On my alleged aloofness - Thabo Mbeki

nEWS & ANALYSIS

On my alleged aloofness - Thabo Mbeki

Thabo Mbeki | 

01 February 2016

Former president takes issue with an oft-voiced criticism of his style of rule

‘DARE YOU PONDER THE OBVIOUS: OF COURSE MBEKI IS ALOOF.’

February 1, 2016

In 2001, the ANC National Working Committee (NWC), of which I was a member, issued the seminal document, “Through the eye of a needle? Choosing the best cadres to lead transformation.” [‘The eye of the needle’.]

Among others, this document specifies the critical requirement that, “A leader should constantly seek to improve his capacity to serve the people; he should strive to be in touch with the people all the time, listen to their views and learn from them. He should be accessible and flexible; and not arrogate to himself the status of being the source of all wisdom.”

Six years after this document was issued, the ANC held its elective 52nd National Conference in Polokwane. At this Conference I lost the contest for the position of President of the ANC, with the delegates electing Comrade Jacob Zuma as President.

Before the Conference there had been much public/media discussion about the possible outcome and meaning of this election, which continued long afterwards, to date.

Some of this discussion advanced the proposition that one of the reasons I would and did lose the election was that I was ‘aloof’, a leadership defect which had allegedly alienated the majority of the ANC members, and therefore the delegates at the Conference.

If this charge of being ‘aloof’ was correct, this meant that even as I was President of the ANC, with the obvious obligation to serve as a role model, I had disrespected the directive contained in ‘The eye of the needle’ to “strive to be in touch with the people all the time, listen to their views and learn from them…(to) be accessible and flexible; and not arrogate to (oneself) the status of being the source of all wisdom.”

The reason the ‘Eye of the needle’ raised this matter was that it had been discussed by the ANC leadership in both the NEC and the NWC, as well as in our National Conferences and the National General Councils.

One of the observations that had been made in these discussions was that because so many of the ANC leaders were involved in demanding Government work at National, Provincial and Local levels, the ANC leadership as a whole was losing direct and immediate contact with the people and that this had to be corrected.

However, in my specific case, the charge of being ‘aloof’ rested on the assertion that whether intentionally or not, my very style of leadership meant that I deliberately chose to be ‘not in touch with the people’, (and the membership of the ANC), obviously having ‘arrogated to myself the status of being the source of all wisdom.’

Some elected constantly to propagate this notion as an established and self-evident truth which did not even require that any evidence should be produced to substantiate this ‘truth’.

Thus in September 2009, Blade Nzimande, General Secretary of the SACP, was quoted by the Mail and Guardian as having said that “there is an almost complete national consensus that Mbeki’s aloof and intolerant personality was a disaster…Thankfully we are now once more in a situation in which national dialogue and debate are possible.”

Earlier still, in September 2008, the UK Financial Times had carried a report from its correspondent in South Africa, Alec Russell, entitled “Thabo Mbeki: Aloof leader who fell from grace”. Russell went on to say:

“It was clear even then (when he succeeded President Mandela) that Mr Mbeki was a curious politician. He made clear he would never be a crowd pleaser… His undoing, friends and enemies agree, was his aloofness.”

Another September 2008 article in the US Chicago Tribune, entitled “South Africa's Mbeki aloof to the end”, said, “Even to the bitter end, Thabo Mbeki stayed true to his aloof self. ‘He was never much good at connecting with his own people,’ said Raenette Taljaard, the director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, a pro-democracy think tank in Johannesburg.”

In June 2013, the Daily Maverick published an article by Ranjeni Munusamy entitled “Zuma, Mbeki, and the shifting sands of public perception”, in which she wrote:

“Once upon a time, people detested their president (Thabo Mbeki), believing he was too aloof, too disconnected, too scholarly, too proud to admit his mistakes and impervious of criticism.”

