In his Business Day column last Friday the UCT academic Anthony Butler commented that COSATU "champions many of the same political objectives as the DA, and can teach it a lesson or two about political courage." On issues such as AIDS and Zimbabwe COSATU (and the SACP) had apparently fought away while, he claimed, the DA "nervously twiddled their thumbs for fear of being labelled racists."

The basis for his claim was a speech made by COSATU's general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, to the SACP's recent national conference. Vavi praised the two organisations' "willingness to go to battle" on various issues including Zimbabwe, HIV/AIDS, jobs and privatisation. "Think what could have happened," he told the conference, if they had not taken a stand against efforts to centralise control in the hands of a small elite; against the growing culture of crass materialism and corruption; and, against "the abuse of power and the use of state resources and institutions to persecute political opponents."

These passages were indeed a strikingly eloquent defence of the importance of opposition (albeit of the internal kind.) And the SACP and COSATU are certainly outspoken on these issues nowadays.

Yet, in his book The Whig Interpretation of History Herbert Butterfield warned that when "we organize our general history by reference to the present we are producing what is really a gigantic optical illusion." Butler's comments are a telling illustration of the distortions that can result from casually rewriting history from the vantage point of the present.

The DA and the SACP/COSATU clearly continue to differ both on economic policy and labour market regulation. But how do their records really compare in opposing the Mbeki leadership on those issues where there is now some agreement between them - namely Zimbabwe, HIV/AIDS, and centralisation?

When judging the respective records of the liberals and the left two basic facts should be kept in mind. The first is that by 1997 most critical voices in South African civil society had gone silent. The ANC was both united and possessed of formidable moral authority; it had the backing of most of the media; was in control of most avenues of patronage within the state; and enjoyed massive international support.

While many individuals and institutions were quieted by fear of being attacked as ‘racist' but the Democratic Party was not one of them. It was one of the few institutions - the Mail & Guardian was another - to remain critically minded and outspoken through the early years of the Mbeki-era. Both were subjected, as a result, to what was described as "moral terrorism."

The second fact is that most of the policies which would later undermine the moral standing of the ANC of Mbeki - either directly or through their consequences - were put in place then. These included the decision to bring all state institutions under party control, the arms deal, and Mbeki's support for Virodene (the putative AIDS cure which would lead him into his later AIDS ‘denialism'.) The crisis in Zimbabwe broke in early 2000 - the same year in which many of these other issues came to a head.

I

As far as I can tell the SACP and COSATU did not oppose the reintroduction of democratic centralism, in 1997, as the guiding organisational principle of the ANC. In terms of this policy a small elite was given the right to take decisions, which ordinary party members were obliged to defend and implement.

They also did not oppose the concurrent adoption of the policy of cadre deployment; whereby the liberation movement sought to push out the existing incumbents of the state and replace them, where possible, with party loyalists. Indeed, they supported the formal adoption of this policy and took up seats on the deployment committees at national and provincial level which were meant to implement it.

Within the state, members of COSATU-affiliated unions both pushed for and benefited from this policy. For example, the report of the Jali commission on corruption in the prison service documents how, in 1996, POPCRU officials secretly adopted a plan called ‘Operation Quiet Storm.' This entailed, one witness testified, "the forcible removal of ‘reactionary forces' from their positions of power. This aim was to be achieved in stages, which followed one another rapidly. Certain strategic and influential posts were to be targeted. Once the incumbents were removed, our choice would be deployed to the vacant post." (The relevant chapter can be accessed in PDF here.)

Following one of a number of warnings issued by the DP of the dangers of this policy, Business Day published a sneering editorial which asked, "Should we all be terrified of a tyrannical regime's pervasive tentacles? Or should the DP be embarrassed at a McCarthyist effort to paint a false picture of the post-apartheid state." On the basis (mainly) that the ANC did not mean what it said on this matter it pronounced the DP "guilty of McCarthyism."

In his reply Tony Leon stated that the ANC was indeed "engaged in a conscious attempt to extend its control over every nook and cranny of our society. The DP intends to oppose this attempt at centralised control with or without the support of those who should know better."

It was really only after it emerged - in April 2001 - that the police were being used to ‘investigate' possible rivals of Mbeki that COSATU and the SACP first took a stand for the separation of powers.

