In the early 1990s, Ken Owen, the former Sunday Times editor, described Thabo Mbeki as the ANC's "leading moderate and the most sophisticated of the exiles". Although he had slightly modified this opinion by the time of the 1999 election, Owen still insisted that Mbeki was "a good man in whose hands our democracy will be reasonably safe".

In the most recent Africa Today, Owen tries to explain Mbeki's fall within the space of two years from being the crown prince of the ANC - with "a reputation for competence and intelligence" - to being regarded today as a "little man, vain and self-important, whom mockery makes dangerous".

Yet one of Owen's explanations - that "a technocratic lieutenant is not necessarily a great leader" - suggests that he still misreads Mbeki's true nature. Like the blind man holding the elephant's tail, Owen is unable to understand the Mbeki presidency for the simple reason that he does not recognise it.

In the New York Review of Books, Paul Trewhela described the Mbeki he knew in exile as a man steeped in Stalinist orthodoxy, "an apparatchik of the classic Soviet type, an organisation man through and through, an ideological hit man". It is the enduring influence of this orthodoxy that is perhaps the key to understanding Mbeki.

One of the best descriptions of this particular kind of elephant can be found in Hannah Arendt's writings on the totalitarian leader, in her classic work On Totalitarianism. Seeing the ANC of Mbeki through this prism makes many of the puzzles of the Mbeki presidency - which seem to defy rational explanation - explicable. Arendt writes: "In the centre of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion, is the leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his ‘intangible preponderance'. His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than his demagogic or bureaucratic-organisational qualities.'

For Arendt both Hitler and Stalin were "masters of detail" and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel so that after a few years, hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them. Mbeki acquired his position in much the same way. Cyril Ramaphosa was his superior both as s speaker and in terms of organisational ability. But Mbeki was the master of internal party struggles. As Robert Schrire, a political-scientist, wrote in Leadership in 1998 Mbeki "clearly preferred to operate behind the scenes where he is an acknowledged master of the tactical thrust. He has created a network of loyalists who have penetrated all 1evels of the ANC and the government and who protect him from outside pressures. Because they are Mbeki's creation with no independent power base, they closely identify their own interests and future with Mbeki's'."

Arendt writes that once he has consolidated control, and once the party has been trained to implement his will, "the leader is irreplaceable because the whole structure of the movement would lose its raison d'être without his commands". Despite endless feuding, bitterness and personal resentments, the leader's position will remain secure not because of his superior gifts nor because those around him are blind to his personal failings, "but because of the conviction that without him everything would be lost".

What muddies the water with the ANC is that it once was a broad church run, in the early 1990s, along democratic lines. Although the personnel remain much the same, it is now run according to the doctrines of democratic centralism, with the party leadership exercising inordinate and often arbitrary power. Those members who joined the social democratic and non-racial ANC of Mandela find themselves stuck in the party marginalised and compromised, like fish caught in a pond after the tide has gone out. At best, they have a technocratic role.

Mbeki has since his accession made himself indispensable in much the way Arendt describes. The national working committee is (with the exception of Frene Ginwala, the speaker) entirely made up of Mbeki loyalists. The key strategic state institutions (the police, intelligence, director-generals, the army) are also headed up by Mbeki-ites. He controls directly (or through proxy) all appointments to party structures and of party members to state structures. There is no one in the inner circle who can challenge him intellectually and no one in the outer circle who would dare do so.

The party apparatus is required to defend and implement the decisions of the leadership. There is a process of negative selection as blind loyalty is rewarded with promotion, while rivals and independent-minded members of the party (like Ramaphosa, Andrew Feinstein and Helena Dolny) are shunted to the periphery of the movement.

Mbeki provides the drive and (no matter how flawed) the vision. Without him the ANC would be helpless and directionless.

This form of leadership helps explain two great riddles of the Mbeki government: the first is why Mbeki has refused to call ministers from his inner circle to account through a whole progression of scandals such as Sarafina 2, the Henri Kluever affair, and the recent attack on the local Portuguese community

Arendt writes: The leader represents the movement in a way totally different from all ordinary party leaders; he claims personal responsibility for every action, deed or misdeed committed by any member or functionary in his official capacity. "This total responsibility is the most important organisational aspect of the so-called leader principle according to which every functionary is not only appointed by the leader, but is his walking embodiment and every order is supposed to emanate from this one ever-present source. For this reason, the leader "cannot tolerate criticism of his subordinates" and he certainly cannot discipline them since they always act in his name".

