Behind+Mbeki’s+bid+to+hang+on,+Butler,+B+Day



=Behind Mbeki’s bid to hang on=


 * Anthony Butler, Business Day, 15 October 2007**

President Thabo Mbeki seems resigned to still more collateral damage to the state and the African National Congress (ANC) as a result of his faction’s struggle to monopolise political power for another decade.

Some of Mbeki’s critics suspect the president of personal arrogance. They accuse him of taking to heart purely rhetorical claims made about his intellectual and political stature. Others argue that the incumbent faction fears humiliation or even persecution by its successors, and resents the prospect that incomers will take up position beside a trough of state patronage that it has claimed as its own.

Such vicious accusations, however, are largely a product of the heightened emotion that the succession struggle has generated. Cooler heads counsel that the real explanation for the behaviour of Mbeki’s ruling faction is that it has become gripped by a sense of its own indispensability.

The perception that the world will fall apart if one is not there to run it is hardly unique to members of SA’s political class. After a decade in power, national leaders everywhere lose a sense of the ambivalent, and most likely indistinct, imprint they will leave on history. They always underestimate the relief with which a new generation will receive their departure.

It is uncharitable, and psychologically implausible, to suggest that leaders such as Mbeki, Russian premier Vladimir Putin, or Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez are engineering the prolongation of their factional and personal power in full recognition that others could easily replace them. No, each one of them believes that his continuation in office will promote the interests of his people and the good of his country. For Mbeki, the stakes are higher still because the fate of the African continent, in his mind, rests in the hands of the ANC.

Under close examination, however, the arguments advanced for Mbeki’s indispensability are even less persuasive than those put forward by Putin’s or Chavez’s champions. First, there is the purported need for the president to safeguard his “economic legacy”. Mbeki’s degree in economics once boosted business confidence, especially in the days when Trevor Manuel, Tito Mboweni and Pravin Gordhan were considered leftist radicals. Today, however, talented economists such as Jabu Moleketi have burst through the ranks and fresh ideas about how to reduce poverty and unemployment have supplanted Mbeki’s tired economic orthodoxies.

Mbeki also has no remedy to offer for the limited participation of black South Africans in the formal economy. As Science and Technology Minister Mosibudi Mangena told delegates at last week’s Black Management Forum, after a decade of Mbeki’s rule, whites still control 70% of the land, 98% of the banks, “all” manufacturing and tourism, and the overwhelming majority of precious metal reserves.

A second claim by Mbeki’s circle is that a power handover would create an insoluble challenge of continuity planning. Those not in government, they observe, necessarily “lack the experience” to be considered for high office. But does the current assemblage of ministers, directors-general, security chiefs and political managers really represent an irreplaceable national treasure whose hard- accumulated knowledge must be safeguarded at any cost?

Third, Mbeki’s people now implausibly claim that only they can resolve problems that result from their own past mistakes. Many health professionals, for example, believe that SA’s HIV/AIDS crisis has been made immeasurably more dangerous by sluggish interventions under Mbeki, and they now fear the rise of the sinister menace of drug resistant tuberculosis. Mbeki’s team remains eerily calm. Asked about slow implementation of government AIDS programmes, his health minister recently remarked that “Rome was not built in one day”.

Finally, the government has been paralysed with indecision when confronted by system-wide trends that threaten a major collapse of state capacity within a generation. Mbeki cannot convincingly argue that he will now dig the ANC out of the patronage and corruption hole into which he has allowed it to fall. Even at national and provincial level, where a public servant is legally obliged to place “the whole of his or her time at the disposal of the state”, the auditor-general reported last year that 1700 MECs and senior public servants have outside financial or business interests, the majority of which have not been disclosed. How can the architects of such a situation credibly promise to serve as the country’s belated rescuers?

If our leaders’ deeply felt sentiments of indispensability do not result from their experiences of indubitable success, then where do they originate?

History may ultimately identify the liberation ideology that grew up in the desperate years of ANC exile as the source of the current ruling elite’s inextinguishable sense of indispensability. Exile was an exercise in agonising impotence, culminating in frustrating isolation from the domestic insurrection that drove the apartheid regime from power.

Even the most astute exiles, such as Jacob Zuma and Mbeki, were never able to measure their entitlement to command against substantive accomplishments, and they have never had the opportunity to expose themselves to democratic election. When they returned to SA, the electoral triumph of the ANC may have reinforced their personal sense of entitlement to rule, but popular election was always a mere supplement to a deeper source of moral authority.

Maturing politically in the shadow of communist theoretical and organisational philosophies, they learnt that the movement’s leadership possessed a scientific understanding of history, a monopoly of wisdom about the character of social and political change, and an obligation to act on behalf of the masses in the light of this superior insight. Neither democratic elections nor claims that the time has come for them to step aside are likely to sway them now.


 * Butler teaches public policy at UCT


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A587140**

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