In January 2014, the Financial Mail carried an article by Justice Malala in which he wrote; “Remember when people said all those nasty things about Thabo Mbeki - "aloof, educated, too much Shakespeare, old chap"…”

With regard to the ANC, the first point I would like to make is that (i) the National Office Bearers (NOBs) met at least every Monday, (ii) the NWC met at least every fortnight, and (iii) the NEC met at least every quarter. I regularly attended all these meetings as President of the ANC, never standing aloof from the ANC leadership.

Further, one of the decisions we took in the NWC to help ensure that we maintain closer contact with the ANC membership was to hold our meetings in the Provinces, spending two days in each Province.

We would divide the NWC members into small delegations, in which I participated, each of which would spend the first day in one of the Regions in the Province, to familiarise itself with the state of organisation at this lower level. On the second day the delegations would then report to the NWC as a whole, which thus gained a more detailed understanding of ANC affairs in the Province concerned.

Further, the participation of ANC Provincial Chairs and Secretaries and the Chairs and Secretaries of the Women’s and Youth Leagues in the NEC, meant that our national leadership was regularly informed of developments and views in the Provinces and the Leagues.

On various occasions the ANC National Office Bearers, the NWC or other NEC delegations would have to engage some of our Provinces to help find solutions to the then extant problems. The President of the ANC would be involved in these initiatives.

Even when, as President of the Republic, I ceased to be a Member of Parliament, I continued periodically to attend the meetings of the ANC Parliamentary Caucus.

At Government level, we instituted the “Presidential Izimbizo Process”. This resulted in our holding many meetings with both urban and rural local communities, in which as many people as possible spoke directly to the President to communicate whatever they considered important.

By the time I left Government we were very concerned about the security challenges posed by the increasingly enormous size of these local Izimbizo which derived from their popularity. Our concern arose from the fact that it was proving impossible to allow time for everybody who queued to speak actually to reach the microphones and address the President, which, we feared, might result in conflict.

Nevertheless we always took the necessary action to respond to what had been raised at these Izimbizo, covering all three spheres of Government.

To ensure that the National Government remained exposed to the thinking of our country’s broad leadership, we established a number of standing Presidential Working Groups, during all of which I, as President of the Republic, would lead a Ministerial groups which would engage the leadership delegation in each Working Group.

The Working Groups were made up of leaders in each of these areas, constituting (i) the women, (ii) the youth, (iii) the trade unions, (iv) big business, (v) black business, (vi) agriculture, (vii) the religious communities, and (viii) academia.

The relevant Ministries would then assume the responsibility to cooperate with the appointed representatives of each of these sectors to follow up on relevant matters that had been raised at these Presidential Working Group meetings.

It is also important to understand that, of course, in addition to the instances I have mentioned relating to the ANC and Government, there were also other countless instances during which I interacted with ANC members and structures and the South African population in general, at all times ready to listen and engage.

Thus I have never been able to answer the question – from whom and what was I ‘aloof’?

Shortly before our 2004 General Election, the 9 April 2004 edition of the UK newspaper, The Guardian, published an article by Rory Carroll which, among other things, said:

“In recent weeks (during the election campaign, Thabo Mbeki)…has reinvented his public persona by playing with children and dancing, an astonishing departure which has won rave reviews, but for a decade, as Nelson Mandela’s Deputy and then as President, he abhorred the common touch. Give him an opportunity to empathise with the poor and sick and he would retreat into technocratic jargon. Give him a baby and he would plop it into the nearest lap.”

Thus did Rory Carroll, years ahead of the 2007 ANC Polokwane Conference, provide a simple answer about what I would have to do to shed the deadly image of being ‘the aloof’, and thus win ANC elections and popular approval – display the common touch, play with children, dance, cry publicly for the poor and the sick, and kiss babies, all this in front of the television cameras!

But of greater significance in terms of the future of our country was neither an alleged aloofness nor what a British journalist thought. Much more relevant were the views expressed by a leading South African journalist, Ms Karima Brown, who clearly sought to convince all who would listen that – Mbeki must go!

