s always casting himself as a victim, accusing others of “hidden agendas,” suggesting his rivals within the ANC are plotting a coup against him. Any sign of opposition could only be explained as the machinations of Western imperialists and their local reactionary clients. Recently he warned his parliamentary caucus of “mercenaries and counter-revolutionaries,” leaving them wondering who exactly he meant.

Then there are his statements on Aids (such as that the HIV virus has nothing to do with the illness because “a virus cannot cause a syndrome and his willingness to believe in a plot by big pharmaceutical companies to assassinate him. One missive he sent to then President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair on the subject of Aids was so wacky that Mr. Clinton thought it must be a fake.

Similarly, his siding with Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe is also based on a conspiracy theory: that Western imperialists are trying to overthrow radical regimes in the region and that if Zimbabwe “fell,” South Africa would be next. While Mr. Mbeki himself has been careful enough not to say this in public, his spokesmen has repeatedly made that point for him.

This paranoid trait is accentuated by a streak of narcissism. Mr. Mbeki sees himself as a major intellectual figure, towering above the rest of his party­ and there was never a shortage of sycophants to confirm this view. He spends endless solitary hours surfing the Internet, from where he would glean odds and ends of (half-) knowledge, which he would use to second-guess Aids scientists, unemployment statisticians, actuarial analysts and so on. He likes to pepper his speeches with literary quotations, suggesting a vast knowledge of literature and his weekly online letter would include earnest essays on anti-colonial history from Haiti to the Sudan. Typically relying on single or dubious sources, these would be full of historical howlers. (For instance, in one such tractate, he wrote of British Governor Charles Gordon coming to conquer Sudan when actually he came to effect a withdrawal.) Mr. Mbeki’s aides told me that Fidel Castro was once amazed to find their boss creeping off to his room to write these weekly lectures, protesting, reasonably enough, that he could get other people to perform such work.

Mr. Zuma’s dogged and gradually successful campaign appears to have only exacerbated Mr. Mbeki’s paranoia. His online letters are now full of tirades, not simply against critics or opponents but “enemies.” The press is allegedly engaged in a systematic campaign of denigration aimed at his overthrow.

Equally eccentric has been Mr. Mbeki’s patronage of Ronald Suresh Roberts. The author and lawyer once famously lost a libel suit against the Johannesburg Sunday Times, the country’s biggest newspaper, for an unflattering portrait of him. The court found Mr. Roberts to be “vindictive and venomous.” And yet, Mr. Mbeki chose this man, who was censured by the Law Society for his improper behavior, to write his official biography, entitled, without even a hint of irony: “Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki.” The book is a hagiography of schoolboy standard, purporting to show that Mr. Mbeki never was an Aids denialist, that he always was a multi-party democrat, when, in fact, Mr. Mbeki, a graduate of Moscow’s Marx-Lenin Institute, once wrote articles in praise of the Algerian one-party state. According to this rewrite of history, Mr. Mbeki never supported Mugabe but actually criticized him.

It was child’s play for critics to punch holes in this oeuvre­and in any case, even after the book’s launch, Mr. Mbeki was ringing up another biographer, Mark Gevisser, to volunteer an Aids denialist document he had penned himself, in which Aids scientists are compared to Nazi concentration camp doctors and black people who accepted their medicines as displaying a slave mentality.

More recently, Mr. Mbeki staggered critics by sacking his deputy Health Minister because she had spoken out against the high infant mortality rate in an Eastern Cape hospital, saying that the situation there was part of a national health emergency. Mr. Mbeki, who is fiercely protective of his Health Minister (who supports his Aids denialism) not only charged into the debate to insist that 200 dead black babies a year in that hospital was perfectly normal but inserted into his argument a long and prurient analogy about 1960s mini-skirts and what they revealed and suggested, claiming that media coverage of the event was concealing and suggesting but not exposing the truth. This juxtaposition of mini-skirts and dead babies shook many who had hitherto overlooked the President’s eccentricities. When he later sacked the public prosecutor and threatened to arrest the editor of The Sunday Times for publishing that the Health Minister was a drunk and had a conviction for stealing from comatose patients, it only further damaged public confidence.

His opponents, particularly the backers of ANC deputy-president Jacob Zuma, are by now so bitterly alienated from him that if Mr. Mbeki fails to be re-elected as ANC president next month they could well try to remove him also as president of the country. For this is the terrible irony of Mr. Mbeki's life. His paranoia has led him to offend so many of his former supporters that he has conjured up the true paranoid nightmare: For it really is true now that his opponents are conspiring against him, that he is cornered and that his enemies may triumph. Naturally this winds up Mr. Mbeki even more. The next month or two are going to be a difficult time in South Africa.


 * Mr. Johnson is Southern Africa correspondent for the Sunday Times, and author of “South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation” (Phoenix, 2004).


 * From: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119697769662716203.html?mod=googlenews_wsj**

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