Ever since his arrival in this country in the mid-1990s the ANC of Thabo Mbeki has relied heavily upon Ronald Suresh Roberts - English-born, Trinidad-raised, and Oxford-and-Harvard educated - to counter their South African critics. On Friday last week his most recent book Fit to Govern: the Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki was finally published. This work, whether out of accident or design, has been released at a key moment in the ANC's succession battle. And it can be read as a sustained effort to try and turn the tide of informed opinion back in favour of Mbeki.
The funding for the book was "facilitated" by the Minister in the Presidency, Essop Pahad. In late 2003 Pahad approached the then chief executive of Absa, Nallie Bosman, to request a sponsorship for Roberts, to which the bank agreed. The payments to Roberts - which were originally set at R1.23-million rand - ran from early 2004 to the first quarter of 2005, by which time the book was meant to have been completed.
The presidency gave Roberts an office in Tuinhuys, Cape Town, and provided him with a telephone, a government computer, and a po.gov.za email address. During this period, which ran through the 2004 election campaign, Roberts wrote numerous polemics supporting Mbeki, and attacking those who crossed the president.
Pahad was clearly anxious to keep this funding arrangement under wraps and when the Democratic Alliance asked, in a parliamentary question in October 2004, whether the presidency had "secured R1.2 million in corporate sponsorship" from Absa he replied "no".
When the book was not completed on time Pahad was again intimately involved in securing an extension of funding. At one stage Pierre Loubser, Assistant to the Group Chief Executive of Absa, wrote to Roberts stating:
With reference to our discussions regarding further financial contributions from Absa I hereby confirm the following as agreed to by Minister Essop Pahad and our Group Chief Executive Dr Steve Booysen: Absa will contribute a further R200 000,00 ... which will bring Absa's total contribution to R1 431 000,00.
On 4 October 2005 Roberts wrote back to Loubser asking where the money was, as it had not been paid into his account. Loubser replied that "We are waiting for confirmation from Minister Pahad's office (Louis du Plooy) to make this final payment. Louis confirmed on the 29th by email that he first wants to run this by the Minister."
A week later Loubser wrote to Roberts to say that Absa had "received feedback from the Minister's office. The Minister indicated that he is happy that a substantial amount of work has been done and that we are in the final stages of the book. The Minister is of the view that some final editing still needs to be done and he will take a personal interest in this regard."
Absa were originally supposed to be the "exclusive funders" of the book. But their sponsorship had run its course in late 2005, and it seems others stepped in to fill the gap. In his acknowledgements at the beginning of Fit to Govern Roberts thanks Vodacom and Edcon (CNA) - along with Absa - for their "material support". "The support of Siemens and Interactive Africa", he writes, "was also indispensable."
In evaluating the book the key question is whether the effort that the presidency put into secure funding for Roberts, and the "unprecedented access" it granted him, was worth it. Has he, in other words, repaid the faith invested in him by the president's men, and been able to put Mbeki's shattered reputation together again? Certainly the few reviews there have been of the completed version seem to suggest that he has put up a good show (see here and here).
What follows is not a review of the book per se, but rather of three assertions Roberts makes in his effort to salvage Mbeki's standing. The first is that Mbeki "always opposed the one-party state and always championed democracy"; the second, that Mbeki was never an AIDS ‘dissident'; and the third, that Mbeki has always been outspoken on Zimbabwe.
Mbeki and the one-party state
Roberts states (pg. 52) that Mbeki, "the supposedly dangerous and autocratic African nationalist, never went through a stage where he supported one-party rule. He never rejected free and open politics as a form of governance dominated by the unfettered will of a supposedly all-knowing revolutionary vanguard."
It should be noted at the outset that this is an inherently implausible claim. Mbeki joined the South African Communist Party in 1962. By doing so he committed himself - in terms of the rules of democratic centralism - to defend the Party and its policies and to carry out its decisions.
In particular he would have been committed to the 1962 Programme of the SACP, The Road to South African Freedom. This document states under the heading "immediate proposals" that once power was forcibly seized by the ANC/SACP, "a vigorous and vigilant dictatorship must be maintained by the people against the former dominating and exploiting classes."
Even more implausibly Roberts claims that the evidence for Mbeki's commitment to Western-style democracy can be found in his pseudonymous writings for the African Communist, the house journal of the SACP. "Where one-party rule easily might have seemed to be a kind of conventional wisdom," Roberts claims, "Mbeki can be found explicitly and robustly rejecting the one-party state. This is clearest in his adherence to the Algiers Manifesto [Charter], among the contending ideals and programmes of the time."