As early as August 2006 she had written that my “sell-by date” was ‘stapled on (my) back’. She even thought that what might happen would be that I might face “the ignominy of an investigation…(being) the focus, or the centre, of a new criminal probe into the arms deal… Is it any wonder then that the smart (ANC) MPs are beginning to look at life beyond Mbeki?...The writing is on the wall.”

In November 2007 she went on to write, “In the hurly-burly of the ANC succession battle, the question still needs to be asked, let alone be answered, why it is that the ruling party is willing to countenance the perpetuation of Mbeki’s rule beyond its natural and constitutional end-date, all because of the false obsession of “legacy”.

“After all, with the “benefit” of the past eight years of Mbeki’s rule to look back on, it does not appear that the legacy - creditable macroeconomic management peppered with a dangerously pathological denialism - is worth preserving…

“It is a bitter irony of African politics that our leaders stay in office beyond their welcome, so that they may fix problems that are wholly of their own creation. Johnson diagnoses it perfectly (remember he gets to be right twice in a 24-hour cycle): “We are at a crossroads where the central possibility is the indefinite extension of one-man rule by a paranoiac. In a word, Mugabeism.”…

“It is of course nearly impossible to love Mbeki. Not in the way one can love Mandela, or even, for that matter, Zuma. “Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a’ night,” said Caesar to Mark Anthony. “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

Writing five years later in October 2012, Zweli Mkhize, the current Treasurer General of the ANC, commended Ms Karima Brown for her reporting ahead of that year’s Mangaung ANC National Conference and said:

“Very few journalists are confident to find a positive side of this very important conference of the ANC. Journalist Karima Brown seems to have been one of the few brave ones to buck the trend. Her recent article in the Sunday Independent about the trends in the ANC structures is correct but under the atmosphere, it swims against the dominant trend in most media.”

As Zweli Mkhize had correctly stated concerning Ms Brown’s reports about the 2012 ANC National Conference, history suggests that she was also very accurate in foreseeing that her wishes would be fulfilled at the 2007 ANC National Conference.

In this regard, she obviously had the correct understanding of the impact the sustained charge of aloofness, and other similar negative assessments of the then President of the ANC, would have on the delegates gathered at the 2007 Polokwane Conference.

This article first appeared on the Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s Facebook page – see here. 

SOURCE: politicsweb

TONY LEON IN BUSINESS DAY

BUSINESS DAY

Opinion & Analysis

Mbeki’s race rage — and what he did (not) do about it

BY TONY LEON, 01 FEBRUARY 2016, 05:54

• inShare
• Kindle
• 

•  

PASSIONATE: Former president Thabo Mbeki at his Johannesburg home where he busies himself with promoting the continental agenda. Picture: PUXLEY MAKGATHO

BACK at the dawn of the last century, readers of The Strand Magazine in London lined up in droves to buy the next instalment of the latest Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Author Arthur Conan Doyle and his publisher had hit upon the brilliant marketing strategy of doling out the story in instalments, increasing the appetite of the reader and fattening the bottom line of the magazine. Indeed, in 1901, The Strand sold an unimaginable — by today’s standards at least — 500,000 copies a month.

Appropriate to this age of instant electronic communication, former president Thabo Mbeki is attempting something similar. In weekly postings on Facebook, he is publishing defences of some of the more contentious events from his near-decade at the apex of power in SA.

So far, he has attempted to rebut the so-called "spy saga", which dented the reputations of a troika of African National Congress (ANC) grandees — Mathews Phosa, Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale. Next, Jeremy Cronin was roasted for his early reference to the so-called "Zanufication of power" and Mbeki’s suppression of debate.

In the last instalment, we were treated to Mbeki’s view of Jacob Zuma’s apparently mischievous, but winning, strategy of painting himself in the colours of a victim.

Mbeki’s detractors await his defence of the real areas of controversy around his rule — literally the A to Z, from AIDS to Zimbabwe. Doubtless these will feature soon.

