Succession+plan+may+have+empty+throne.+Brown,+Mde,+B+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 06 February 2006
=**Succession plan may have empty throne**=


 * Karima Brown and Vukani Mde**

IF PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki gets his way, he will deliver his swansong state of the nation address in 2009 with chosen successor Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka waiting in the wings. Mbeki will stand before Parliament and the nation to recount all the successes and progress made during the “age of hope” — his spin-doctors’ chosen definition of a decade of his rule.

Mbeki will show for all to see that his leadership has turned SA into a nation ready to conquer the world in the coming decade.

The following June or July, Mlambo-Ngcuka will reveal to Parliament and the nation how she plans to build on the Mbeki legacy of hope.

This is the brushstroke picture of our country in the next few years if Mbeki has his way. However, three years in politics is an eternity and many things between then and now can scupper Mbeki’s and Mlambo-Ngcuka’s best-laid plans.

The economy could refuse to play ball. South Africans, still socially conservative at heart and unwilling to have a female president, could fail to embrace Mlambo-Ngcuka.

The African National Congress (ANC) could get very rough with her as succession battles intensify and confine her to the lonely life of money-making in business, a fate that has befallen others with similar ambitions.

If the ANC remains true to its history, it will soon remember that Mlambo-Ngcuka is a minnow in the movement. It will remind all who promote her that she has no real constituency.

It will worry about her failure to connect with its powerbase, ordinary people. But that is the ANC of old. Mlambo-Ngcuka is part of a new breed of ANC leader and represents a new mode of thinking. To the new ANC she is connected to the constituency that matters most — money — and its power of patronage.

In truth, the most likely stumbling block to Mlambo-Ngcuka’s path to power is Mlambo-Ngcuka. She could implode all on her own, having already shown a tendency to shoot herself in the foot.

But if she fails to ascend to the throne in 2009, it will not be for lack of opportunity and encouragement. Her boss has been kind to her. Today she will stand before the country to present an economic growth plan that has been all but stamped with her name.

Should it deliver on just half of its promises in the next three years, she will have a ready-made election platform. South Africans will be sharing in the bounty of her economic plan and the international markets will be on her side as a proven and bankable steward of the economy.

In her role as executor of the Mbeki legacy, Mlambo-Ngcuka had her first real debut last Friday.

For the first time, she took her place next to the president during Parliament’s opening. It was a moment that signalled Mlambo-Ngcuka’s coming into her own. It was her graduation from stop-gap to presidential hopeful.

While her predecessor, Jacob Zuma, quietly took his seat among the guests in the gallery, she strode purposefully into the chamber ahead of the president.

Friday should have been her moment of triumph. But her demeanour was subdued, for a reason that is not hard to understand: history repeats itself, first as scandal, then as farce.

On Friday Mlambo-Ngcuka had more in common with the fallen Zuma than she would have liked. Like Zuma did in 2004, Mlambo-Ngcuka entered the chamber this year with a cloud of scandal hanging over her.

The mystery around her jaunt to Dubai is not yet resolved and the explanations from her office have been confusing.

Her old albatross, Oilgate, has recently returned to centre stage. For Mlambo-Ngcuka, the link between the two scandals is Thuthukile Mazibuko-Skweyiya, wife of Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya and a businesswoman who enjoys a close personal relationship with the country’s number two.

While it might be too early to make comparisons, the bond between the two, and Mlambo-Ngcuka’s apparent willingness to place state resources at her pal’s disposal, echoes the friendship of Zuma and Schabir Shaik.

It is entirely possible that today Mlambo-Ngcuka’s all- important briefing on the growth initiative — her succession platform — will be swamped by questions around these twin scandals. If this sets the tone for how she is seen in the next three years, Mbeki will not have things his way.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/national.aspx?ID=BD4A149886**

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