|
|
South Africa: Finding Our Voices Again After Mbeki
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Business Day (Johannesburg)
COLUMN
15 May 2008
Posted to the web 15 May 2008
Xolela Mangcu
Johannesburg
THERE is now near universal consensus that President Thabo Mbeki has been an unmitigated disaster for this country. His erstwhile defenders are nowhere to be seen or heard. There is a part of me that feels vindicated by this sudden realisation, and a part that is angered by it.
Naturally, I support calls for Mbeki to resign or be recalled by the ANC. The man has become an embarrassment. and a vexation. But how long should a people take to wake up and speak truth to power? This question will be as relevant under the new group of leaders as it was under Mbeki. For years we watched as the nature of his depredations worsened. There is indeed a qualitative difference between Mbeki's grave policy blunders, and what he is being accused of lately.
In all of my critical writings about his policy faux pas, I never questioned the man's integrity. I just thought he was highly overrated as an intellectual and a political leader. What concerns me about the latest revelations is the possibility that the president may have been deliberately dishonest. It is one thing to be egregiously wrong about public policy but it is simply unforgivable to betray the trust of your people. One reason Richard Nixon will forever stay in ignominy is that he lied to the American people.
Allegations that Mbeki suppressed a critical report about the 2002 Zimbabwe elections; ordered a shipment of arms through to Zimbabwe; intervened to protect Jackie Selebi from being prosecuted; claimed that he knew nothing about the allegations against Selebi; or may have improperly benefited from the arms deal are just of a different order of magnitude from anything I may have written about the man. That is why not too long ago I wrote one of the most difficult columns of my writing career, in response to Barney Pityana's criticism of Jacob Zuma as immoral while at the same time exonerating Mbeki. I felt like I was writing in public against my own parent, which is what Pityana has always been to me.
BUT in all honesty this is no time to be comparing which leader is more morally deficient. That exercise in itself is a demonstration of how low we have sunk over the past decade. The strategic question is how we get ourselves out of this mess. Some people have been calling for a new political party as a way out, and others have called for changes to our electoral system to loosen the ANC's grip on our society. We are in this mess because we cannot directly elect our leaders. What the ANC decides is what we all have to live with. It's as if they are holding us by the scruff of our necks and we can barely breathe. Something's got to give -- either society will suffocate to death, or the ANC will have to be kicked out of power, unless it re-imagines itself as a democratic organisation.
That is the great challenge of the new leadership -- how to rediscover its voice after a decade of connivance and collusion with Mbeki. The challenge of the citizenry is similar -- finding individual voices after conniving and colluding by remaining silent during the most foreboding moments of the Mbeki years. Ours is as much of a political challenge as it is a civic one. As Wole Soyinka put it in his memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, "to be robbed of the seemingly intangible -- such as a civic voice -- is to be diminished as a citizen".
We must also find our voices against the despicable thugs who have been killing and maiming fellow Africans in Alexandra township. These are our brothers and sisters, forced to flee their land because our own government and some of its influential citizens could not find their voice on the crisis in Zimbabwe. As citizens we need to stand up and be heard, not only in our own country but right across our region.
n Tendai Biti, secretary-general of the Movement for Democratic Change, will be speaking about the crisis in Zimbabwe at the Wits Great Hall at 6pm on May 22.
|
Mangcu is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation and the author of To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa.
I think your article dispels what many disillussioned people feel about the man.. His weaknesses have for long been covered up by the success of the South African economy. Facts will definately show that the hiccups this man has made are deinately the Waterloo in his reign. Statistics show that more Black South Africans (the real Black, not the BEE defination) are now living on less than a dollar per day, now than when he took over from Mandela. The guy is an astute Denialist who went to the extent of denying AIDS, at first he had an argument abt... [Read Full Text]
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