Diplomatically speaking, Mbeki and I did not enjoy the closest of relationships when we faced off in Parliament less than a decade ago. His disdain for his internal critics was more than matched by his icy detachment for some of those outside the party. Perhaps there’s a future posting on that too.

But for all the past controversies, there might yet be a market for Mbeki nostalgia. For barely a month into the new year, SA’s intelligentsia seems, in the apt words of Politicsweb editor James Myburgh, to have "descended into what can only be described as an era of racial madness".

Reality, consistency, proportion and fairness are, in his view, the collateral damage of the Penny Sparrow, Chris Hart and related affairs and incidents.

The current political conflagration is, however, not as new as it seems. As the governing party and the country gear up for the state of the nation address (Sona), doubtless these race incidents will be top of mind. This leads back to Mbeki at the time of his Sona in 2000. "Gobsmacked" would be the sentiment I felt when, soon after his opening remarks and pleasantries in Parliament, he thought it appropriate to share a racist e-mail penned by an engineer from a KwaZulu-Natal sugar mill.

Mbeki read the racist diatribe in unexpurgated and hateful form, including: "I would like to summarise what the kaffirs have done to stuff up this country since they came into power", and "All I am saying is that AIDS isn’t working fast enough."

Mbeki drew from this venom the conclusion that "many in the country" had reached the "premature conclusion that racism in the country is dead".

Far from it, Mbeki advised Parliament, with another quote, this time from abroad: "The bitch is in heat again."

I opined, in response, that quoting one racially bilious e-mail was hardly proof that its noxious sentiments were widely shared and that, more positively, there were acres of positive examples of racial amity dotting the South African landscape.

What was most striking between that past debate and the outpourings Parliament will doubtless witness a few weeks hence is the difference between the barely suppressed racial fury of Mbeki, on the one hand, and his lack of consequential action or stringent remedies on the other.

Unlike the current spokesman of the ANC in Parliament, Moloto Mothapo, Mbeki did not announce a specific law to "criminalise racism and the promotion of apartheid". He did not declare that the Constitution was imperilled. Instead, he tamely proclaimed that the government and the Human Rights Commission would convene a "national congress against racism".

I forget the achievements of that talk fest, but looking back from today’s vantage point, it was obviously unsuccessful.

Two further reasons suggest themselves as to why Mbeki’s public fury led to few consequences or wider outrage. First, his speech occurred in an antique age: there were no Twitter warriors or trolls to beat the electronic racial tom toms. The second clue lies in the rest of his speech. He drew attention to the huge economic progress SA was experiencing back then. Gross domestic product growth was at more than 4%, the rand-dollar exchange rate was an impressive R6.95, and he arrived in Parliament fresh from a triumphant reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He read to Parliament, with approval, the words of Anglo American chairman Julian Ogilvie Thompson: "Increasingly, (foreign investors) share our assessment that SA is one of the most attractive emerging markets."

Today, of course, Anglo is more a crippled giant than market leader. The currency has crashed more than 100% in value against the greenback in the intervening period; last week, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development revealed that foreign direct investment had fallen a whopping 74% in just one year. Most critically, the relatively high growth era of the Mbeki years has sharply reversed.

Drawing sweeping conclusions from random and offensive racist utterances is thus hardly novel in our two decades as a democracy. But the poison now, whipped up by the Twitterati, is that it comes at a time of low growth and a bleak economic outlook. Hence its dangers. There appears to be no shortage of expert opinions on how to quarantine racist behaviour and antidotes against it, although some of them will do much violence to our Constitution and rights it asserts.

But as fundamental — and, alas, equally contested — are the necessary, perhaps deeply politically incorrect, remedies for uplifting the country from the low growth trap in which we are ensnared. That debate needs to move urgently to centre stage.

• Leon is a former leader of the opposition. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonS
A

I Defend Thabo Mbeki! - By Mukazo Mukazo Vunda

I Defend Thabo Mbeki!

