Man on Planet Thabo just doesn’t get it
Thabo Mbeki understands your gloom. No, really, he gets it. SA, the former president told an audience and Fin24, has a “permissive atmosphere” that “allows for” the current tide of violence sweeping the country.
“It’s very difficult not to be depressed,” he said, his baritone barely audible over the whine of a violin and the plink-plink of crocodile tears plopping down on to his fire-warmed slippers.
Mbeki’s determination to resist reality has always been resolute. Perhaps this was an essential survival strategy on his part: when you’re Nelson Mandela’s successor and you have the charisma and warmth of a gherkin, perhaps it’s better to check out.
Whatever its causes, it was spectacular. For example, there was his decision — made just as SA prepared to enter the 21st century — to root his HIV/Aids policy firmly in the 12th century. There were his endless protests that the arms deal was above
board, as if locking politicians and arms dealers in the same room doesn’t instantly turn into a heaving, sweating Bacchanal of corruption and cover-ups.
And, of course, there was his penchant for writing endless treatises on the country’s present and future at precisely the same moment his government was figuring out the most expensive way to make children illiterate. But Mbeki saved his most urgent fugue states for Zimbabwe.
Recall, for example, his championing of the notion of an “African Renaissance” in 1998, just a few years before he revealed to the world that “accessory to a crime” and “enabling a despot” are actually pronounced “quiet diplomacy”; a policy of appeasement and suppression that dragged on for 10 bloody years before finally reaching a climax in 2008 when Mbeki helped Mugabe steal an election.
On Friday fate tried to shake the former president out of his decades-long, hypocritical stupor: literally hours after Mbeki had asked why the violent, the corrupt and the wicked no longer fear consequences, Mugabe died in hospital in Singapore, ending a life that, for its final two decades, had been the very definition of crime without consequence.
Unfortunately, fate needed a firmer nudge than a coincidence of timing. When you’re the sole occupant of Planet Thabo, distantly orbiting the ANC solar system, you are so far away from any consciousness of your own culpability that the Lord God Almighty could appear and write “YOU MADE THIS TURD!” across the sky in flaming letters and you would still blame the dastardly CIA.
It is tempting to stare in disbelief at the self-righteous, faux ignorance of Mbeki. It would be cathartic to let our jaws drop and ask: is he serious? Is the guy who appointed Jackie Selebi, and whose party then fired Vusi Pikoli for investigating Selebi, seriously asking why criminality is out of control in this country? Is the guy who actively helped destroy Zimbabwe seriously fretting about the fabric of SA?
It would feel good to yell out those questions, but, of course, we know the answers. This is simply the Seven Ages of ANC Man unfolding as they always have: get born; get noticed; promise and threaten in equal measure; attain power; pontificate a little and eat a lot; deny; and, in the end, sympathise without admitting anything.
We also know why Mbeki worked so hard to keep Mugabe in power. Certainly, Big Man hero worship was a factor, as was a shared paranoia about Western and white influence. But perhaps the ultimate motive was the cold-eyed pragmatism of the doctor quarantining a sick population: given the choice between a messy, probably violent transition into genuine democracy and the relative quiet of autocratic repression, Mbeki chose the latter.
He did it because he and the ANC didn’t have a plan for dealing with an unravelling Zimbabwe. Now we know that the governing party also doesn’t have a plan for dealing with an unravelling SA. Which brings me back to our collective gloom, the one Mbeki feels so keenly.
The violence and rage and despair are depressing. But what’s also depressing is the very real possibility that in 10 years the remnants of the press will be quoting former president Cyril Ramaphosa as he mournfully wonders why SA is so much more violent and poor and depressed than it was back in 2019.
How does that cycle get broken? The simple, perhaps simplistic, answer is that it starts with consequences. It starts with a trustworthy police force, and a justice system in which life means life and rapists and murderers do not get parole. It starts with a system in which inept politicians lose their jobs, and corrupt ones lose their assets and then their freedom.
Until there are consequences, rich, vain, delusional politicians will wring their hands, and SA will burn.
IS THE GUY WHO APPOINTED JACKIE SELEBI SERIOUSLY ASKING WHY CRIMINALITY IS OUT OF CONTROL IN THIS COUNTRY?