Carol Paton observed that when the alliance partners had initially embraced the cadre policy, "it seemed inconceivable to everyone in the alliance that the interests of the movement could be anything other than the interests of the nation. But the main effect was to blur the distinction between party and state. The plot saga woke the allies up to the fact that the two are not identical." (Sunday Times June 17 2001)

II

After the Zimbabwe crisis broke in February 2000 the SACP condemned the violence but supported Mbeki's approach and emphasised the centrality of the land issue. According to a Sowetan report (May 29 2000): "The SACP yesterday called for the Zimbabwean government to implement a far-reaching land reform programme and for international governments and institutions to support it...[It] also endorsed President Thabo Mbeki's quiet diplomacy in dealing with the Zimbabwean crisis, which it labelled ‘constructive and careful'."

In an article published after the June parliamentary elections - which gave ZANU-PF a narrow and undeserved victory - Blade Nzimande wrote, "The land question must not be allowed to disappear. Mugabe must stick to his statement that it was not an election gimmick. Land redistribution must be implemented immediately in an orderly and legal manner... Let Zimbabwe go back to the historic mission of its revolution: the struggle for land, national liberation and socialism." (Sunday World July 2 2000).

(It was much later, in November 2004, that COSATU sent the fact finding mission to Zimbabwe which was summarily expelled.)

By contrast the DP opposed the land seizures, opposed ‘quiet diplomacy', and supported the right of Zimbabweans to elect a government of their own choosing. Nick Clelland, the former DP MP who accompanied Leon on several trips to Zimbabwe as the crisis unfolded, recalls:

"The first trip Tony and I made to Zimbabwe was just after the February 2000 referendum on the draft constitution. Our trips featured meetings with a wide array of Zimbabweans including the editorial leadership of the Daily News, MDC leaders and MPs, the UN World Food Programme, Transparency International, the Commercial Farmers' Union, NGOs, small farmers, South African property owners, farm workers, farm invaders and ‘war veterans' - many of them not much older than 19. ZANU PF refused to meet with us. One particular visit was denounced by Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa as ‘interference' in Zimbabwe's domestic affairs and ‘treacherous'.

Then there was the fact finding trip Tony and I embarked upon in July 2002. Checking in at the hotel directly from the airport, we were told that the television news had reported that anyone who met with us was doing a disservice to the country.

We were followed by the CIO wherever we went. We visited farms occupied by so-called war veterans in the Mazoe Valley and in Bindura, north of Harare. I remember orchards of over-laden orange trees - the ground around them blanketed with fruit. The farmers had been threatened with criminal prosecution if they tried to harvest them.  Then there were dried out fields - which had once been automatically irrigated - barren save for the odd patch of subsistence farming. We saw a magnificent greenhouse - that in previous years had produced flowers for export - but which was now abandoned, and the flowers left to grow wild."

III

The DP's opposition to Mbeki strange policies on HIV/AIDS goes back a long way. In early 1998 the party revealed that the ANC had been promised a share in the company developing Virodene. The then Minister of Health, Nkosazana Zuma, responded by saying that, "The DP hates ANC supporters. If they had it their way we would all die of AIDS". Mbeki claimed that "The DP cannot hide its pathological hatred of the ANC. Let us, however, not be deflected by activities of those who have no interest in the welfare of our people."

Although it was the American press which first picked up on Mbeki's growing AIDS ‘denialism', the DP did not exactly twiddle its thumbs on this issue. Most famously, in early July 2000 Mbeki entered into a long and acrimonious correspondence with Leon over the government's refusal to allow rape survivors access to anti-retrovirals as a post-exposure prophylaxis through the public health care system.

The first letters were published side-by-side in the Sunday Times on July 9 2000 (see here and here). A Mail & Guardian editorial the following week commented that Leon's analysis of Mbeki's letter pointed "to a distortion of fact by way of contextual manipulation which, if used by a second-hand car salesman, would verge on the fraudulent."

The debate between the two of them continued both in private and in public. In a speech in late July Leon reportedly accused Mbeki of suffering "from a near obsession with finding African solutions to every problem, even if this meant flouting scientific facts about AIDS in favour of snake-oil cures and quackery."

Mbeki replied by accusing this "white politician" of enunciating "an entrenched white racism that is a millennium old." Following this exchange one columnist for the Independent Group of newspapers wrote that "inordinate pressure should be brought to bear on [Leon] to curb his tongue."