He quotes Mbeki as describing the Charter of Algiers, adopted by the Algerian FLN at its first congress in April 1964, as "one of the outstanding documents drawn up by the African people themselves." Roberts then states:
There were those who advocated a one-party, Mbeki reported in the African Communist, as the ‘mainspring' of the new society. But the Charter rejected any such idea: ‘On this fundamental question, the Charter stated that "the union of all forces which was an indispensable instrument of the armed struggle should be considered in light of the objectives and perspectives of the socialist revolution". Such a union had had its day. To keep it could only result in confusion and unhealthy compromise.'
What Mbeki actually wrote was: "In his report to the Algiers Congress, Ben Bella [president of Algeria and head of the FLN] pointed out that the new society "needs a mainspring of one party only, one party which is fully aware of the needs of the working masses..." (African Communist 1st Quarter 1973, p. 28) He then goes on to quote the Charter on this question. It is clear from the original phrasing that Mbeki was referring to Bella's comments with approval.
Furthermore, it is quite untrue to claim that the Charter proceeded to reject one-partyism (i.e. the position of its own leader). The Algerian Constitution, adopted in 1963, had enshrined the hegemonic and single-party rule of the National Liberation Front (FLN) and had committed the country to a socialist path. The Charter of Algiers, adopted by the FLN the following year, was explicitly opposed to multi-partyism.
In capitalist societies, the Charter said, multi-partyism allowed for particular interests "to organize themselves into different pressure groups, all trying to defeat the general interest, which is to say the workers' interest." It also created openings for the "manoeuvres of those who see in the new society the end of their privileges."
Meanwhile, in those societies on the socialist path of development multi-partyism "erected into a principle of political democracy" created a favourable environment "for collective mystification, demagogy, the sustaining of artificially swollen discontent and social irresponsibility." It also facilitated the manoeuvres of foreign interests trying to "paralyse the measures running counter to their interests as exploiters."
"Opting for a single party" was, it stated, "not sufficient to engender an essentially revolutionary power immunised against all these deformations." What was needed was not the continuation of the broad church structure of the resistance period - the "union of all tendencies" referred to earlier - but rather an "avant-garde" or vanguard party from which "exploiters" and "elements hostile to transformation" were excluded.
The source for Mbeki's passage on the Charter was an article by Henri Alleg published in the African Communist in 1965. In that piece Alleg wrote that the Charter created:
The conditions for organic fusion of all the revolutionary forces (including the communists) in a single powerful party which would be in the vanguard of progress and whose aim would be, as set out in the adopted text: ‘to build a society from which all kinds of exploitation of man by man will be banned, to build a socialist society'.
In other words Mbeki was, by endorsing the Charter, very clearly supporting a "form of governance dominated by the unfettered will of a supposedly all-knowing revolutionary vanguard."
Mbeki and AIDS
The policy of Mbeki which did most to undermine his local and international standing was his descent into AIDS denialism between October 1999 and the second-half of 2000. The president's spin-doctors, under the guidance of Essop Pahad, have long tried to undo this damage by pretending that it all never really happened.
It is not completely surprising then that Roberts begins his chapter on HIV/AIDS by asserting (pg. 180): "Thabo Mbeki is not now, nor has he ever been, an AIDS dissident... Mbeki's policy on HIV/AIDS is, and always has been, based on the premise that HIV causes AIDS."
In his online footnotes Roberts quotes the TAC's definition of denialism as "the promotion of one or more of the following pseudoscientific views: (1) HIV does not cause AIDS, (2) the risks of anti-retrovirals outweigh their benefits and (3) there is not a large AIDS epidemic in sub- Saharan Africa." Roberts then claims that "Mbeki has expressed none of these views."
This is a rather questionable contention. Roberts buttresses it though by diligently not quoting many of Mbeki's key statements on ‘HIV and AIDS'. For instance Roberts makes no mention of the March 2002 denialist manifesto, Castro Hlongwane, which is perhaps the most comprehensive exposition of Mbeki's evolved views on AIDS. The preface to that document stated that it (inter alia):
(1) Rejects as illogical the proposition that AIDS is a single disease caused by a singular virus, HIV. (2) Accepts the proposition that anti-retroviral drugs can neither cure AIDS nor destroy the HI virus. It therefore rejects the suggestion that the challenge of AIDS in our country can be solved by resort to anti-retroviral drugs. (3) Rejects as baseless and self-serving the assertion that millions of our people are HIV positive.