By Mukazo Mukazo Vunda

The Perspective

November 12, 2001

The effect that the opinions of leading news agencies have had on my psyche, in defaming Thabo Mbeki's stand on the issue of AIDS, became apparent to me when I hesitated in finding a fitting title to this article in defense of him, wishing not to seem associated with his ideas, the reason I wanted to defend him notwithstanding. I chose one title, then dropped it, then another, and, because of this, almost came to the point of giving up, like so many have done.

I never have problems finding catchy titles for my articles.

The realization that I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't tell of the opinions I share with him, and also knowing, like no other, the power of the written word, made me shake myself free of this grip. I started making notes and as I went along, I became more resolute and freer in my rendering.

Then fear gripped me, the same kind of fear I used to have in my younger days, when I felt naked in front of an overwhelming power, as I realized yet again how easy it is to be led astray, how powerful, as I have said already, the written word is when well and often rendered. Then anger gripped me, as I saw the evil cowering behind in the shadows, the evil that has thus far done a good job in preventing us from examining, in time, the positions of the Thabo Mbekis of this world properly, and I knew then how I would head this article.

I am a true born African, and I have experienced the entire gamut of life in Africa. I was born at the dawn of independence so the only knowledge I have of the time is written and hearsay. All evidence, however, points to the fact that life conditions took a gradual decline from then, till the mid seventies, the time that I have my own recollections of, up till today. This is true of all African countries even though the decline may have come earlier in some countries than in others.

I have walked around Lagos in Nigeria, and seen violence for a few naira, dead bodies left lying in the streets, and talked to street vendors, or street thugs standing around waiting for a chance to make some money. Almost all were tales of sheer hardship, almost all were coping strategies invented in the fire of poverty.

I have waited for busses at the main bus station in Zambia's Kitwe, sitting long hours in the blazing sun with a bus that just won't go anywhere until a certain number of passengers is reached, and seen beggars without a chance, thieves scheming, and women making their living selling scones and fruits, and ultimately, themselves.

I have slept in Zimbabwe's squatters, and woken up broke like everybody else, without money for a trip with a minibus into the center of the city, if that was the nearest place where I could find sustenance. I have found it imperative to trek on foot, ten to thirty kilometers at a time, to the place where I can find bread, on an empty stomach, and experienced, maybe for a few days, what those around me experience much too often, if not daily.

I have experienced this reality from Kenya's Nairobi, Soweto in South Africa, to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. It goes without saying that the situation in almost all of Africa is bleak indeed.

Let us agree on one thing; that health is hard to come by if one is forced to live in such circumstances. Once this position is accepted, we will stop and think of this situation before we stuff vitamins into the mouths of these people when we see them ail. On an empty or malnourished stomach, pure vitamins in the form of tablets can be toxic. We would think twice before we concoct antiviral toxins to give to these people. We would think twice before erecting gigantic, modern hospitals in these regions because, even if a hospital is a blessing, it will be a good thing, and is a blessing for only 1% or less of the well off in these countries because medical remedies are only fully effective on a well-stuffed belly.

It is useless trying to heal a man who ate well only two weeks ago, and has had to make it on a 500 calorie per day diet, if not less, since then, trekking from one point to another, tens of kilometers at a time, torturing his body by the day. The only thing that will be good for such a person is a painkiller, and ultimately food, glorious food, and good food at that. When this is assured, we can start thinking of the other basics, and once these are also guaranteed, we can go ahead and build as many heart transplant theaters as we desire.

The sad fact about the African situation is that this reality has largely been ignored. That economic advice, medical and technical help to Africa has ignored this fact is plain to see. It is actually quite easy to see, and this simplicity is probably the reason that "complicated thinking" African intellectuals are missing the point. Poverty and its effects rule the day and the majority are unhealthy because of this. People in this state will not respond to medication, and this is precisely the point that Thabo Mbeki is making.

