South Africa: Mbeki is All Head, Zuma Heart

17 December 2007
allAfrica.com
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Standing out from today's local coverage of what most journalists saw as the humiliation of South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki at the ANC's conference on Sunday, was a piece in the kwaZulu-Natal newspaper, The Witness.

Mbeki had "gambled away a chance to win support in his opening address," wrote Nalini Naidoo in a blunt assessment.

Even delegates sympathetic to Mbeki said he missed a golden opportunity to talk directly to the members. They can't understand why he hasn't picked up that the tussle with Zuma is not about policy, but about leadership style...

And:

"I saw a loser," said a delegate. "He spoke with no passion." Many asked how he could have misread the situation and the mood of the membership.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS who can stand back and distinguish the wood from the trees have often helped South Africans to see themselves more clearly. One has been John Carlin, formerly of The Independent in London, now working for El Pais in Spain.

One of the best chroniclers of the country's transition to democracy, Carlin gives every impression of loving South Africa like a South African. (He's just sold the movie rights to his book on the remarkable story of how the 1995 Rugby World Cup united the country under Nelson Mandela. Morgan Freeman will star as Madiba.)

The piece which The Pretoria News carried today was vintage Carlin. During the transition, he wrote, Mandela said the way to persuade white Afrikaners to relinquish power was not merely to address their heads, but their hearts also. Writing of Mbeki and his opponent, Jacob Zuma, today, Carlin continued:

...the balance Mandela advocated, and epically exemplified, is absent in the[se] two leaders. Mbeki is all head and Zuma is all heart and, given the political times we live in, the heart shows every sign of emerging the victor.

And:

The speech Mbeki gave on Sunday at the ANC national conference was an appeal to pure reason. There was no attempt to bypass the brain and grab his listeners' emotions. Two-and-a-half hours of unremittingly soporific logic, it was Fidel Castro without the pregnant pauses, the rises and falls, the raging histrionics. As a last-ditch attempt to rally the people to his cause, it was calamitously limp.

Read the full piece.

And Africans interested in how the English-speaking West sees us should look at today's coverage from the New York Times, the Washington Post and, in Britain the Financial Times and the Guardian.

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