While Leon was fighting Mbeki on this issue the SACP and COSATU do not seem to have said much. On September 10 2000 the Sunday Tribune suggested that while there was growing disquiet among SACP and COSATU leaders at Mbeki's stance there was no-one willing to openly criticise him. A spokesman for the SACP was reported as saying "the party had not studied the issues of whether HIV caused AIDS and the efficacy of anti-retroviral drug treatment sufficiently to take a position."

During the 2000 local government election campaign, towards the end of that year, the ANC released a statement complaining: "The electioneering message by Tony Leon and his ilk for the provision of free anti-retroviral drugs for areas in their control at local government level should be seen for what it is: a desperate vote catching exercise that is a political ploy, not borne out of caring for the people." In a follow-up statement the ANC then accused the DA of a "total disregard for the well being and safety of our people who are being used as guinea pigs and conned into using dangerous and toxic drugs that are detrimental to their own health."

On this issue the SACP sided firmly with the ANC. Their spokesman stated in an article that "the opportunistic offer of Tony Leon that DA controlled local governments will give free anti-retrovirals must be seen for what it is - cheap politicking and treating black people's lives with contempt."

In April 2002 the ANC cabinet suddenly reversed its opposition to the provision of anti-retrovirals for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission and for rape victims (which is what Leon had argued for, and stood his ground over, in his correspondence with Mbeki.)

This reversal severely damaged Mbeki's intellectual authority within ANC. Carol Paton noted that although his views no longer carried the weight they once did he still commanded authority and respect among senior and middle-ranking ANC leaders. "For one thing, on an interpersonal level Mbeki is seductive, frequently leaving people in awe of his brilliance. Says one communist not well disposed towards Mbeki's politics: ‘Nobody has articulated a project like Thabo has. There is no one who can oppose him'." (Sunday Times April 14 2002)

Butler noted in 2005 that "HIV/AIDS shattered the dangerous fiction of presidential infallibility." Yet that was not something which happened through osmosis. The idea of Mbeki's infallibility would not have been broken if it had not been challenged, by the DA and others. By drawing Mbeki out on this issue the DA ensured that he was held to account, and did not evade responsibility for what he had done.

In an article on April 16 2002 Business Day's editor, Peter Bruce commented that Mbeki had "travelled through a string of controversies - AIDS, Zimbabwe, the ‘plot', the premier who understands the need to lie, the arms deal, his new jet - without once being drawn on any of them in any significant way. Except, perhaps, AIDS, where he must regret allowing an exchange of letters with Leon to be published in the Sunday Times. Leon won, simply by finishing many of the quotes Mbeki had half used to justify his position."

IV

Although it is a fact many people would prefer to forget within the liberation movement, and among its sympathisers, the weight of opinion was so overwhelmingly in favour of Mbeki - when he became president in 1999 - that it took a long time to turn around, like a super-tanker.

The assessment of Mbeki himself is that South African liberalism - as "pronounced by the DA and its acolytes, of various sorts" - has been "our most consistent/organic ideological opponent."

Up until 2001 the SACP focused most of its criticism of Mbeki on his government's careful economic policies. There was an element of racial outbidding in this, as the claim was made that abandoning nationalisation as an instrument of policy left "white privilege" intact. These interventions were not only misdirected; they also strengthened rather than weakened Mbeki as it made him look - in the eyes of business and the West - like a moderate and a centrist.

On AIDS SACP/COSATU went "to battle" after the crucial fight had been won, and on Zimbabwe well after it had been lost. There has also been a tendency of the ANC's alliance partners to support the cause and then oppose the effect: supporting rigid labour laws but opposing high unemployment; supporting the dispossession of white farmers in Zimbabwe but opposing the economic meltdown that followed; and, supporting the conflation of party and state but opposing the resultant corruption and abuse of power.

This is not to say that Vavi was wrong in what he said in his address to the SACP's conference. It took considerable courage for the SACP and COSATU leaders to take the stand that they did against the more destructive policies of the Mbeki presidency. Because they have been seen as more of a threat, they have been subjected to much rougher treatment than Leon was. Their stand was also essential to the resuscitation of internal democracy within the ANC, which at one point looked as if it was close to dead.

* The author worked as a parliamentary researcher for the Democratic Party from 1997 to 2001

Click here to sign up to receive the Politicsweb headlines in your morning inbox