Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
6 February 2004
interview
Johannesburg — 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.
Hit and miss, even; look at Zaire.
If you take, for example, the fall of Mobutu. Mobutu was to every African the monster. He killed Africa's hero, which was Patrice Lumumba. But, to us as the ANC, we knew very little about that story. So we thought that, somehow, we could have a dignified exit mechanism for this monster, Mobutu.
And yet, President Mandela, as peace mediator, was on that icebreaker, the Outeniqua, on the high seas off the coast of Pointe Noire in Congo Brazzaville, waiting for Laurent Kabila to come on board, with Mobutu almost dying, thinking that he could knock heads together and somehow organise a departure of Mobutu from then Zaire. That failed miserably.
Of course it failed miserably, because it wasn't based on a clear understanding of the politics of the Congo - of then Zaire. Our leaders did not understand who Laurent Kabila was. I mean Laurent Kabila had been fighting against Mobutu in the jungles of the Congo since the 60s. So there was a huge lack of understanding of what the story was in the Congo. Mobutu himself had been very implicated in stoking fires in Angola, in the surrounding countries, in Rwanda etc. But we didn't know all that.
South Africa had to grow up pretty quickly; certainly South African foreign policy. Do you think President Thabo Mbeki has handled it properly? When you look to how South Africa has now got involved in peacemaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Burundi. South Africa seemed to have to play catch-up pretty quickly.
Yes, I think we are catching up. And I think we are less ambitious. We came in with big ambitions. We could tell the Basotho how they should live. We could go to the Congolese and say love one another and so on.
Are you saying the idealism has been stripped away?
Definitely our ambition is much, much less. We are looking at how to help economic development and how to help parties to talk to each other - not to help them to talk to each other, but to provide a forum. For example, with the Congolese parties, what we did is we provided a forum for them in Sun City. And we provided, so to speak, consultants. If they wanted a consultant from the South African government, then that person could act that particular role. So, we provided a forum for the Congolese. So I don't think it's quite right to say we brought peace to Congo.
Helped to restore peace -
We helped by providing a forum, a neutral forum, for the Congolese and then making available our own negotiators who had been involved in our own negotiations to be available to help whenever they wanted.
And yet, people say President Mbeki has failed just across the border, in Zimbabwe, with his policy of quiet diplomacy or constructive engagement with President Robert Mugabe.
Well, I think the South African government - including the president - admit that quiet diplomacy has not produced what they thought it would, i.e. a change of direction by Robert Mugabe. It hasn't done so. But again, coming to the point I made earlier, the ANC knows very little about Zimbabwe.
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