Saturday, 30 August 2008

Charity Begins at Home

One of the criticism that was directed against president T. Mbeki was that he concentrated power in the office of the presidency and orientated everything to his personality. We were told there was urgent need to strengthen local-government if our democracy had any hope of success. The ANC (African National Congress) conference in December 2007 at Polokwane took the initiative by voting T.Mbeki out as ANC president through the concerted efforts of party branch structures. Most of us were hopeful coming from that conference that things were turning for the best. Perhaps we should have been more circumspect where we saw the manner of the so called democratic process in Polokwane, which was more manipulations by organised factions within branch level of the ANC than anything else. Collectivism is not always democracy.

After Polokwane the ANC Members of Parliament seemed to breathe fresh air, voicing their views vigorously, pushing the margins of their party towards a more consultative and democratic process to guard against the erosion of our constitutional values. After the hearing process for the dissolution of the Scorpios it seems as though Parliament has gone back to its past habits of being a karaoke club for Luthili House (ANC headquarters). What the South African Parliament lacks, it seems glaringly clear now, is what Kerry Kennedy called, in a recent lecture at University of Cape Town recently, ‘moral courage’ to dissent towards the maintenance of constitutional law even against party caucus when necessary.

Caucusing in Parliament is nothing unique to the ANC, even if those in the minority do it, and tend to cry foul whenever they loose. If anything, the past few years of our democracy should have convinced us by now that “party-parliamentarism” does not really give power to mobile vulgus, but to vested interest of party leadership. This, indeed, is a false substitute for people's representatives. For check and balances we should, at the least, consider changing the system to include individual candidates for local-governance and Members of Parliament. Isn’t a ground vote the whole point behind popular representation? Our democratic system has to be organic, live up to our local challenges as they arise. This might also give us reprise from the nascent nauseating group politics within and out of the ruling party.


I do understand, nor respect, the formation of groups on economical, cooperative, territorial, educational, professional, industrial principles, or even political values for that matter. I respect formation based on moral values, which is why Kerry Kennedy’s lecture touched me so much. After Polokwane, there was lot of talk about strengthening Local Government, which was taken as the nadir of good governance. Of course there are no guarantees that a strong Local Government means good governance, if the Republic of China is anything to go by. In China the central government is almost hapless against local government that is often very corrupt and unruly in following the passed laws of the republic, especially Environmental laws that are flaunted at will by local governments when bribed by businessman. On the same breath, good local governance is possible, as exemplified in countries like Switzerland and other federal working states.

Of course, the cause for moral courage is a double edged sword. For instance, it cannot be that it is needed only in Africa, despite Ms Kennedy’s emphasis, even if Africa is the continent most fraught with problems associated with limited civil justice. As long as, for instance, trading tendencies tend to be bias against the developing world, moral courage will be needed also by those in Western countries to “Speak Truth To Power.” When people are imprisoned on secluded islands indefinitely just for suspicion of being terrorists, moral courage is also needed to speak out. There’s also a clear danger, beyond the obvious, in narrowing the borders of moral courage to include only instance one agrees with. In thinking civil justice is only concomitant with only liberal democracy, for instance.

Another cause, blatant in our country, is how the majority of our people live with hunger and permanent refugee status in different informal places around the country. But you hardly here any moral courage coming out of private people and business against it. When the first fires blazed, in the form of xenophobic attacks, there was more moralising and condemnation than moral courage. The only moral courage we saw was in the form of philanthropic help for the displaced people, which was a good thing. But the whole thing reminded me of something RenĂ© Girard once said; that “The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same.” The thing about moral courage is that it requires the ever widening of borders of empathy and dissent without neglecting what’s under your nose. As the idiom goes, charity begins at home.

Friday, 29 August 2008

The Dream Deferred: Thabo Mbeki (Book Review)


One thing certain about Mark Gevisser biography of the incumbent president of Republic of South Africa, The Dream Deferred: Thabo Mbeki, is that it was well timed. It came out just at the time when the governing party of South Africa, ANC (African National Congress), went to it 52nd National Conference to elect its next president after Mbeki.