Although this idea of total responsibility does not yet apply to the ANC as a whole, it does apply to Mbeki's loyalists, and those who have subjugated themselves completely to the leadership principle.

The best illustration of the effect of "total responsibility" was the ANC's submission to the Human Rights Commission, presented by Jeff Radebe, the minister of public enterprises and Steve Tshwete's, the minister of safety and security, letter to the Portuguese community.
It is probable that both documents were written by Mbeki. When they provoked an outcry Radebe and Tshwete were neither able to defend themselves (they had merely put their name to the documents), nor could they apologise, for they were not responsible: to apologise would be a betrayal of the leader. It was utterly futile for the Democratic Alliance to call on Mbeki to discipline Tshwete for his comments. He could
do no more that than publicly slap his own wrist

The second riddle is why, despite the massive centralisation of power the ANC government is proving so utterly ineffective at social delivery?
Arendt comments, "as techniques of government, the totalitarian devices appear simple and ingeniously effective". The monopoly of power, the certainty that all commands will be carried out, the leader's complete independence from his subordinates, are (contrary to what one would expect) disastrous for administrative efficiency and economic productivity.. For, as Arendt explains, the system destroys "all sense of responsibility and competence", it hinders productivity "because conflicting orders delay real work until the order of the leader has decided the matter", and the fanaticism of the party cadres "abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different".

Under the ANC government, the state has been steadily purged of technical and administrative skills, and the upper echelons have been packed with "party servants". These cadres are unable to, and relatively disinterested in, ensuring good governance within their institutions.

Instead, they use their positions to advance the movement's agenda: to deepen party control, and to implement their movement's racial policies. When Mbeki is directing a particular ("transformed") institution, it will move forward, but as soon as his attention is diverted it will lapse into indecision.

Arendt describes the totalitarian leader as having a dual role. On the one hand, he is the movement's "magic defence" against the outside world. On the other: he is the "direct bridge by which the movement is connected" with that world. To successfully impersonate these two roles, the totalitarian leader - a man who bears "total responsibility" for all the actions of the movement - has to "claim at the same time the honest, innocent respectability of its most naive fellow-traveller".

Up until last year Mbeki managed to execute the demands of this dual role. This required that he disguised his hatreds, both in one-one meetings, and in his more public speeches. His immense charm in one-to-one meetings with his enemies is legendary As Patti Waldmeir, an American journalist, noted, Mbeki's charm was "a personality tool wielded sharply to advantage. For Mbeki, charm is a form of self-discipline; it masks his feelings, and ensures that he gives nothing away."

In his speeches to parliament or to predominantly white audiences his message was constrained, disguised, but ominous. He defended his movement's goals in terms of "white guilt" and "racial redress" and the world applauded. His virulent resentments were given full expression only behind the closed doors of party forums, through proxies, or occasionally in speeches to organisations like the Black Editors Forum. Every disguised threat was counterbalanced by a vague assurance so that two people could listen to the same speech and come away with completely different conclusions about what Mbeki had been trying to say.

Last year, however, the mask slipped, he failed to disguise his hatreds: and be did not realise that the one issue on which his usual tactics of moral blackmail and the race- card would not work was on AIDS. It was as if, for a moment, the portrait of Dorian Gray had gone on public display.

By doing so, he lost his facade of respectability. His spin-doctors, realising the mistake, have tried to correct it. Thus, during presidential question time, Mbeki did not launch into any racial diatribes. As a result, much of the press has fallen back, relieved, into sycophancy. Nothing has changed, the goals are what they were yesterday, his resentments smoulder on, but he has (momentarily, at least) recovered that balance.

This article was first published in the Sunday Independent April 1 2001. At the time James Myburgh was a researcher in the Democratic Alliance's parliamentary office. The article reflected his personal view.

ENDS