Isaacson+on+Gumede

The publication of **William Mervin Gumede**'s political biography of President Thabo Mbeki, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, will serve as a test of the maturity of our new democracy.

Several weeks before publication next week, the enthusiastic folk who work in the president's office have been queuing up for their copies. We want to respond, they say.

How they do respond to the critical biography of a presidency who has shown repeatedly that it does not tolerate criticism will be telling. Gumede's portrait of a Gucci revolutionary, clad in houndstooth jackets and Cuban shirts, pulls no punches. It reveals a man who centralises power and runs his government through political patronage.

He brings us closer to our cyberspace "pres" than any amount of logging into his blog or watching his nightly appearance on SABC TV news. A man born to political fame, with a fair dose of luck, intelligence and ruthlessness for good measure, the president appears as a complex man. He is seen in the context of a country in transition, following an intense period of action in exile under Oliver Tambo's wing.

Gumede uses the word "vindictive" to describe Mbeki's response to his critics. Typically, Mbeki offered his harshest critics in the trade union federation sinecures. Zwelinzima Vavi, the Cosatu general secretary, and Willie Madisha, Cosatu's president, both refused these and were subject to public ridicule and shut out in the cold.

The criticism of the ANC's alliance members, in particular the South African Communist Party, which has recently moved closer to the civic movements on the left, has not warmed Mbeki to them.

It is interesting to know what makes Gumede, a young writer and academic, currently a research fellow at the Wits Public and Development Management School, prepared to risk the blows his book is likely to bring.

Among the premature criticisms levelled at Gumede is the fact that, as an outsider to the ANC, he is not equipped to criticise the party. But it is precisely because he is an outsider that he is free to do so. In Gumede's eyes, a major flaw is Mbeki's tendency "to equate criticism of the state with a campaign to sabotage transformation, or more importantly, questioning the legitimacy or integrity of the state".

Gumede says the belief that the state and ruling party should be insulated from criticism is a hoary post-independence argument. In an interview, he says that, by holding up the government's intolerance of criticism, he is addressing the importance of democracy. Gumede is fed up with people's self-censorship and fear of speaking out.

His narrative, well researched, also depends a great deal on what people have told him. That they have spoken anonymously is a source of irritation, but Gumede is not an angry young man. He wants to open a space for similar critical work.

Gumede, a London School of Economics (LSE) doctoral candidate, has studied political science, economics and journalism at the University of Utrecht and at Wolfson College at Cambridge. From his position as media officer in Cosatu in 1994/1995, Gumede moved rapidly through newspaper drudge to become a senior editor of and columnist for the Financial Mail and Sowetan's deputy editor for a year in 2002. His experience as chairperson of the Media Institute of Southern Africa from 2001 to 2004 revealed the dire state of journalistic circumstances in some countries.

Currently an Africa (excluding South Africa) stringer for the Economics Intelligence Unit in London and Omvarlden in Sweden, he paid his dues as a student organiser and an editor of student publications during the 1980s. In retrospect he sees his own mistakes and looks with shame on his ignorance.

Gumede's is the first African voice to be raised in criticism in a book of this nature in post-apartheid South Africa.

He studied - in candlelight - for matric at the Ravensmead Senior Secondary Senior School outside Bellville in the Cape. Tiger Valley, a squatter camp in Cape Town, was home until he was 11. His years of service as a golf caddy, a collector of waste and scrap, and service in the informal business sector (by which he means shebeens) have contributed to a political view that necessarily incorporates a way of caring for the vulnerable.

His reading of economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Robert Wade (at the LSE), Jeffrey Sachs and Adam Przeworsk (at the LSE) inform this perspective. And so it is against a background of international economic and political history that Gumede looks at our democracy. The history of the transition, from liberation movement to ruling party includes pen portraits of Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, Cyril Ramaphosa (an erstwhile rival of Mbeki's) and other key players.

Gumede characterises the suave and silky "can-do" president as the consummate strategist. Mbeki, who received military training in the Soviet Union and served on the SACP's central committee while in exile, nurtured instincts that were inherently centrist.

Tambo's social democratic leanings made an impression on Mbeki, and Harold Wilson's wing of the British Labour Party appealed to him. Gumede cites, as an example of Mbeki's strategic ability, his resignation from the SACP's central committee when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s. After the ANC was unbanned he allowed his party membership to lapse.

An uninspired public speaker, he was hardly a match for romantic revolutionaries such as Hani, Joe Slovo, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Mac Maharaj. And at the feet of Tambo, whose favour he earned by default (Hani was Tambo's first choice), he learnt diplomacy and strategy. He served at his right hand and received his protection, even when he fluffed up.