The realities that these people are experiencing daily are what is making our heroic leader so mad. He is standing up for you and me, for those in the majority who have to suffer so much daily. He has not forgotten, nor will he forget us, from the looks of things, and in this he should be commended. Too many become divorced from this reality when they make the high office.

Let us be civilized about our situation in Africa and not let the western media lead us astray. They know this reality like nobody else. They, and only they can recognize this reality at first sight because they can compare the reality they see in Africa with their own, even before they have landed at an African airport, unlike Africans who are the fish who will find it almost impossible to see the water they swim in.

Africa smells of poverty and underdevelopment from way up in the skies, from the windows of an airplane.

Westerners are the last people to criticize Thabo Mbeki. They know better. In fact, after going so far with writing this letter, I have freed myself enough to step into contentious waters and state openly that I think the only reason they are doing this is because they have an agenda for Africa, a plan for the continent.

Let us consider this part of their own history. When the plague hit Europe in a previous century, it wasn't removed from the face of the continent with vitamins, with medicines, with technology, but by cleaning up Europe. The squalor in which Europeans lived, ignorance and the general health of the population, was the cause of the rapid spread and scope of the plague. The plague was not eradicated by acceptance of the reality itself either, i.e. "by not being a dissident of the plague theory", and though this is the essential first step, as opposed to a non scientific approach, it still isn't the cure.

We shouldn't forget here that Africans have never needed westerners to accept that disease is part of life, and also knew of medicines long before westerners set foot in Africa, and the need of medication to cure disease. I know I speak for many when I say that I find traditional medicines the best remedies I have used. In fact, if we go further back in time, we will find that Africans, or Asians, outdo Europeans in the number of traditional medicines and remedies they had developed for diseases, which actually
worked, and still work wherever they are still popular. There is actually more to the story than meets the eye, or can be done justice to in a single article like this. The idea of a placebo, for example, is not a product of western scientific methods, but an invention of the very people considered as trapped in unthinking mysticism.

If anything, the west outdid the entire world in public executions of witches, and attributing witchcraft to disease in the centuries gone by. In Africa, the execution of witches was rare and far removed. Individuals who were considered malicious to society were simply isolated to prevent them from doing harm to the general population. The evidence is there for all to see. Europeans are actually the first people to use disease as a weapon of war, an act only a witch was associated with in former, even present times, in African and Asian societies, and that today, western establishments held in high esteem by their citizens (the CIA, and especially the former, notorious South African apartheid secret service, etc.) owe some of their successes to biological warfare waged on unsuspecting citizens.

AIDS remains an incurable disease, a disease that hits right at the most vulnerable spot of any society because the reproductive potential of the group, the only reason we live on as a species, is jeopardized. As such, we have to be very careful how we go about eradicating it. The best of a society's physical and intellectual resources have to be mobilized to eradicate such a dangerous scourge, and I am sure that a man of Thabo Mbeki's intelligence knows this fact. The only problem here is; how do you mobilize people who are in no state to actively partake in such an activity because of other inhibiting factors in the design? How do you set your priorities when you are confronted with other factors which also need urgent attention? How do you tackle such a disease, when the symptoms of the disease you are battling are so universal, similar to symptoms of prolonged stress, acute alcoholism, kidney or liver failure, anaemia, adult malnutrition, and the rest of the package you get with poverty, knowing full well that it is almost impossible to distinguish the microscopic virus itself? Why would you be led to believe that making the fighting of this disease your main priority will be your long awaited release from all your woes?

Many people who get lame immune systems do not necessarily have the virus. Some athletes get AIDS because of the strenuous demands of sport. Virgin daughters of kings in affluent climes have been reported to have the condition. An experiment carried out in Nairobi, Kenya, found that the men who had been suspected of suffering from the disease were actually not carriers of the virus, but had the condition purely because of the unhealthy life styles they led, and these were men with jobs and means to more bread than the average citizen. They were international truck drivers.

