Lonely+at+the+top,+Mondli+Makhanya+and+Hogarth,+Sunday+Times

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 10 December 2006
=It’s lonely at the top when the national discourse is so one-sided=


 * Mondli Makhanya**

Was it just me who recently heard President Thabo Mbeki preach against the relentless pursuit of wealth?

I am sure that I — and many other citizens of this republic — heard the President rail against the cancer of greed when he delivered the Nelson Mandela Lecture at Wits University in July ...

Quoting variously from Marxism, the scriptures and literary classics, Mbeki told us that we need an RDP of the soul — a return to human values, rather than the ideology of greed.

“E very day and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons embedded in our society, that stalk us at every minute, seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realisable dream and nightmare. With every passing second, they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity: get rich! get rich! get rich!” he said.

So were we dreaming when we read his tirade this week, in which he labelled as racists those who question those politicians who can’t get their snouts out of the trough?

Defending ministers who have a stake in Gautrain’s winning consortium, Mbeki made an amazing leap of logic and said critics of the project were racists who stereotyped blacks as “inherently amoral and corrupt”.

These racists included Cosatu, the SACP, the Democratic Alliance and, of course, this newspaper. It was angry, rambling and embittered vitriol.

“The Gautrain story confirms the hard reality that, as long as the racist conviction that Africans are naturally prone to corruption, venality and mismanagement persists, so long must we remain on guard to fight the canards that will be peddled, serving as media headlines with greater frequency than the summer rains.”

The message was clear: Thou shalt not question that upon which I have put my stamp of approval.

We, the people, are supposed to stand at the bottom of the mountain and accept the edict. Except that we are South Africans, a people unused to accepting edicts. We may be in awe of Mbeki’s intellect and we may have handed over all our thinking to him, but we are certainly not an obedient people. We talk back a lot.

Had we been prone to accepting edicts, we would have accepted the instruction that we should all just shut up about Zimbabwe and trust that this “quiet diplomacy” thing would sort things out. We would have believed that criticism of Robert Mugabe’s brutal rule was akin to advocating Zimbabwe’s recolonisation.

South Africans were more intelligent than that and they rejected the patronising reassurances. And how right they were! Witness that country’s six- year slide into the economic Dark Ages, the erosion of human rights, the collapse of infrastructure and the disdain with which Mugabe has treated Mbeki.

Had we been the obedient type, we would have nodded enthusiastically as Mbeki lectured us about the origins and effects of HIV/Aids. We would have punched the air in futile defiance as he effectively told us that those who were urging the government to take Aids seriously were racists who saw Africans as sex-crazed savages. This society refused to listen and it was instead he who was compelled to silence on the subject.

One shudders to think in what worse straits we would be had we allowed him and the denialist professors to continue leading us down destruction alley.

Had we been an acquiescent lot, we would have allowed laws heralding the erosion of judicial independence and media to pass unchallenged.

South Africans want Mbeki to lead them wisely — to engage them, to listen to them and take them seriously, not to speak down to them and treat them like noisy nursery-school kids.

This has, unfortunately, been the hallmark of Mbeki’s rule. The people of this republic have not been worthy of his attention span. They have been expected to be grateful for the occasional parliamentary appearance, the quarterly imbizo and the odd SABC interview — or, if you happen to be among the tiny minority with Internet access, the privilege of imbibing his cyber-wisdom.

Mbeki’s presidency has been characterised by a failure to appreciate that the leader of a democratic republic has an obligation to communicate with his people, and that the people have a duty to talk back.

In his defence, we have allowed him the space to believe he has no obligation to us. By elevating him to the status of purveyor of all wisdom and the harbinger of all ideas fresh and original, we have given our President a superiority complex.

The fruits of this superiority complex have been mistakes that will cloud the many successes of the Mbeki years. This superiority complex and the conviction that anyone who dares talk back to him is either a racist, an enemy or an ill-disciplined party cadre have been the stuff of his undoing.

They are the reasons he today finds himself a lonely man, unable to control his party and so unsure of his power that he is even fearful of a certain policeman.

If Mbeki is to help us miss him after 2009, he can start by realising that people do not appreciate bullying — intellectual or otherwise. That they will ask him tough questions and criticise him about his governance, his utterances and his contradictions.

And that, yes, they will ask him — with the frequency of the summer rains and with hypnotic regularity— really hard questions about R23-billion train projects that make no sense.


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=338608**

__Hogarth__
=Master detective exposes conspiracy=

Hogarth understands that it is the lot of the politician to invent elaborate explanations for dodgy behaviour.

But this week President Thabo Mbeki kind of pushed the envelope a little too far. Why did the Sunday Times expose shareholding in the Gautrain by Cabinet ministers? Why was this followed immediately by statements of condemnation by Cosatu, the SACP and the Democratic Alliance?

Well, it’s obviously all a ... ? Conspiracy! A conspiracy motivated by... ? Racism!

Luckily for South Africa, the ever- vigilant Mbeki was up all night on the Internet to bring to light the golden threads of truth through the dark web of lies.

Said he: “During the dying days of the month of November 2006, the nation was presented with the fact of a new multi- party offensive against the ANC, composed of the Commercial Media [Sunday Times], the Democratic Alliance, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions.”


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Insight/Article.aspx?id=338609**

1084 words