allAfrica.com: South Africa: Democracy is Mature, the Private and NGO Sector is Strong, and Government is Weak in South Africa, says Moeletsi Mbeki (Page 1 of 5)

South Africa: Democracy is Mature, the Private and NGO Sector is Strong, and Government is Weak in South Africa, says Moeletsi Mbeki

South African President Thabo Mbeki is scheduled to outline his plans for his country in a state-of-the nation address in Cape Town on Friday. It will be his last such speech before South Africa's third non-racial elections, expected in late March or April. The speech is President Mbeki's opportunity to assess the record of his leadership and to demonstrate what progress there has been under the governing African National Congress (ANC), since liberation ten years ago. Analysts predict that the economy, job creation and the continued fight against poverty will feature prominently in the speech; so too foreign policy successes including South Africa's peace efforts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. But President Mbeki is said by some critics to have failed in his approach to the crisis across the border in Zimbabwe.

Moeletsi Mbeki, the president's brother, is a business entrepreneur and political commentator. He is also the deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, an independent think tank, based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In a wide-ranging conversation with allAfrica's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton he summed up his views on a decade of democracy in South Africa as well as the highs and lows of the ANC government.

How would you assess the past ten years here in South Africa? What are the pluses, what are the minuses, what needs still to be done?

The big blast about South Africa is that we have become a mature democracy during the past ten years. If you look at democracy in Africa, I would count two countries as being mature African democracies - Botswana and Mauritius. Those two countries have never had coups d'état, they have never had civil wars. They have had changes, but changes of president - or prime minister in the case of Mauritius. So we have two mature democracies in Africa. Both these countries became independent in the 60s.

We are, of course, a newcomer. But we are only ten years' old, but our democracy is as entrenched as in Botswana or in Mauritius. So that's a huge plus.

How can South Africa possibly be a mature democracy in only ten years?

You see one of the things that gets forgotten about South Africa is that South Africa is an old state. We are at least three hundred years old. South Africa as a modern state was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. And it has been continuously a state ever since then, which is unlike most African countries, which were established as states only about 80 years before their independence.

So that's one point about South Africa. As a society, democracy in South Africa pre-dates 1994, because we had democratic traditions in the middle of the 19th century - what generally is referred to as Cape Liberalism. But that was the beginnings of democracy - of modern democracy in South Africa. The whites had a vote and the blacks had a vote. And the blacks from the middle of the 19th century had their own newspapers - because they were participating in the electoral process and they had their own political parties.

If you take the ANC, our ruling party, for example - if you look at the predecessors of the organisations that culminated in the formation of the ANC - they were formed mainly in the 1880s. They used to be called vigilance associations. And one of the major components of the ANC was the Natal Indian Congress, which was dissolved, but absolved into the ANC. The Natal Indian Congress was formed in 1896. So you can see we have a long tradition of democracy amongst the people, although we didn't have a long tradition of democracy in the state, which is why our democracy - at the level of the state - looks mature much more quickly, because we have had a long tradition of democracy amongst the people.

Let's spool forward to 1994 and let's look at South Africa within the African context, because there were early foreign policy near-disasters, when South Africa stepped out tentatively to make its way within Africa. Look at the debacle in Lesotho in 1998.

One of the things that many people in Africa and many people in South Africa don't understand about the ANC is that during our period when we were in exile and we were in other African countries - for 30 years virtually the ANC was in exile from 1960 to 1990 - we had our head office initially in Tanzania and then in Zambia. But what was happening was that, under the OAU conventions, the OAU conventions made liberation movements into a state within a state.

The net effect was that our liberation movement leaders were like diplomats in Africa. They had very little contact with the people in the African countries. So, they understood very little about the nature of the problems in the African countries, because they were interfacing with government - especially the foreign ministry of Zambia or of Tanzania and then the Organisation of African Unity's Liberation Committee.

So we have quite a bizarre situation in a way whereby the ANC spent 30 years in Africa, but it knew very little about what was going on in Africa. It was focused on its own problem of tackling apartheid. That's why our foreign policy in terms of Africa has been very experimental; let me put it that way.

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