Why is there such certainty about a little known disease on the continent, and only on the continent of Africa, because in the west, every so often a doctor comes on the screen advising people not to panic if they notice such and such symptoms because the cause could be something other than they may be led to believe? Why are western medical experts giving different advice to Africans? Everybody knows that wanting to get well is usually half the battle when a person is ill, but why are we taking away the need to live in
Africans by telling them in one callous statement: "There is no hope for you. Just come and take some medicines to prolong your life, but, ultimately, your life is over", but encouraging the same in the West?

It is one thing to launch a campaign of prevention, and quite another to make people loose hope of life, the only thing they have.

But then this truth is only useful if a person can digest it and see the implications, and make useful connections. If a man's mental apparatus corresponds to what Ralph Ellison described as the mechanical man, in his book "Invisible Man", the world becomes a really complex place indeed, as revealed by president Arap Moi's speech in which he described the thatched hut, roadless, foot path crisscrossed contour, tribalism trapped, banana republic entangled, shackle-on-good-sense hugging, ideologically impoverished, naïve, politics-of-the-belly prone, nepotism bent, inarticulate, apathetic, easily controlled neo-colonial face of Africa as a "complicated place". This is not to say that complexity does not exist in Africa, but the context in which Arap Moi says this is what makes his statement flawed.

It is not true that Africa lacks control today. Africa lacks control by Africans. African control on the continent is restricted to a kind of gangland guarding of territory and the resources therein, reserving the resources for others to plunder. This is how the African controllers get paid. Arap Moi's statement is actually typical of the modes of thought of those who live in the darkness of gangland, thinking small, as others hover above them pulling the strings. In this parochial universe of the gang, the other gang, or country's rulers, the other tribe, the poor, are mysterious phenomena. Such a mentality cannot fathom how foreigners can manage to control a continent that is so complex, let alone make the realization that if a bunch of multinational companies can control Africa, then Africans can do it too, if they only thought as big as the others are thinking, if they stopped being puppets, and looked up and learnt how the other party is still managing to breast feed, and control their complex selves.

Africa is controlled by the same powers that control the rest of the world, but, unlike the case with the rest of the world, they are not discrete about the issue in Africa. Consider Taylor of Liberia, or the late Kabila of the then Zaire, who was signing contracts with mining companies long before his victory was assured, before he had even conquered the capital, while Mobutu still sat in his "rightful" throne. Such impunity is impossible with the Pakistanis, the Punjabis, the Russians, or the Americans.

It is not only in Africa where an oil company can have an activist removed, but only in Africa where it can be done so blatantly. Imagine the backlash if the incident in Nigeria a few years ago was in England.

A letter in our press section (which, by the way, is the main motivation behind this article), of an erudite African who blames Africa's problems on a lack of logical thought, and competent leadership, as he feels is the case with Thabo Mbeki's stand on the issue of AIDS, is quite revealing, and very frightening considering the interested parties looking for lackey leadership in Africa, and know that Africans are easily impressed by academic qualifications.

In his article, Tarty Teh, a Liberian living and working in America, with a Ph.D., makes the age-old mistake of equating erudition with wisdom or common sense, seeming to think that the latter flows automatically from the former. He also makes another common fallacy. He projects personal inferences, decisions and judgements made by individuals, on the rest of the concerned community, taking it for granted that if "Jim" can do this, then "Sam" will also do it. Summed up, his article takes various, disconnected statements and makes them support a preconceived judgement, a judgement conceived, unfortunately, without an understanding of the nature of the human mind, or of reality, for that matter.