After more than a seven year immersion in relevant archives and travels on two continents (Africa and Europe) Gevisser’s biography is thoroughly researched, referencing, amateurish psychoanalytic, and none too innovative. From the beginning Gevissers tells us ‘This book demonstrates that if Mbeki has been driven by one overarching dream, it is that of self-determination—personal, political and psychological.’ Then he let’s that slips for Lanston Hughes’ poem as thesis and, sometimes, forced reference point.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
Like a syrup sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explodes?

Mbeki first publicly mentioned the poem in introducing ‘debate on reconciliation and nation-building in 1998.’ All things considered this should have worked well had Gevisser been more of a storyteller than a journalist, all be it a well read and competent one. Indeed the strong point of Gevisser’s book is the broadness by which he tells the story of the ANC, especially in exile, than anything else. The book is also a mine for post apartheid South African politics even if one gets the feeling Gevisser didn’t invest enough attention into South African early history, especially implications of Frontier and Colonial implications. That section sounds more like parachute journalism with dull and glum recycled notions of Xhosa, especially Mfengu, character makings.

Givisser is more into his element when talking about Mbeki’s political experience; in the end, not too shabby for a political biography. But Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred lacks the ruthlessness necessary to streamline Mbeki’s life into a functional narrative. There are vast stretches of prohibitive dryness and repetitive material that could surely been excised to bring down the 801 paged book into, at the least, half that. (I think there should be a law against writing books that are more than 500 hundred pages; no subject is that interesting).

Gevisser’s tone is that of investigative journalism, with literary nuggets there and there. It lacks informal anecdotes and titbits that make for entertaining read in lives of politicians. Though there are instances that beg for the raw venting of feelings and deeper delving into greasy facts (like reports of the president’s womanizing tendencies) the biographer chooses only suggestive implications, giving us too much muscle without fat. In fact Gavisser’s analysis of incidences around Mbeki’s life is most of the time flattering to the president with the notable exception of Aids dissidence case.

Gevisser, who was educated at Yale, concedes that the beginnings of the book were in his profile writings for a Sunday newspapers, coupled with inspiration he got from ‘Hermione Lee’s exceptional life of Virginia Woolf’. After that he immersed himself on intricate turns of Thabo Mbeki’s life, especially sources material instead of just printed material, hence his deep familiarity with his subject. The idea of a biography, he wrote to Mbeki when canvassing the book idea, was ‘a thesis, really, about biography as a tool for transformation.’ Mbeki bitted. Though Gevisser’s biography is competent in other ways, one can’t help judging it by higher standards of books like, Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare, which introduced a far interesting paradigm shift on telling of familiar stories. Instead of telling a cradle to grave story, recent biographies concentrate on a certain episode that almost defines the life of its subject with web-like strands pinned into it like a pin centre. I was hopeful, after reading the book’s insightful introduction about what happened between Mbeki and Zuma, this might be the case with Gevisser’s book. For a moment I thought Gevisser was going to tell the story backward from the dissection of that incidence. Instead he chose Lanston Hughes poems, which to him expresses Thabo Mbeki’s lifetime dream and fears since he came to power.

*

Thabo Mvunyelwa Mbeki was born in 18 June 1942 (try finding that crucial information from the biography) at a little village called Mbewuleni. The village is in a small town of Idutywa in the former Bantustan of Transkie. His father, Govan Mbeki, was a prominent member of SACP and one of Rivonia treason trialist, with the likes of Nelson Mandela. Epainette Mbeki was left to provide for the family when Govan went to jail. Thabo had one elder sister, and two younger brothers, Moketsi and Jama (a lawyer who died under mysterious conditions connected to heat squad in Lesotho). It is obvious that Gevisser tells the story of Thabo through the eyes of Epainette, his mother most of the time, who is an obvious first and constant contact for the biographer.

Thabo was educated at Lovedale College, the first fountains of education for black people in the Southern Africa with missionary origins. He was involved in politics and was expelled from the institution. He went to Johannesburg where, through his father’s contacts he met (white) people who organised a scholarship for him to study economic at Sussex University, England. He graduated with Masters in Economics from Sussex and went for a soft military training in the Lenin Military Institution at Moscow. He married Zanele Dlamini whom he met in England through political connections with the Tambos. He worked as a de facto assistant and understudy of O.R. Tambo, the then president of ANC. Though based in Lusaka, Zambia, travelled the globe a lot doing underground ANC work.

