How Mbeki's claim of a 'plot' put him on the road to nowhere

The ANC had presented a united face for decades, but this finally came to an end when Thabo Mbeki decided to publicly purge Cyril Ramaphosa and other top officials.

Steve Tshwete had built a reputation as a rough, gruff and straight-talking politician who did not suffer fools lightly. He was one of the few who enjoyed all three of the liberation movement's pedigrees: he had been imprisoned on Robben Island, served as a regional leader of the internal resistance in the United Democratic Front and had left South Africa to join the ANC in exile. He had made his reputation as a problem solver in the role of sports minister under Nelson Mandela.

In April 2001, Tshwete would once more steal the limelight, this time by initiating one of the more bizarre incidents of the democratic era. He announced on television that three senior ANC leaders - Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa - were involved in a plot to undermine Mbeki by spreading rumours that he had been behind the assassination of Chris Hani in 1993, when Hani was a rival for power in the party.

Hani's killers - right-wing politician Clive Derby-Lewis and an apparently impressionable Polish immigrant, Janusz Waluz - had been tried and convicted of the killing. The suggestion that the whole truth had not come out during the trial had been made, with no evidence to back it up, by several populist politicians, including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

But the accusation that Ramaphosa, a highly regarded member of the party, had conspired with Sexwale and Phosa, both former provincial premiers, to smear Mbeki with the assassination rang false. The only evidence of a "plot" appeared to come from one James Nkambule, a self-styled intelligence operative who was the discredited source of a smattering of untested claims involving the powerful.

Ramaphosa told me he was in Cape Town when news of the plot broke. "Oh my Lord! It was bizarre. It was a complete bolt from the blue." His reaction was to immediately see Mandela, who said: "Do not issue a statement and keep calm. Let me deal with this."

"It shocked me," said Rama-phosa. "It was not only unsettling, it was scary. It was scary because I started having visions of being arrested and being put before a court for treason, and I thought this is when the revolution eats its own children."

He was "very, very keen" to meet Mbeki over the claims. He contacted then-ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe to ask for a meeting with Mbeki. "That opportunity never came. There was no opportunity to meet and converse about things, so it was just one of those things," said Ramaphosa.

Tshwete, meanwhile, had raised the stakes, saying: "This rumour can set the president up to be harmed, because Hani was loved by the people. It can put the president in danger not only as the president of the ANC, but as the head of state. We need to investigate, because when something happens, people will say, 'We told them about this.'"

The view might have been taken that Tshwete had overzealously launched an assault on the three because he lacked political subtlety. But Mbeki's refusal to meet Ramaphosa over the matter suggested that he was taking the alleged plot seriously. His public utterances appeared to give credence to the bizarre claims.

Appearing on a separate television programme to the one on which Tshwete had dropped his bombshell, Mbeki asked those with evidence to back up the alleged plot to come forward. "Some people want to be president of South Africa. That's fine. The matter that's arising is the manner in which people pursue their ambitions. If there is any talk of plotting, those who have information must come out openly and say this is what they know about the plotting, who is involved and so on," he said.

Mbeki's disdain for "the manner in which people pursue their ambitions" was hard to swallow. He had, some five years previously, seriously damaged the reputation of Sexwale, then a rival for the ANC presidency, by spreading a rumour that he had been involved in drug trafficking. Mbeki had asked FW de Klerk , then still his fellow deputy president, to investigate claims that Sexwale had been involved in drugs, knowing that such a morsel of information, once passed around in political circles, would of course be made public. An account of the incident, by journalists Adrian Hadland and Jovial Rantao, suggested that he might have acted on weak information.

The document uncovered by De Klerk, they wrote, "was only from one source and was not backed up by further evidence". Its credibility was in question because the source had asked the National Intelligence Agency for money in exchange for the information. This was hardly the smoking gun that would prove Sexwale's guilt. Sexwale was furious and demanded that his name be cleared. The ANC smoothed over the ruffled feathers and a public reconciliation between Mbeki and Sexwale was orchestrated.

The irony was rich. The fresh round of allegations against Sexwale, Ramaphosa and Phosa could have been described as an example of "the manner in which people pursue their ambitions". The effect of the allegations, which were never found to have any substance, was to put a lid on criticism of Mbeki inside the ANC ahead of the 2002 conference. If Ramaphosa, Sexwale and Phosa had challenged him for the party leadership, this would have merely been evidence that there had been a plot all along.

Cosatu's Zwelinzima Vavi was highly critical of Mbeki following the plot controversy, making the point that it was hardly a crime to challenge someone for the party leadership.

Mandela, not for the first time, gave Mbeki a thinly disguised tongue lashing: "These three comrades that have been mentioned ... until there is evidence to substantiate the allegations, I will always regard them in high esteem. Let us not prejudge the issue."