On numerous other occasions Mbeki questioned the causal connection between HIV and AIDS. He and his spokesman also described anti-retrovirals as variously: "poisonous"; "as dangerous to health as the thing they are supposed to treat"; and, "dangerous and toxic". The provision of anti-retrovirals to HIV-sufferers in DA-controlled municipalities apparently constituted a form of "biological warfare" against black people.
Roberts seems to be doing a dazzling job of pretending that it was an "old lie" that Mbeki had said that "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" - while keeping the president's actual views firmly out of sight - but he then trips up over his own cleverness.
At one point (pg. 189) he attacks COSATU's Zwelenzima Vavi for criticising Mbeki for, "a non-existent ‘denialism' while at the same time overlooking what Jacob Zuma had said in 2000, when he reportedly praised ‘the [dissident] AIDS group ACT-UP San Francisco' and compared ‘its belief that HIV is harmless to Galileo's 17th century crusade to prove that the earth rotates around the sun'? [Jacob Zuma, quoted by Newsday, 23 April 2000]". This was, Roberts proclaims, "the most categorical and clear-cut denialist statement made by any public figure in South Africa since 1994."
The statement quoted by Newsday was issued by the Office of the Presidency on the 19th April 2000 as their formal and official response to a debate in the national assembly on "The President's apparent refusal to accept the mainstream scientific view that HIV causes AIDS". It was probably drafted by Mbeki himself (it certainly reflected his views) and it approvingly quoted from a letter he had personally received from ACT-UP San Francisco. Zuma's only role was to loyally read it out in parliament.
So if Roberts' assessment of this particular statement is to be believed, far from Mbeki's denialism being "non-existent" it was "categorical" and "clear-cut" after all. On this matter, as on the previous one, Roberts ends up unintentionally proving what he set out to refute.
Mbeki and Zimbabwe
In his chapter on Zimbabwe Roberts describes the claim that Mbeki has refused to condemn Mugabe as a "myth". He asserts (pg. 157-159): "Thabo Mbeki's democratic instincts very obviously recoil at Robert Mugabe's methods. He has repeatedly made this clear, but to no avail... Mbeki had in fact spoken out - repeatedly...On each occasion that Mbeki has spoken out, his speaking out has been noted and then forgotten. "
If this was true it would be easily proved. All Roberts would need to do is quote Mbeki denouncing one or other of Mugabe's assaults on democracy in that country. Unfortunately, he can't do this, because there aren't any. So again he backs up this assertion by not quoting Mbeki's endorsement of ZANU-PF's victories in three rigged elections.
Roberts seems to have had difficulty deciding on the best line of defence of Mbeki's Zimbabwe policy. On pg. 155 he describes the Mugabe-regime (p. 155) as the "democratically elected government of Zimbabwe". On pg. 166 he writes - in an effort to expose British hypocrisy - that in the early 1980s Mugabe's army was responsible for the massacre of 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland. On pg. 172 he decides that Mugabe was "for much of his life first and foremost a democratic humanist."
His desire to score points gets him into trouble here as well. He takes Business Day to task (p. 155) for describing those who had invaded an Oppenheimer estate in Zimbabwe as "settlers". Describing "dispossessed blacks" as "settlers" Roberts wrote, was language "hopelessly drenched in colonial and settler ideology." So how did Mbeki describe those who had occupied white-owned farms? Well, he called them "protesting land settlers."
Conclusion
One oddity of the book is that very little of it is taken up with documenting and elucidating Mbeki's own views, which do not seem to be of particular interest to the author. It is divided instead between "a theoretical dogfight in ideological outer space" (as Rian Malan put it) and vindictive attacks on Mbeki's critics and opponents. At one stage Roberts writes (p. 125) that The Discourses by Niccolò Machiavelli's are what really "illuminates Mbeki's statesmanship." Yet, in that work Machiavelli advised:
I hold it to be a proof of great prudence for men to abstain from threats and insulting words towards any one, for neither the one nor the other in any way diminishes the strength of the enemy; but the one makes him more cautious, and the other increases his hatred of you, and makes him more persevering in his efforts to injure you.
"It is the duty", Machiavelli continued, "of every good general or chief of a republic, to use all proper means to prevent such insults and reproaches from being indulged in by citizens or soldiers." This is advice the presidency has clearly chosen to ignore. By supporting this project, in the way that they did, the presidency were clearly hoping to buttress Mbeki's position, both morally and politically. Yet they may find that this book - which manages to direct "harsh sarcasms" against so many different people - has precisely the opposite effect intended.
This article was first published on Moneyweb, June 18 2007
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