Don’t miss the superb piece on former South African President Thabo Mbeki from our tribe’s favourite columnist…..
By RW Johnson
Thabo Mbeki is not a man who speaks without thinking. In recent time he has repeatedly warned of a looming counter-revolution. Most recently he has suggested that with the weakening of the state there is little to stop the runaway privatisation of the state-owned enterprises. Already Eskom has lost its monopoly of electricity generation. Wealthy individuals and corporates alike – not to mention some municipalities – have all begun to generate their own electricity and as this happens Eskom is bound to enter a death spiral. It will lose many of its best-paying customers and will be tempted to compensate by pushing up electricity prices even further, causing a further flight to privatisation.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___Simultaneously Transnet is signing up private partners to help it run its container terminals and whereas Transnet is running at prodigious annual losses, its private partners are planning to invest large amounts in improving productivity. Even the NUM is supporting Transnet’s privatisation because it fears that Transnet’s rotten management of the railways will end up costing its members their jobs. And already the black taxi industry has largely stolen the transport business that once belonged to passenger rail services.
Mbeki has rightly pointed out that while privatisation offers an acceptable alternative to wealthier citizens, the failure of the state and its replacement by privatised industries and civil society will leave the large majority of the poor without any affordable alternative. The result, he points out, will be the demolition of “the democratic state” and its replacement by a counter-revolution. But of course, Mbeki’s own policy, GEAR, included a commitment to privatise, so Mbeki has taken both sides on this issue.
At the same time Mbeki is harshly critical of the ANC leadership. He never mentions Ramaphosa by name but it is hardly a secret that Mbeki has a very poor opinion of the current occupant of the Union Buildings. This goes right back to Mbeki’s indignation that Ramaphosa could ever have seen himself as a rival for the succession to Mandela. Not long ago Mbeki scornfully asked what had become of the President’s promise to bring in a new social compact. This clearly rattled Ramaphosa who even now keeps promising that he will unveil a new social compact ere long, though it’s perfectly clear that no such agreement is in the offing.
Now, however, Mbeki has asked what has become of the ANC’s promise of renewal made in 2017? There has, he points out, been no renewal. It was an empty promise. Mention of 2017 is, of course, a direct reference to Ramaphosa – that was when the new President was happily announcing “a new dawn”. To be fair, Mbeki doubtless realises that political parties don’t renew themselves simply by announcing their wish for renewal. But in effect Mbeki is saying to the electorate, “So you’ve finally woken up to the fact that Ramaphosa is an empty vessel. Some of us spotted that fact many years ago.”
More striking, though, are Mbeki’s repeated predictions of “counter-revolution”. In ANC terms (and even more in SACP terms) this is fighting talk. The suggestion that there is now an unstoppable momentum behind privatisation, that the “democratic state” is on the point of failing, and that the ANC’s much trumpeted “revolution” is now on the point of being replaced by a counter-revolution – all these are almost sacrilegious notions for the ANC faithful.
So what is Mbeki up to? It is possible that he is trying to shock the party faithful by deliberately alarming them about the ANC’s direction of travel. But he is making no attempt to appeal for a renewed socialist commitment. If that was Mbeki’s aim we would doubtless have been hearing a lot more about the National Democratic Revolution, but that phrase hasn’t passed his lips.
But what is the alternative? Mbeki was, par excellence, the ideologue of the South African revolution. He it was who preached the gospel of “transformation” and of the African Renaissance, who tried to extinguish the flames of war all over Africa, who preached African unity, who re-launched the OAU as the African Union, who launched Nepad and who was for a while an honoured guest at G8 meetings, who headed the Non-Aligned Movement and who argued that now that colonialism and apartheid were dead Africa must now lead a new crusade to free Palestine.
Even to list all these failed achievements is to remind oneself of the colossal personal disappointment Mbeki suffered. For some years he was able to dream some impossible dreams. But then it all came crashing down. Widely mocked and ridiculed as a result of his Aids denialism, he was confident that he would defeat Jacob Zuma’s challenge but was then beaten by a 60-40 majority at Polokwane and was then humiliatingly evicted from the Presidency, With that all of Mbeki’s dreams and ambitions died. Instead he had to watch as Zuma laid waste to the New South Africa that Mbeki had hoped to build. Mbeki bore all this in silence but he wouldn’t have been human if these defeats didn’t exact a terrible personal cost.
Is it really possible that Mbeki has now decided that all this has failed, that the South African revolution is going to end in corruption, mismanagement and counter-revolution? Has he, in a word, become the prophet of counter-revolution? Or has he convinced himself that his huge personal failure means that if he couldn’t succeed then perhaps no one could?
It’s a tempting vision. Mbeki came quite close to succeeding but must have been appalled by the poor quality of his successors, Zuma and Ramaphosa. He made it quite clear that he expected Zuma to turn South Africa into “a neo-colonial basket case” and doubtless his expectations of Ramaphosa were no higher. It is only a small step from expecting your successors to fail abysmally to experiencing a frisson of schadenfreude as you watch them flop exactly as you predicted.
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