Commentator Xolela Mangcu asked last week what Mandela would think of the current political warfare. The answer can be guessed. But there’s a more profound question to consider: How would he, and we, analyse the way democratic debate has deteriorated into devastating factionalism?
One answer lies in Mbeki’s penchant for a centralist style of power. He brooks little criticism, and surrounds himself with like-minded rather than independent thinkers. The signal this sends out is: “Don’t challenge, don’t critique.”
The president’s personal irony is that he himself takes a dissident view when it comes to HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe. But then he ensures that these particular positions become the orthodoxy within the ANC, even while being at odds with mainstream sentiment at large.
Many would trace this conformism within the liberation movement to its exiled history. Partly due to the example of the Eastern European backers of the movement, and partly due to the pressures of operating underground, “democratic centralism” came to characterise the ANC’s style in the 1970s.
In conditions of struggle back then, it wasn’t easy to substitute a command-and-deploy ethos with the luxury of debate and critique. The 1980s inherited this pattern and portrayed the ANC’s pronouncements as gospel.
It was assumed that because the movement had survived repression to lead the fight against something as evil as apartheid, its leadership’s decisions were unquestionably right (and if even they weren’t, the motivations were).
With the rank-and-file resisters enduring censorship and clampdowns inside the country, and with daily challenges of living in the military camps outside, it was only to be expected that a wise ANC leadership would and should set down “the line”.
Buoyed by transition, the first half of the 1990s overshadowed this history with a flowering of political debate. But Mbeki’s record, as opposed to his rhetoric, supplanted this with attempts to stamp central authority on the body politic. For instance, the RDP was replaced by Gear without public deliberation.
The old history that informs Mbeki’s approach may be understandable, but it also very clearly something linked to an expired era.
Most significantly, his centralist political style has also — over time — given rise to resistance. It became a simple recipe for contestation outside of the realm of debate.
The logic of “the line” becomes one where if it’s not the Mbeki “truth” that is supremely triumphant, then JZ is waiting in the wings with his. You end up with intolerance as to which side can claim to be correct.
And with the centre coming to view opponents as actual enemies, it followed that politics increasingly became “gloves off”.
The contemporary result is political manoeuvre rather than political debate. What decides things is naked power, and hidden power, and who wields these instruments.
In contrast, South Africa needs a lifting of the lid, and allowing decisions to emerge out of unfettered public debate.
It may be too late for the president to change tack now. But let’s hope that any successor will recognise that South African democracy is inevitably corroded by a centralist political style.
South Africa needs fast, cheap Internet, to let some fresh ideas in.
Interesting analysis, albeit with more than a slight taint of Mervin Gumede’s ‘Battle for the soul…’ My own observations: -
1. I believe that there is too much of a muchness in the assertion that Mbeki is surrounded by ‘yes men’. Netshitenzhe, Pahad, Chikane and Gumbi hardly strike me as being ‘like-minded’.
2. I personally believe that Mbeki’s centralist style (which, I agree, is fast running out time) will be judged kindly by history as having been exactly what we needed in the post-Mandela era. Just like the rightist-leftist yo-yo in US politics, I believe that the more ‘inclusive’ style we are inevitably headed for is just part of a cycle that will probably be with us for a while.
3. One thing I most definitely agree with is that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and I’m afraid that Mbeki has also fallen prey to this idiom. Recent events are symptomatic of a man not entirely in touch with the reality that the power he wields was ceded to him and not really taken.
Hi Ndumiso
Thanks for your comment. You have an interesting point about different views between N, P, C and G! I would be very interested, however, to have been a fly on the wall at the cabinet meeting which endorsed the President’s stand on not suspending Jackie Selebe. One would have hoped that someone would tell the emperor that he was looking pretty naked on that issue! The stand, to me, is one that is bad in principle and bad in pragmatics as well. Does anyone in the inner circle really feel strong enough to argue that to the Pres?
On your second issue, about ebbs and flows – that’s food for thought. If you’re right, populism here we come.
Im really dissapponted with the writer’s lack of Knowledge about the Zulu nations.The Zulus fought against the colonists,we lost so many Zulu people in those wars maybe even more than Xhosa people.Does the events such a The Blood River,Isandlwana War and the Bhambatha Rebellion ring any bells in you?The first chief to refuse to pay tax and waged a war against the colonist was Bhambatha more than 100 years ago,but how many people know about him and the answer to that is because he was Zulu.Here in South Africa you only get recognise for your struggle when you are Xhosa because our government is Xhosa.Im sick and tired of all this because KZN did produce leaders that fought in the struggle the likes of Moses Mabhida,chief Albert Luthuli and many more that are never recognised by both our the government and the media.So when we talk about the leadership race may we not look at ones ethnicity but judged them on their leadership qualities because each and every South Africans.whether Xhosa or Zulu participated in defeating the enemy.