Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki, former South African president, main co-founder of the African Union and current leading continental conflict resolver and peacemaker, receives his award of Media Trust African of the Year 2012 today in Abuja.
President is no stranger to honours and awards. In 2000, he received the Oliver Tambo/Johnny Makatini Freedom Award; and he was made Knight Grand Cross order of the Bath the following year. In 2003 he received the Gandhi Award and two years later, he received the City of Athens Medal of Honour in, Sudan's Insignia of Honour, and Rotterdam's Jongeren Raad Anti discrimination Award. In 2007, he was made a Knight of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, and received the Order of Merit from the continent's football body, the CAF.
He has been honoured by universities throughout the world. After receiving Boston's Arthur D. Little Institute's doctorate of Business Administration, honoris cause, in 1994; a doctorate of laws from Sussex University, his alma mater, and a doctorate from the University of South Africa the following year; the Corporate Council on Africa's prestigious Good Governance Award in 1997; another doctorate from Rand Afrikaans University in 1999, and yet another doctorate of laws from Glasgow Caledonian University the following year, and another doctorate of commercial sciences from the University of Stellenbosch in 2004; he was twice in 2000 and 2008 voted Newsmaker of the Year by the Pretoria News Press Association and by the media research company Monitoring South Africa. And this man is still making news, which is why we are gathered here--and it is only right and proper that we are.
But clearly it is not Thabo Mbeki but Media Trust that is being honoured today--for, the honour more properly reverts to the organisation--that this Mbeki, this greatest of Africa's leaders, this celebrated, jewel-bedecked recipient of a myriad of international educational, religious, cultural and civic honours and awards, has agreed to accept its award.
As it is, Thabo Mbeki gave everything to the world; and the world is now giving it back to him. When he came to the Eastern Cape as a restless activist in 1954, Govan Mbeki effectively dissolved his family, urging all members of his family to learn to make and hold and regard the ANC as their new, real and only family. Little Thabo took it literally, but it was just as his father actually meant. Govan was a revolutionary warrior, a capable organiser for the ANC, a teacher and a publicist; and head of the family that has offered everything to South Africa--its time as commitment, its resources as burnt offerings, its members as martyrs, and the other of its surviving sons--Thabo--as its special gift to the continent, who, perhaps next only to Robert Mugabe, is the greatest African leader today. Thabo is, thus, of revolutionary pedigree unmatched by anyone, not even Mandela.
And besides that total sacrifice made by the literally dissolved Govan Mbeki's family to the struggle to free South Africa, Thabo had, in his own right, sacrificed everything for his land--his childhood and his adolescence, most of which he spent in the Umkhonto we Sizwe, his formative youth which he spent junketing around the world as a stateless official vagrant on ANC business, his manhood which he spent in making friends for the yet-to-be-born multiracial republic and in negotiating how to make past enemies future friends, and how to turn colour-barred racial groups into equal citizens. In 1985, Mbeki was part of a group that began making secret contacts with South Africa's business community; and he later led the ANC delegation that began secret talks with the apartheid regime in order to dismantle it.
Apartheid and its supporters had correctly seen and read the bold writing on the wall; and momentous events began to unfold: ANC was unbanned, Mandela and the others on the island were released, negotiations to transfer power to the majority got underway, and the doctrine of apartheid was dismantled. At the end of it all, Mandela became the first president of a non-racially democratic South Africa; and Mbeki became his deputy--and eventual successor.
Mbeki, the enfant terrible, is every bit a chip off the old block--Govan, thepere terrible; but there is something intrinsically supra-political--almost apolitical--about this unusual, cerebral, aloof, academic, funny, boyish, yet grey-haired politician. A clear-sighted former fire-spitting Marxist who could in one flourish shake hands with Adam Smith, cavort with David Ricardo and co-exist peacefully with John Maynard Keynes, this modern-day Shaka Zulu did to Boer settler colonialism what the original one did to British colonial enterprise; and as a latter-day Maqoma the Xhosa, he embarked on and completed the Tenth Frontier War, this time winning with the assegai of intellectual brilliance, and, with it, he drew up the economic blueprint for developing and managing the new South Africa as the continent's leading economy. Yet despite all this, he was to become the struggle's face of peace; for, without Mbeki, South Africa would have descended into a post-apartheid bloodbath.
