Yes to the struggle against corporate capture, no to Mbeki nostalgia
There is a general sense things are unravelling and that, without urgent interventions, we’ll all soon be in deeper trouble. I agree. Where did it begin to go wrong? One emerging but largely misdirected narrative attributes our current turmoil to the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference and Thabo Mbeki’s subsequent recall as state president. As its title suggests (“Mbeki’s recall a virtual coup - Palace revolt that changed ANC’s course”), Professor Tinyiko Maluleke’s thoughtful intervention in the Sunday Independent of 25 September takes up this narrative.
Maluleke is a far too subtle and accomplished an analyst to buy whole-sale into an excessive Mbeki nostalgia found in some quarters. “In fairness”, he writes, “we must acknowledge the ANC loss of moral high ground began during the Mbeki era.” He lists the politicising of the National Prosecuting Authority, the Selebi affair and the Mbeki administration’s clumsy and ultimately back-firing attempts to deal with Jacob Zuma. Mbeki’s role in the arms deal is tentatively flagged. Maluleke might also have noted the Guptas were introduced into the bosom of the ANC government by some within Mbeki’s innermost circle, long before Zuma became president.
Nevertheless, Maluleke concludes by placing Mbeki’s erosion of the rule of law in forgiving inverted commas - “the ‘Mbeki scandals’ that seemed to loom large in 2006 and 2008, pale in comparison with the magnitude and daring nature of the scandals in which several current public officials are currently alleged to be involved in.” He is of course right, comparatively speaking, but missing in Maluleke’s account of the Mbeki presidency is the tragic, some say genocidal, AIDS denialism that President Zuma’s administration brought to an end with a dramatic impact on life expectancy.
Mbeki’s denialism had a direct link with his wider vision. Yet it’s precisely the absence of this wider vision that Maluleke now most laments. “We have good reason”, he writes, “to feel nostalgic about Mbeki’s relentless push for the renaissance of Africa.” In promoting the idea of a continental renaissance, Mbeki was knowingly drawing on a youthful Pixley ka Isaka Seme’s brilliant but flawed award-winning student oration of 1906 in which he envisioned the “regeneration of Africa”.
Studying in the US at the time, Seme felt the dawn of the 20th century heralded a new world in which Africa would once more claim its rightful place among civilised nations. Seme was buoyed by the technical advances of his time that we can now recognise as the previous great wave of globalisation - transcontinental railways, the telegraph, steamships circulating the globe. In poetic prose that Mbeki would often emulate Seme extolled: “the triumph of human genius today! Science has searched out the deep things of nature…taught the lightning to speak, spanned the sweeping rivers, tunnelled the longest mountain range – made the world a vast whispering gallery, and has brought foreign nations into one civilised family…A great century has come upon us.”