Gevisser credits Thabo for being the voice of reason, against the popular but doomed military voice within Umkhonto Wesizwe (ANC’s military wing). At one time Thabo was suspected of being an informer (something very common among the comrades in those confused times). He was lucky to escape torture like many comrades who were suspected of being informers, thanks, most probably, to his close relation with Tambo. Thabo was also often accused of living a soft life as a de facto ANC foreign minister while the likes of Chris Hani were popular for their valour in the military frontiers. Gevisser intimates that this had a bad psychological effect in Thabo’s psyche before the years the ANC was unbanned in South Africa.

According to Gevisser, Thabo initiated talks with South African delegates, first with business people before the actual apartheid politicians. This was a very unpopular move within the ANC, and Gevisser says Tambo actually used Thabo to take the flack for it while he stood to reap the successes. The most difficult years for Mbeki, according to Gevisser, was when Thabo lost the lead of negotiating status to Cyril Ramaphosa, the upstart lawyer with no ANC pedigree within the ANC (Ramaphosa came through the United Democratic Movement that kept the fire of liberation struggle burning during the years when the ANC was in exile wilderness.) This, for Mbeki, were first sign of ‘a dream deferred’; he felt used and discarded. Gevisser suggests that his not so warm relation with Mandela began at this time. Mandela, who had serious political differences with Thabo’s father, Govan, initially was not keen in regarding Thabo as his successor, but was pressured into the position by the ANC leadership. Thus Thabo became the first deputy president of democratic South Africa, and four years later, its president, serving two terms (ten years) that end next year (2009).

*

In truth thare’s nothing much new in all this to those who have followed Mbeki’s life with a modicum of interest. What Gevisser did is to collect material into one source, which is no mean task on its own; in fact I dare say this is a defining book concerning the political life of Thabo Mbeki. What is regrettable is that the traits of Mbeki the man do not come through very clearly; in fact you’re sometimes at pains to find simple biographical facts like his birthday mentioned on the book. He makes much about Mbeki’s ‘disconnection’ from the general mass and lack of integration. ‘From a very young age, his response to this condition of disconnection had been to sublimate all emotions,’ writes Gevisser, ‘all relationships, all desires, into the struggle for liberation. He had long made a political career—unusual indeed for a freedom fighter—around pragmatism, but at his core he was a revolutionary idealist.’

Gevisser tries to go into depth about the unconscious distrustfulness and fear of white people against Thabo Mbeki but left this reader dissatisfied. In any case the real question about South Africa now is whether the country can go beyond politics of cultural difference or grievance and popular cynicism. The tendency so far has been for everyone to hope for winning anyone into their own point view so as to establish the hegemony of their political values. It stands to be seen which side compromise would come or be subverted. Jacabo Zuma is less rigid with his values, rather lack of, and so has become the favourite of everyone in the manner of a girl who puts out being a favourite of boys in High School.

As I’ve already indicated; Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deffered reads more like an extended newsaper feature than, say, a scholarly analysis. What jars most about it is psycho bubble and lunk of metaphors, well suited for platitudinous theorising, but a little cloying for a 801 paged book. Another thing I noticed about the book is that it kept promising that soone or later a putsh of some sort would happen, that you’d rich its nadir, but for some reason you never get the satisfaction of doing so. More like make love without reaching orgasim, or a thud sneeze. But in this age when memoirs of aggrievement climb into a crowded genre of no literature ability in political writing this is a better book.

Friday, 15 August 2008

The centre of African National Congress political infighting will not old

I’ve a friend in NYC (US) who, after seeing scenes of masses taking to the streets in support of JZ’s (Jacob Zuma) case emailed to ask for my personal opinion. I told him it was more of the glue failing to hold inside the ANC than anything, and tried to convince myself that it does not affect me. I was about to narrate to him how the whole cleavage was between the formally educated and self-made man within the ANC; something that’s always been the undertone tension within the organisation even while it was in exile, but stopped myself. Who am I kidding? Whatever mess these people make will affect me directly. Now is not the time for sterile history lessons and chose to be honest instead.