Man's need to know is universal, a condition the west does not have a monopoly on. This need to know is ignited in light of the chaos of information confronting a sentient being, which he has to make sense of to survive. Much of this information will never be fully comprehended. Some of it will get shortcut explanations. Mysteries, like life and creation itself, have often been reduced to a few myths. Mysticism is actually a sign of a higher intelligence. It says that the beings have left the animal state and are capable of reasoned thought. Though this may imply stages - a primitive intelligence as opposed to a higher one - it would be wrong to see it as such. What this means is that our friend Tarty Teh fails to see in Europeans the very mysticism he so readily recognizes in Africans. The man is actually, blatantly denying himself his own ability to see. He is implicitly saying that this gift is a freak occurrence among his own kind. The very man criticizing his fellow Africans is an African himself. In what kind of cranium is the mind that makes him see these wrongs encased? What color of fingers does he look down upon when he is typing such articles. It would do him a lot of good to stop complaining and go about finding a way to create a society that rights wrongs created the way he so aptly sees, a task confronting Africans today, a task that is also ongoing in our western
counterparts' homes, whom Tarty Teh would so much like to emulate.

It should not be forgotten that Christianity, for example, is not so far removed from mysticism if one knows its nature, and we would all be advised not to think we are the sole sane beings living among a bunch of insane, unthinking, primitive beings. This is uncultured, unacceptable, and actually, outright rude.

We are made aware yet again how easy it is for some on our side to loose touch with the harsh reality experienced daily by the majority of our people on the streets, an experience I am sure Teh is familiar with. It doesn't take a presidential position to trigger this at all. But then Teh is also very young, and sidetracked; a product of this century's best, enforced dreams. This is evident from his letter. All I can do is wish him luck and success in his search for true African intellectuals. They might just be the same men he is estranged from on the streets, or the ones he helps crucify. There are a lot of hurdles in life and failing or falling is part of the parcel that comes with this process.

Let it be known that Thabo Mbeki is not alone, nor is he the last of his kind. We shall take up the mantle where he leaves it when they have crushed him into the ground, crushed, unfortunately, by those who should have supported him, those whose welfare is in question, those on his own side who are just too obdurate to understand him, so obstinately obdurate that they make for this African complicatedness whose eradication is a simple gift of seeing eyes, and the removal of the others who have hidden agendas and have successfully made a black sheep out of the Thabo Mbekis of this world.

Are we going to do it again? Are we going to let other, self interested parties lynch, crucify one of our bright ones like this, while we stand aside and watch, even joining in and throwing the stone? Where does it stop?

Lumumba's pertinacious determination earned him enemies on his own side, who were led to actively participate in his downfall and assassination, because a similar campaign was waged against him by others who were not interested in the needs of the local population, and they won, to the chagrin of Africans.

He has been proven right, a little too late, however.

The list of names is endless, but the tactic has been the same, from Kwame Nkruma to Steve Biko, from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X, to mention but a few.

Do you know these stories? Were you there when they crucified these men? Because if you were there then you would notice similarities with the present campaign against Thabo Mbeki, then Tarty Teh would know why our intellectuals, especially the males, are constantly conspicuously absent.

As a necessary move, before the actual handing over of power "to the natives", any occupying force that still needs the territory it occupies buys security by eliminating those they think will stand in the way of their interests. This process often continues into the period that the territory is considered sovereign. It will go on as long as there is a "one way dependence". Chris Hanny of South Africa, Lumumba of Congo, Kwame Nkruma of Ghana, are good, well known examples, but you can bet that there are many, many more, who are unknown to you and me, who were much brighter, much more intelligent than you will ever want to believe, all over the continent, and into the Diaspora too, who were, and continue to be victims of this strategy.

We should not let this be the case with Thabo Mbeki. Let us stop wallowing in certitude, and mobilize ourselves behind him and investigate the situation further like he proposes. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt he deserves as a man who has an entire South African intelligence agency behind him, a man with more information at his disposal than you or me. We may just come up with answers that we didn't expect, which will surprise, or even scare the living daylight out of us. We might just discover that the truth he knows is the truth those who are fighting him want hidden from naive African eyes, that the truth he so vehemently defends, a bit selflessly too, might just mean our salvation, if revealed, and salvation is precisely what we need in face of the intractable scourge of AIDS that is slowly, but surely, like the shadow that comes with dusk, decking Africa, and will ultimately be our bane if we do not forget that we eventually have to get into bed and go about the business of self propagation.

SOURCE: The Perspective