Hani's assassination finally cleared the way for Mbeki's rise. He made an early pitch for the role of deputy president but was withdrew in favour of Walter Sisulu in 1991.

The story of how the man who was without power within the organisation and within the ANC when the movement was unbanned in 1990 came to lead the country and attempt to lead the continent to peace is a sparkling read.

The manner in which the man who inappropriately quoted King Lear at Mandela's 80th birthday celebrations handled the baton the old man passed on to him is second in historical importance only to the story of how Mandela took over the reins himself.

And, as Mbeki had not been Tambo's first choice, neither was he Mandela's. Not only was there resentment over the continual comparisons, but Mbeki withdrew because he found Mandela's calls saying, "This is how I see it, what is your view?" intolerable. He would tell his aides to tell Mandela that he was "busy".

Mbeki resented Mandela prizing reconciliation over black advancement.

Gumede, righteously angry about the excessive job losses that amount to the failure of Gear, the conservative economic policy that was Mbeki's brainchild, is unhappy with the focus of the nouveau noir and the wealthy elite on comfort.

He compares Mbeki's position to that of the former Brazilian president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Cardoso's left-wing intellectual leanings swerved to the right, but that did not stop him from using the slogans of the left to defend his conservative policies. Gumede detects similarities between the two men in their co-opting of powerful figures behind their economic reforms and in the aggressive marginalisation of their opponents.

And it is not only in the co-opting of buddies for reforms that Mbeki excels. His close-knit structure has long been acknowledged. In an entertaining aside, Gumede relates that Essop Pahad, the minister in the president's office, sent Jeremy Cronin, the SACP deputy general secretary, a note saying: "I am the minister in charge of the African renaissance."

"Really?" asked Cronin. "Who was in charge of the Italian Renaissance? Was it Leonardo or Machiavelli? Are you Machiavelli?"

Soft exterior, tough negotiator, Mbeki emerges as a man who is not lacking in expediency. But Gumede makes the point that this expediency can be put to good use. Mbeki, with Jacob Zuma, the deputy president, was instrumental in persuading Mangosuthu Buthelezi to take part in the election at the eleventh hour.

And so Mbeki's abilities do come to light alongside his follies. Tambo once complained that Mbeki gave him a headache. He was referring to his protégé's independence and intellectual roaming.

This was to manifest itself in his maverick approach to HIV/Aids, which has been no uncertain disaster for South Africa. That Mbeki inherited a problem is no excuse - Mandela during his term in office effectively ignored Aids, although he has radically changed his position and made several interventions since.

A key to an understanding of Mbeki is his aversion to interference from the West and his determination to find African solutions to Africa's problems. The albatross thatMbeki has visited on South Africa is his relationship with "Comrade Bob", Mandela's snide term for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

It is only fair to provide background to the blundering that continues as we speak and voters prepare to go to the polls. Mbeki, as Mandela's deputy, was sent on an unsuccessful quest in 1995 to persuade Sani Abacha, the then Nigerian dictator, to spare the life of Ken Saro Wiwa, the activist and writer. Mbeki learnt that, in Abacha's eyes, he and Mandela were no more than puppets of the West.

In Mbeki's understanding, it was a lack of prior consultation with other continental leaders that was the ANC's error - hence the quiet diplomacy. Mbeki was loath to be seen as a pawn of the United States and Britain by siding with their leaders in condemning the Mugabe regime's breach of the rule of law. Mugabe agreed to deals with other parties and later reneged, embarrassing Mbeki, who never expressed his irritation and impatience in public.

"Quiet diplomacy for Mbeki, " says Gumede, "means abstaining from public rebuke of Mugabe while telling him quietly over a cup of tea that some people are a little annoyed with him. He believes that his greatest leverage over the Zanu-PF leaders is a public pretence that the two are the greatest of chums."

In this dissection of the president, whom he sees as a director and chief executive officer, Gumede has not failed to include his piéce de résistance, the African renaissance.

Some Africanists in Mbeki's camp see the African renaissance as a romantic, mythical Africa, says Gumede, but its success depends on the support of intellectuals.

When they enter the debate, their concerns will no doubt include a criticism of Africa's ruling elite, says Gumede. And if that debate is smothered, the African renaissance will choke, he says.

This is not to say that Gumede casts gloom on the nation. He has presented us with a vivid and kinetic picture, a movable feast in a court where he advocates that a place be made for extra players.


 * Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC by William Mervin Gumede (Zebra Press) will cost R200