1 June 2009
editorial
Johannesburg — He made the suggestion in jest, of course, but like all banter, Taft's Words contained a kernel of truth in them. How to deal with out-of-office leaders and what role they should play after stepping down from office?
Leaving the highest office in the land has always been a difficult challenge for leaders, the biggest hurdle being how to adjust to the loss of power and all the benefits associated with it.
Most leaders - including CEOs of companies- have withdrawal symptoms for many years after leaving their positions of power.
Also, very few leaders leave office without having been changed - some for the better, some for the worse - by the experience and exercise of power. Some leaders never recover from it.
A few do manage to find the way back to their old selves. Former president Thabo Mbeki appears to have joined the select few. The rave reviews that followed his first major speech since leaving office last September suggest that the former president is rediscovering the charming and engaging diplomat of the 1980s.
By all accounts -- at least those that I have heard and read -- the Mbeki who addressed an audience of about 1000 people to mark Africa Day last week displayed a character not seen since the 1980s, when he charmed a string of visitors to the African National Congress (ANC) in exile.
The Mbeki who was at Rhodes University in Grahamstown last week came across as honest, open, engaging, charming, interesting and erudite.
That is in sharp contrast to the adjectives and phrases that defined Mbeki's tenure as Nelson Mandela's right-hand man and president of the country: guarded, dull, paranoid, Machiavellian, and a brooding recluse .
"We all read that he was aloof, but we did not see that," the Daily Dispatch quoted Xolani Nyali, one of the co-organisers of the event, as saying.
"He shattered all our expectations.... He has a great sense of humour and even told jokes. He really wanted to engage with people."
The same paper reported that Mbeki sprinkled his speech with amusing anecdotes; he even answered a few thorny questions, including one about his views on HIV/AIDS.
Mbeki's performance at Rhodes suggests that he has accepted the change in his political circumstances, the hurdle most leaders often fail to clear.
The move almost overnight from being the centre of power to becoming a citizen -- you never do become ordinary after being president of the country -- can test even the strongest of characters.
Leaders often take a long time to go through that transformation, most of the effort being taken up by the process of overcoming the loss of power and all the trappings that come with it.
If the relaxed Mbeki who appeared at Rhodes is anything to go by, he has accepted quite quickly his transformation from the head of the state to a resident of Killarney.
Stepping down from office, it would appear, has freed Mbeki from the shackles of the Presidency, a cocoon that can suffocate those who occupy the office if they are not careful.
It has also freed Mbeki from the ANC, the organisation he joined at the age of 14. The liberation struggle and the ANC shaped Mbeki's outlook and behaviour, a point he made to his biographer, Mark Gevisser, when he warned him not to seek answers to his conduct from his psychological make-up.
Today, for the first time in 53 years, Mbeki is free to be himself (although we have yet to establish what the real Mbeki is like).
Whether he does ever become himself -- other than a man shaped by liberation struggle politics -- is another matter.
But whatever path Mbeki follows in building his post-presidential career, he will have to choose a combination of models proposed by historian Irina Belenky. She wrote in 1999 that all former presidents could be categorised into six camps: the still ambitious, the exhausted volcanoes, the political dabblers, the embracers of a cause, the first citizens, and the seekers of vindication.
We will know in due course which combination of Belenky's models Mbeki goes for, but his performance at Rhodes suggests that we may not need to turn to Taft's suggestion after all.
Sikhakhane is editor-in-chief of Destiny Man and a freelance writer.
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