The plot allegations undermined Mbeki's reputation, confirming the stereotype that he was a Machiavellian operator who would do anything to hold on to power. When Tshwete died towards the end of 2001, Mbeki spoke at his funeral.

He mentioned Tshwete's "pretence at a sharp tongue, which sought, unsuccessfully, to hide the softest of hearts". But at the time of the allegations, few had believed Tshwete to be pretending, and he went to the grave with his reputation diminished.

Mbeki was steadily isolating himself from key sectors of his own party. The left, already smarting after the introduction of Gear, was now beginning to ask whether Mbeki had the character to lead South Africa. It goes without saying that, from now on, Ramaphosa, Sexwale and Phosa would lend Mbeki only the thinnest support while quietly working for his political demise. If there had not been a plot before, there certainly was one now.

Mbeki would retain a complex mixture of adulation and distrust from inside the party, but his insecurity was beginning to show. He saw enemies all around him and responded to criticism with bitter ad hominem invective in his weekly online column.

There were enemies within and new enemies without.

In 2001, the ANC and the National Party had done the unthinkable and joined forces to govern the Western Cape province. Mbeki, who had been highly critical of the National Party in the past, now presented himself as its staunch ally, writing that it had made a bold effort to reinvent itself. The party had since been relaunched as the New National Party. Using his customary royal "we", he wrote in December 2001: "We were greatly encouraged by the efforts of the New National Party to rid itself of its racist past. We saw the New National Party as an important player in the critically important struggle to create a nonracial South Africa. We were and are very willing to work with the New National Party to achieve this objective."

The new enemy on the opposition benches was the DA, which he subjected to a scathing attack, saying "it sought to project everything the ANC was doing as constituting a threat to the white section of our population".

Mbeki was angered by the failure of the media to play the game of pretending that there was no conflict in the ANC, when there palpably was. He expected the media to buy the official line that there were no differences of opinion between himself and the party leadership, despite the fact that this was a widely known and spoken-about fact in the ANC.

As Mbeki's circle of political support shrank, he appeared to rely ever more on the close coterie of advisers from his exile years. Among them was Essop Pahad, a combative man with a large personality. He was Mbeki's parliamentary counsellor until 1999, when Mbeki elevated him to minister in the Presidency. Pahad held strong opinions, usually along the lines that Mbeki was infallible, and he did not shy away from hurling profane insults at journalists whom he believed had not reported on Mbeki fairly.

Shortly after I began reporting on parliament for the Sunday Times, I attended a lunch meeting with him and a fellow political journalist. Pahad's no-holds barred attack on her over a story she had written, during which he cursed and waved his finger, was a shocking introduction to the state of mind of Mbeki's inner circle. The effect of Pahad's aggressive response to criticism was to compound Mbeki's isolation and render him a figure of ridicule.

Pahad and his brother, Aziz, along with another close ally, the comparatively genial Sydney Mufamadi, as well as head of policy Joel Netshitenzhe and director-general Frank Chikane - a former church leader who ran Mbeki's government office throughout his presidency - appeared to be the only people on whom Mbeki could wholly rely for support.

Mbeki's alienation from the party's left was also notable. His failure to consult them on Gear had been compounded by his dogged refusal to acknowledge the extent of the Aids crisis or even, indeed, that HIV caused Aids.

The decision to spend vast sums on arms acquisition rather than on social projects compounded this. By 2000, Mbeki's routine attendance at Cosatu's congresses had become strained and awkward. Cosatu leaders now brazenly attacked Mbeki, who sat in stoic isolation as they spoke.

HIV and Aids remained a major problem for the members of trade unions, and Cosatu president Willie Madisha spoke out in no uncertain terms: "The current public debate on the causal link between HIV and Aids is confusing. For Cosatu, the link between HIV and Aids is irrefutable and any other approach is unscientific and unfortunately likely to confuse people."

Mbeki began to speak of "some among us" who were dressed in the clothing of the left but helped to strengthen the ANC's opponents to the right.

In 2002, Mbeki addressed the ANC's policy conference in Kempton Park. After denouncing "neoliberalism" and its "right-wing platform", Mbeki turned on the left, saying: "Our movement and its policies are also under sustained attack from domestic and foreign left sectarian factions that claim to be the best representatives of the workers and the poor of our country." He went on to say that the ANC leadership were being accused of "acting as agents of the domestic and international capitalist class" as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund "against the interests of the working people". He said they were "contemptuous of the goals that our national liberation movement has pursued since its foundation".

How the man who had charmed Afrikaner academics into accepting the ANC during the final years of apartheid and won the approval of the party to take over from Mandela came to find himself politically isolated is one of the great enigmas of the democratic era.

• This is an edited extract from 'Ragged Glory - The Rainbow Nation in Black and White' by Ray Hartley, published by Jonathan Ball (R225)