I see there is an article on Politicsweb entitled "The Government on RW Johnson" (see here). You might like to know the other side of this. It relates to a piece I wrote for the (London) Sunday Times in 2007 about the then very threatening pressures being exerted on the Press by the Mbeki regime in what were, in fact, its dying days.

It was a frightening time in which Mbeki was musing aloud about whether it might not have been better to go for "the Jacobin option", by which he undoubtedly meant a regime of Robespierrean repression. Mondli Makhanya, the editor of the Sunday Times, had shown enormous courage in standing up to Mbeki and I interviewed him for the article I wrote.

I told him that I was pretty convinced that the Zuma forces were going to win at Polokwane which would, at long last, bring Mbeki's dreadful rule to an end. Mondli and I are both Durban boys and both of us were accordingly aware of the gathering weight of the Zuma coalition - in a way which eluded most observers, and indeed even some other Durban boys.

I remember Tony Leon telling me how he'd shared a plane flight from Durban to Cape Town with Alec Erwin on the eve of Polokwane and how Alec had poured utter scorn on the thought that Mbeki could lose, saying "that just shows how you haven't begun to understand the way the ANC works". But of course by then, in the general air of delusion which infected the whole Mbeki regime - a classic fin de regne sign - Alec was also seeing saboteurs at work in the nuclear electricity plant.

But I remember Mondli grimacing and saying, well you're probably right about Polokwane but that still means we have some very difficult months to live through. True enough.

At that point there were repeated reports of Mondli being arrested, of warrants being issued but not executed, and so on. Mondli had good contacts and these reports certainly reached his ears. Mbeki was at that time clearly in a very fragile state - this was the time when he was phoning up Mark Gevisser and dishing out great wads of Aids denialism and admitting he had written much of the previous mad stuff that had appeared anonymously.

Doubtless, Mbeki who had intrigued all his life for the ANC leadership and had won it without ever facing a proper election, now saw power slipping away and his responses became increasingly frantic. One can well imagine the byzantine tugs-of-war which must have taken place in the Presidential office in that period with Mbeki more and more obviously over the edge and advisers frantically trying to claw back disastrous initiatives. That probably explains why those warrants did not in the end get executed.

The thing that lived with me throughout this period was an interview I'd done many years before with Bobby Godsell who said quite matter-of-factly that he could not see Mbeki getting through two terms, that he was just too fragile (read: damaged) a personality. Bobby, I could see, was weighing him up as one CEO to another: he knew just how crushing the pressures and responsibilities of such a position could be and knew that you had to be a psychologically healthy individual to get through them. And, quite clearly, he didn't rate him. He was the only person I knew who called that so perfectly.

So the offending article appeared and reported that Mbeki had ordered Mondli's arrest. I knew of course that this was absolutely bound to be denied: Mbeki always seemed to believe that he was so much cleverer than everyone else that his hidden back-stabbing was really hidden, just because he said so.

When the article appeared Mbeki was in Paris and on the Saturday had seen the Springboks win the Rugby World Cup. In a final demented piece de theatre, the tiny Mbeki was briefly carried shoulder high by several enormous Afrikaners, a sort of toy mascot borne aloft by giant vikings. It was a weird image. Mbeki feels uncomfortable around large white men (Kader Asmal had a horror of the same thing, and particularly if they hugged him. It made him feel small, which he couldn't bear) and he is also a man who never in his life has paid the slightest attention to sport of any kind, let alone white man's rugby.

To see him tossed around like a teddy-bear, grinning because he had reached the stage where he needed to feed off winning of any kind, was surreal.

A thought then occurred to me. Mbeki would obviously spend the night in Paris after the game and on Sunday morning, not speaking French, he would want an English-language Sunday paper - and the only such paper easily available on the streets of Paris is the Sunday Times, so by noon the next day he would be reading the article I had just written.

I realised it was going to spoil his day and prepared myself for the inevitable blast. It came in the form of a long, paranoid rambling letter, almost hysterical with rage, allegedly penned by the SA High Commissioner in London, Lindiwe Mabuza - but the prose was recognisably Mbeki's, no doubt dictated down a phone line from Paris.

The Sunday Times passed it on to me with a sort of shrug. South Africa House, doubtless on Mbeki's orders, was demanding that the Sunday Times publish the whole thing - which was certainly not going to happen. The letter was longer than the original piece and space in the Sunday Times is always at a premium - it is by some margin the most powerful Sunday paper in the world. As such it is used to getting loopy letters from autocrats who don't much believe in press freedom, overcome with their own importance.

The Foreign Desk asked me if I wanted to reply. I said no, I'd just stand by what I'd written. This appeared to infuriate South Africa House all the more (doubtless, it was getting great heat from Mbeki and Essop Pahad). In fact they were very foolish. Had they written a crisp, short reply to make their point, I'm sure it would have been published.

What happened after that was increasingly bizarre. The "High Commissioner's Letter" - in fact, as usual, Mbeki hiding behind someone else - was read out over the SABC as a news item (no prizes for guessing how that bit of news selection worked) and it was also published in full by several South African papers as a paid-by-government ad, together with the outraged commentary which you print in your item "The Government on RW Johnson".

Naturally, I just ignored this and made no attempt to reply. This was, by the way, a typical parochial mistake made by both this government and its Nat predecessor. Finding that the rest of the civilised world regards them as obnoxious and/or loopy, they respond by buying space in South Africa - where they cannot possibly refute an international newspaper. Only a month or two later came Polokwane and the entire Mbeki team - Essop, Erwin and many other unlovely folk - were booted out and in came another lot of, well, far from lovely folk, it has to be admitted.

All of this comes back to me now with the publication of Frank Chikane's book on the fall of Mbeki. Personally, I could never take Chikane seriously after he attacked South African clerics who protested against the use of torture by Zanu-PF and I watch in wonder at the current attempted revival of Mbeki-ism.

According to the definitive Harvard study Mbeki's policy of denying ARVs to HIV+ mothers cost the lives of 365,000 mothers and children. Not even many Nazi war criminals can claim to have killed so many of their own people. Yet not only has Mbeki never uttered a single word of apology but nor have Chikane, Erwin, Essop Pahad and all the others who went along with this deeply evil policy.

I was astonished that Stellenbosch University could invite Mbeki to speak on their platform with this issue unresolved. I would also like UCT to explain to the world how on earth it could have given a special award for leadership to this man. If they had any sense of shame, this award would now be revoked and, perhaps, a gentle word or two could be said in its place about those 365,000 young women and their babies who, unfortunately, are never coming back.

This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter