one respect, it is an indictment of the post-apartheid government in South Africa that such a question is posed at all. When Mandela left office in June 1999, South Africa’s global standing was high on account of the (relative) peacefulness of its transition to democracy, its discourse of racial reconciliation, and its apparent determination to act as an evangelist for democracy on the African continent. Much, if not all, of that reservoir of goodwill was drained away during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. At no stage – either at home or abroad – did Mbeki command the same aura or inspire the same confidence as Mandela, despite, paradoxically, his superior administrative skills as a head of government.
There were many reasons for this – principally his less accessible personality, the more conspiratorial and secretive political culture he fostered, and his enthusiasm for a highly centralised, top-down style of government (Hamill, 2001). All of this would ultimately sow the seeds of his demise, as he was removed first from the ANC presidency in December 2007 and then from the state presidency in September 2008. Internationally, Mbeki had initially been received favourably as a key figure in the so-called ‘new generation’ of African leaders who seemed to understand what was required to rescue the continent from its position on the margins of international politics. This ‘new generation’ had at least mastered the post-Cold War vocabulary of political and economic change, even if their commitment to its substance was yet to be tested. As Mandela’s deputy president, Mbeki had championed an ‘African renaissance’ – central to which was a commitment to clean, open and democratic government – and had spoken of wresting control away from ‘petty tyrants who would be our governors by theft of elective positions’ (Mbeki, 1998).
In his first two years in office as president, he played a major part, alongside the British prime minister Tony Blair, in constructing the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), a development contract with the West in which good government, transparency and democratisation were core elements. This was followed in 2002 by the establishment of the African Union (AU), the successor to the widely discredited Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Mbeki was one of the AU’s principal architects and he served as its first chair with a more robust – although at this stage still largely theoretical – commitment to democratic governance and a more critical attitude towards the traditional axioms of state sovereignty and non-interference. Here was a leader who seemed attuned to the new post-Cold War orthodoxies and who sought to steer South Africa in particular, and Africa in general, towards a pragmatic accommodation with them. This was evidenced by his pivotal domestic role in fashioning the Gear strategy introduced in June 1996, a more conservative macroeconomic framework and one which was an anathema to the ANC’s formal allies, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the SACP. This did not make Mbeki an unconditional enthusiast for neoliberal globalisation, as was sometimes charged. It, rather, portrayed him as a reformist globaliser who broadly accepted the prevailing nostrums of globalisation while acknowledging the continuing importance of the state. He also sought the restructuring of the political and economic institutions of global governance to give greater weight to the voice of the global South, and of Africa in particular.
THE SQUANDERED PRESIDENCY
The image of Mbeki the pragmatist and stable technocrat faded as his first term progressed and as he staked out eccentric, even bizarre, positions on particular issues and perhaps sought to overcompensate for the broadly conformist nature of his government’s economic policies by a more contrived and laboured militancy in other contexts. His policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’, introduced following Zimbabwe’s descent into state-orchestrated mayhem in 2000, had exhausted its (always) limited potential to stabilise that country and to facilitate democratic change by the time of the fraudulent presidential election of 2002. Persistence with the policy subsequent to that date, in the face of extreme regime violence and an openly stated determination to liquidate the opposition, was an exercise in self-deception on Mbeki’s part and a failure comparable in scale to his simultaneous abdication of responsibility in dealing with South Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Indeed one wonders: was Nelson Mandela’s lament (2008) about a ‘tragic failure of leadership’ directed at least as much towards Mbeki as it was towards the regime in Harare? People inevitably drew the conclusion that if South Africa failed to condemn unbridled state terrorism in its own neighbourhood and could display such scant regard for the flouting of democratic values – and if its own government ministers could offer supportive words to a regime such as Mugabe’s – then a replay of the Zimbabwean scenario was a possibility in South Africa. In 2003, the then foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (2003), declared that an ANC government would never condemn Zimbabwe, a position which could only have emboldened the Harare regime. In the same year (2003), Membathisi Mdladlana, then labour minister, stated that South Africa had much to learn from the Zimbabwean ‘land reform’ process. In a similar vein, the ANC Youth League leader, Julius Malema, praised Mugabe’s land seizures in Zimbabwe as a model for South Africa to emulate while denouncing the ‘Mickey Mouse’ MDC (Bridgland, 2010). In June 2009, South Africa’s minister of Land Reform and Rural Development, Gugile Nkwinti, announced that the ANC government would scrap its ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ land redistribution policy, which allows the government to acquire land only at a market prices and only with the consent of the land owner, and replace it with ‘less costly, alternative methods of land acquisition’. Whether a break with the ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ principle is an attempt to accelerate land redistribution and thus neutralise Zimbabwean-style populist demagoguery, or whether it is an early symptom of it, remains moot at this stage.
Added to this was a South African rhetoric which tended to focus not on the perpetrators of human rights abuses and the theft of elections but rather on the easier option of blaming the West or Western racism and which even echoed Mugabe’s own vitriol in characterising the opposition MDC – the electoral victors – as Western puppets seeking to reintroduce colonial rule. In a letter to Tsvangirai on 22 November 2008, Mbeki wrote that: ‘It may be that, for whatever reason, you consider our region and continent as being of little consequence to the future of Zimbabwe, believing that others further away, in western Europe and North America, are of greater importance’. Such strident criticism was never directed at Mugabe.
There have, over the years, been numerous indications that South Africa has lost its way on the Zimbabwe question and has departed from the values underpinning its own transition to democracy and which informed Mbeki’s ‘African renaissance’ vision and his role in constructing the Nepad. Although ‘quiet diplomacy’ was premised on the belief that a more punitive approach would cause economic collapse in Zimbabwe, thus triggering a mass influx of refugees, this has paradoxically proved to be the outcome of South Africa’s more indulgent policy. At least three million Zimbabweans have now taken refuge abroad, the vast bulk of them in South Africa, and through the first decade of the twenty-first century Zimbabwe had the dubious distinction of recording the highest inflation rate in history and becoming the world’s fastest contracting economy.
Instead of intervening to pressurise Zimbabwe, South Africa has rejected any use of its considerable economic leverage against the Mugabe regime and has opposed the imposition of ‘smart’ sanctions imposed on Zanu’s leadership. In 2008, it also used its position as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to mobilise opinion against any extension of sanctions on Zimbabwe (and indeed any measures against the Burmese junta and the Al-Bashir regime in Sudan), making common