The situation within the ANC, I told him, has necessitated their men of goodwill, like Mandela, to remind of the crucial need for unity, and preach on the cardinal virtues of justice, courage, self-restraint, and wisdom, but those things are out of business in the organisation. Everything has gone topsy-turvy. Their clever politicians are fighting out a Hegelian tragedy—where the causes are more about hubris and pride and both sides stand on the limited right. Accusations of state institutions being used to fight political battles are thrown; and autocratic means of secrecy, speed and tact used to plot the downfall of JZ. But JZ is doing everything in his power not disqualify, at the least delay, his opportunity to test the truth of allegations against him tested in the courts of law.

In all that ordinary people have become outdated and the constitution of the country is being stretched to near breaking point. Everybody, the accused and the accusers, complain that justice is being perverted. One thing clear is that, as the ancient Greek, Thrasymachus, would say, justice is become the interest of the stronger. Debates are given to that the effect of giving legal respectability to wickedness and corrupt tendencies of powerful men in the name of democracy and to the disadvantage of common good. Justice court judges are under imposed duress of JZ supporters who, as they say, are dancing war cries and ‘ready to kill for Zuma’.

Everywhere they step comrades are treading on each other’s corns while trying to save false public face. The only people who have courage are those of coarse fibre and vulgar minds who foolishly tend to run risks that are beyond their resources. Ignorance has become a passionate weapon to silence the enlightened. Youth leaders, with bloated faces from too much whiskey and matshisa inyama (braai vleis) rely on the assistance of ignorance and dangerous ambition to intimidate the president of the republic with obvious reluctance from his leaders to discipline him. Self-restraint is seen as a weakness. Pusillanimous caution is how those already in government strive to advance their careerism and keep their jobs by being silent. The term, kunqilwa ophetheyo [you kowtow before the one in power] is thrown around with proud braggadocio for material greed and gain. Power has become the measure of all things. And wealth the new sign of comradeship. Other animals are more equal than others, and law is relevant because it must serve the animals, not the other way round. The pigs are walking on their hind legs.

There was a time when political wisdom was means by which wool was pulled over our eyes. Now there’s dearth of well turned phrases that used to ravish us into acquiescence. Wisdom, in political arena, is rare as hen’s tooth. Things that require skills of creation lay dormant. Since the whirlwind has hit our shores we’ve been seeing a lot of isisila senkukhu [hen’s tail]. Men we took to be of great ability have recently been seen toyi-toying, like on pulled strings, outsides courts for their compromised king. Trade unionist who once took impartial view of things have revealed themselves to be nothing more than wishing to be kingmakers and intimidate to submission those who ‘don’t tow the line’. And moribund former soldiers of Umkhonto Wesizwe took the opportunity to be on the lime light by promoting violent views if JZ lost his case.

That is what is called democracy these days in our shores; the threatening overthrow of democracy by the tyranny of the masses. The saddest part is how those who should know better within the party have decided to thrown in the towel. Suddenly, since JZ took power, their private affairs seem more interesting and exacting. They’re, one by one, withdrawing from public life to go plant cabbages leaving a general political lethargy where the ignorant gain confidence and the enlightened loose the nerve. Things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold, to paraphrase the poet.

I’ve lived with a declining and harried hope that whatever is wrong inside the ANC they’re sensible enough never to allow it to negate the revolutionary gains of our past. I thought the prevalent cancer was benign. It looks like it’s malignant. Every revolution contains within itself the pull towards its own demise, the philosopher says. It looks like ours, unfortunately, is no exception to the rule, as we had hoped. The situation is no longer about knocking a few holes against the party walls of the ruling party, it is getting dire.

Unfortunately the present political oppositions do not stand a chance against the ANC, even in a wounded state. What is needed is a Mass Movement of Democratic Union (MMDU), made of all civil minded people who see where the country is headed under the present leadership of the ANC, to come together under one umbrella. The choices are simple, continue bickering, living in the wilderness, or shamefully hoping you’ll forever compromise your principles by, well, ukubusa ophetheyo; or organise. Battles in a democracy are won by political organisation. Or, at this rate, we just must loose everything we hold dear, including meaningful effectiveness of our cherished constitution.
In spite of few outstanding instances of moderation and true nobility, I say with this due consideration and deep commiseration; we are in the whole on the melancholy track of degeneration and under the stress of civil conflict. Personally, I stand with those who stand by our constitution.