Thabo Mbeki says Jacob Zuma destroyed South Africa’s democracy, confirming that Mbeki has finished his transformation from pseudo-intellectual and buck-passing whiner to a confused old man shouting at clouds.
To be fair, we’ve seen it coming from a long way away. Even when he was in his prime, he was already showing a distinct flair for blaming everyone else for his personal failures, whether it was helping Robert Mugabe wreck Zimbabwe and then blaming Tony Blair, or watching 300,000 South Africans die of treatable HIV-Aids while blaming racist western medicine for not getting behind his beetroot and garlic side hobby.
This week’s burbling, however, in which the former president tried to pin every aspect of our current quagmire on Zuma and his coterie, was special even by his standards.
Speaking at a University of South Africa talk shop on Wednesday, Mbeki reached for his favourite medium — a large bucket of whitewash — to explain to his audience that South Africa had been going in more or less the right direction between 1994 and 2007.
Mbeki is trying to tell us the ANC was good one day and rotten the next. But the people who served Zuma were in many cases the same people who’d served Mbeki, the party — and themselves — for years
But in 2008, he said, the ANC suddenly and inexplicably seemed to lurch in the opposite direction and start cocking things up.
“That’s a puzzle, that’s a conundrum!” said Mbeki. “If there was a change of party, then you could explain it. But it was the same party — what happened?”
The answer, I’ve already revealed, is that Zuma happened. At least, that’s the story Mbeki is sticking with.
It’s kind of cute, and quite satisfying. It’s even true in parts: it was Zuma who did most of the heavy lifting when it came to dismantling institutions in this country.
But like all simplistic, binary stories, Mbeki’s version whereby things were Good and then they were Bad is self-aggrandising horse manure.
The thing is, Zuma and his cabal didn’t parachute out of a clear blue sky. They didn’t take South Africa at gunpoint. Almost everything they did, they did with the approval of the majority of the few hundred people who own the ANC and run it for their own benefit.
Mbeki would have us start believing that Zuma was a kind of piratical figure who somehow wrenched the party in a terrible new direction and stuffed parliament with criminal trash, yet Zuma’s first cabinet was continuity personified, crammed with gold star ANC stalwarts.
Jeff Radebe and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, for example, had both been cabinet ministers since 1994. Lindiwe Sisulu, Naledi Pandor and Lulu Xingwana had all been appointed to the cabinet by Mbeki. Malusi Gigaba, likewise, had been a deputy minister in Mbeki’s administration. Nathi Mthethwa and Siyabonga Cwele (the latter accused in the Zondo Report of trying to hide Zuma’s relationship with the Guptas) were both appointed to cabinet during the brief presidency of Kgalema Motlanthe.
All the rest had been in the ANC structures for decades.
Mbeki is trying to tell us the ANC was good one day and rotten the next. But the people who served Zuma were in many cases the same people who’d served Mbeki, the party — and themselves — for years.
The real question is: how did the ANC become an organisation in which someone like Bathabile Dlamini could be a member of parliament or Fikile Mbalula could become the leader of the Youth League, both on Mbeki’s watch?
No, Mbeki can peddle myths about the golden years between 1994 and 2007, but it was he who whitewashed the arms deal, setting in stone the ANC’s relationship with corruption for the next quarter-century.
It was Mbeki who enabled and protected the lethally deranged and incompetent Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, mainstreaming anti-scientific hokum and conspiracy theory, as well as setting a precedent for how many people your policies can kill before you’re forced grudgingly to shift them.
It was Mbeki who rubber-stamped Mugabe’s stolen elections in 2002, teaching the future populists and tribalists who so repulse Mbeki that elections can be overturned if you don’t like the outcome.
It was Mbeki who was president in 2003 when Potemkin holding company Chancellor House was a created as a secret ANC fundraising machine and soon hooked up with Hitachi to score massive contracts on Eskom’s new power stations.
And it was Mbeki who told Vusi Pikoli not to arrest crooked police boss Jackie Selebi — allegedly one of Mbeki’s besties — and who promptly suspended Pikoli when an arrest warrant appeared.
In short, it was Mbeki — not Mandela, not Zuma or the Guptas, not Cyril Ramaphosa and his idiot cabal — who did the most to introduce the belief that there is one law for the ANC and another for the rest of us, who showed the cadres that loyalty to the right ANC faction can evaporate not only consequences but the very laws of the country they pretend to govern.
Mbeki is an old man who is entitled to mutter his nonsense. But as he mutters, let’s gently remind him that a roof is rotten long, long before it collapses on the vain, self-righteous old hypocrite sitting grumbling under it.
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