Good Bye Thabo and Bon Voyage!
And so the time has come, when the distinguished gentleman of cigars, described as a leader of Machiavellian tendencies who impressed abroad and not at home was unceremoniously dumped by the rapacious and belligerent ANC. South Africa woke up on Sunday to a new dawn of unknown futures and a new political reality. In the end Mbeki, who succeeded in bringing old apartheid foes in line, cut a lonely figure in the wilderness as his destiny was sealed and perhaps wrapped up in his favourite Havana Cuban Cigars he so enjoyed. Described as the quintessential black Englishman or more appropriately the ‘Black Knight’ after his recent foreign honours by the ‘Queen’ Elizabeth herself, Mbeki succeeded in putting Africa on the G8 agenda, oversaw the creation of the African Union and devised what popularly came to be known as the ‘African renaissance’. Who can forget his, “I am an African” speech?
Often hailed as the ANC’s modernizer, his biographer Mark Gevisser stated, that “in his inability to grasp that new conditions always superseded old loyalties, however, he remained remarkably old-fashioned.” ‘Just call me Thatcherite,’ said Mbeki at a press conference in June 1996, at which the ANC presented its new economic strategy called GEAR. His record for South Africa has been a shambles as will probably be that of his successor Jacob Zuma who, together with his insane thugs, have long since sold their souls to international capital. During Mbeki’s tenure, white household incomes rose 15 percent, whilst the average black household income fell by 19 percent according to government statistics. Power and water bills have risen so high that they now consume almost a third of the income of the poorest families. Those who are unable to pay, have had their water and electricity cut off. In September 2005, a comprehensive study was presented to the South African parliament that compared the treatment of rural people under apartheid and today. It documented that during the 1st decade of democracy, close to a million people had been evicted. Almost half of those forcibly removed were malnourished and starving children and almost a third were women. This is not what the Freedom Charter promised. Today the ANC is synonymous with corruption and mischief. It’s leaders are the Pharos of our times. The removal of Mbeki, creates no silver lining for the millions of South Africa’s poor whose economic situation is not destined to change anytime soon. In documenting the fall of this “prince”, Gevisser abtly quotes Shakespeare’s Coriolanus who details the last line of the play given to the murderer, “My rage is gone, and I am stuck with sorrow.” He questions now in wonderment as to whether the ANC feels the same way, or whether there is now the taste for more blood!
The IPCI imbibes the Islamic vision of speaking truth to power, standing up for justice and challenging rapacious hegemony in whatever form that it metamorphoses. In the forthcoming months plans are afoot to engage with high-level ANC executives and individuals such as Zuma in debate, challenging their benign assumptions on the reality of what South Africa has become, and providing alternatives and frameworks within which civic society can seek to find solutions to their problems.
As the celebrated playwright Oscar Wilde proclaimed, “Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has studied history, is man’s original virtue”. |