If Mandela was South Africa's Mao Tse-tung, Thabo Mbeki is its Deng Xiaoping. If the Madiba collective led its doctrinaire Marxist Great Trek to freedom from the restrictions of apartheid; at its end, it was Thabo Mbeki who took over the effective reins of government, and crafted and implemented its free-market Great Leap Forward. And of all of South Africa's liberation heroes, he is perhaps the only one who can creditably be compared to the great Madiba. While Mandela spent 27 years on Robben Island; Mbeki spent 28 years in a much larger kind of jail--the world.
The whole world was his prison and what a cold cell it was! And it proved no less as restrictive to him as the island was to the elders; and in it, Mbeki devoted his entire life to the ANC in a long sojourn in the metropolitan wilderness of its earthly cells. And his record as a true, rare, exceptional and distinguished leader of the African National Congress and a patriot will remain indelible for all time. He lost his son, he lost his brother and, to all intents and purposes, he lost his father to Robben Island, and he himself lost his freedom, and was, for 28 long years, reduced to wandering the globe without country, family or home--or future, except the one in his dream, which, of course, he realised.
The continent can have no better Man than this revolutionary who fought the war, negotiated the peace and led the government to multiracial maturity. But perhaps it was in the nature of African politics--and it was a shame that shouldn't be forgiven or condoned--that a Jacob Zuma would come to replace a Thabo Mbeki in South Africa in the manner that a Mohammed Abubakar Rimi was defeated by a Sabo Bakin Zuwo in Kano. The Mob can have its way but, in the end, the Mob is always a fool--and it and its interest are soon parted. As it is, Zuma is a nice, affable, jolly good fellow of a traditional African elder who does speak the language of the masses; but when it matters, at the time of hunger and unemployment, is it Zulu adverbs or Xhosa syntax that the masses will eat? The great expectations of blacks couldn't be met by the paltry offerings of South Africa's truncated, unfinished revolution--and the answer would have been blood.
And when the time for departure came, Mbeki left, resigning the presidency of South Africa after his unprecedented recall by the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, following a conclusion by a judge against him of improper interference in the procedures and processes of the National Prosecuting Authority, which at that time was prosecuting Jacob Zuma for corruption. He decided to leave with head held high than cling on to power kowtowing; and even when the court's conclusion was finally overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeal in January 2009, he let his resignation stand.
After engineering his defeat and departure from office, Zuma, perhaps in a bid to make it up, decided to deliver the valedictory to the departing president.And, as usual, before he gave his address, he led the crowd in singing 'somlandela uMbeki yonke indawo' [We shall follow Mbeki everywhere]. And they will be the losers if they don't.
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His greatest legacy is the Republic of South Africa which he gave to the world and of which Nelson Mandela is the beloved symbol. His other legacies include the New Partnership for African Development, NEPAD, which was really his brainchild. His other equally important and related legacy is that of success in conflict resolution situations thought beyond the pale. Today, there is peace in many areas of the African continent, thanks to the Mbeki signature: he mediated in conflicts in Burundi, in the Congo, in Cote d'Ivoire and in Zimbabwe.
And even concerning the AIDS controversy on which Mbeki has been much pilloried but over which he has remained unrepentant, the world may yet come to reconsider its stand on him when technology news and received medical wisdom are no longer beholden to multinational drug manufacturers.
He has also been criticised for his stand on Zimbabwe by a world that forgets that both the negotiations at Lancaster House and the Groote Schuur were veritable Western-inspired abbreviations to democratic nationalist struggles that would have gone on to their logical conclusion--the securing of peace, freedom and power--and land--for discriminated African majorities.
In 1961, shortly after his election as secretary of the African Students' Association, he was instructed by the ANC to leave South Africa in preparation for higher duties, which he had now ablyn discharged. Along the way, this had seen him going to school in Sussex, to office in London, to train at a military school in the then USSR, to train others in Botswana, in Zambia, in Swaziland and to while away time in Nigeria. If anybody is looking for the personification of the ANC and the real, authentic African hero, he should look no further: here he is--Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki, the man who has made Africans proud by all the actions he has taken, at home or abroad.
Adamu, a seasoned journalist, is a Daily Trust columnist
