FIRST DRAFTS

To my wife
Jenny Gandar
FIRST DRAFTS
South African history in the making

ALLISTER SPARKS

Jonathan Ball Publishers

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN
 All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted,
in any form or by any means,
without prior permission from the publisher or copyright holder.

© Allister Sparks, 2009

The original date of publication is at the start of each column.

Published in trade paperback in 2009 by

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS (PTY) LTD
PO Box 33977
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ISBN 978-1-86842-374-3

Design and reproduction of text by

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Cover design by Michiel Botha, Cape Town
Printed and bound by CTP Book Printers, Cape
 Contents

List of abbreviations ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction xi

A generational change – from struggle to delivery 1

A three-in-one revolution 7
SADC leaders must pin Mugabe down 14
9/11 and the countdown to war 18
Yes, there was an exit plan for Mugabe 21
Swift death of a once invincible force 24
In a turbulent world, SA looks like a haven 28
Zimbabwe – the crisis without end 31
New dialectic of the post-Cold War world 35
How to get the poor into the economy 39
Warning: You’re ignoring the rules of damage control 43
Israel through South African eyes 47
Looking back on the first decade of democracy 51
… And looking ahead 56
The Arms Deal and politics of the back alley 62
Zim out of Commonwealth ‘indefinitely’ 66
The capture of Saddam Hussein 69
Mugabe turns on white struggle heroes 73
A shameful act of political expediency 77
Perverse hypocrisy of the hanging Christians 81
Mbeki sets his sights high 85
The passing of a saint 89
Devastating report on Iraq’s weapons 93
The start of a legal saga 96
Zim insult will sharpen alliance tensions 98
A squeaky win, but Bush returns with increased power 101
Watching America’s long rightward swing 105
Beginning of the end for Tony Blair 109
Mbeki’s plan to help the poor 113
Shaik guilty –- and a grave crisis for Mbeki 117
Mbeki replaces Zuma with stop-gap deputy 122
A surreal world of terror 125
The left flexes its muscles 129
Mbeki hits back as ANC crisis worsens 133
An unbreakable deadlock 135
The dangers of populism 137
Power vacuum as the smear campaign worsens 141
Rape charge means the end of Zuma 145
Hamas victory shows West out of touch 147
Iran the big winner of Bush’s war 151
New name for major new growth strategy 155
The growing crisis of our ‘Big Nine’ cities 158
Zuma acquitted of rape, but stigma stays 163
Meeting with the leaders of Hamas 167
Then to Israel 171
Then to compare with SA 175
A struggle for the elusive soul of the ANC 179
Political realignment looms for SA 183
The mother of all messes 186
Up next – a helluva year 190
The revenge killing of Saddam Hussein 194
The rot that is corroding the ANC 198
Seeking causes of the high crime rate 202
An election without the electorate 206
Mugabe begins election rigging campaign 210
Opportunity for DA to breach its white ceiling 214
When is foreign intervention justified? 218
New twist to the Mideast crisis 222
A preliminary bout in the big power struggle 226
Mbeki’s final blunder 230
If he’s innocent, why doesn’t he clear his name? 233
Celebrating the liberal flag-bearer 237
Mbeki heading for defeat 241
Eskom crisis exposes inefficiency 247
A crime against the crime fighters 251
How Mugabe bilked his way out of defeat 255
viii  f irst dra f ts   viii

Tsvangirai withdraws 258

SABC a snake-pit of faction fighting 261
A civil war among the desperate 265
America’s candidate of change 269
Defining moment in the Zuma saga 273
Mugabe’s blackmail deal 277
Judge throws out Zuma charges 281
Humiliated Mbeki leaves gracefully 283
Manuel resigns, then returns 287
First hint of a new party 290
End of the free market theology 294
The second transition 298
A multicultural leader for the global village 305
The age of the serialised scandal 309
COPE makes a great start 313
Brutal Gaza war brings only negatives 318
The truths Israel won’t face 324
Lavish promises as recession looms 328
Appeal Court trashes Zuma case withdrawal 332
Man with a massive mission 336
COPE shoots itself in the foot 340
Zim generals trying to scuttle deal 343
Changing dynamics in the Middle East 348
Zuma charges withdrawn 352
Now he’s our OJ Simpson 355
A carefully balanced Zuma Cabinet 359
Election shows deep rift in Iran 363
Life beyond the social engineers 367
Taking responsibility for our failures 371
Obscene symbolism in hard times 375
The whitewashing of Judge Hlope 378
The Zuma era – its problems and prospects 382

Index 393
 List of abbreviations

AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

ANC African National Congress
ASGISA Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa
AU African Union
BOSS Bureau of State Security
CHOGM Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting
COPE Congress of the People
COSATU Congress of South African Trade Unions
DA Democratic Alliance
GEAR Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy
ICASA Independent Communications Authority
JIPSA Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition
JOC Joint Operations Command [Zimbabwe]
JOMIC SADC’s Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee
MDC Movement for Democratic Change
Mercosur Common Market of South America
MERG Macro-Economic Research Group
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NEPAD New Partnership for Africa’s Development
NPA National Prosecuting Authority
PA Palestinian Authority
PLO Palestinian Liberation Organisation
SACN South African Cities Network
SACP South African Communist Party
SADC Southern African Development Community
SASCO South African Students’ Congress
SEATO South East Asia Treaty Organisation
SCOPA Standing Committee on Public Accounts
UDF United Democratic Front
URP United Rhodesia Party
ZCTU Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions
ZEC Zimbabwe Electoral Commission

ix
 Acknowledgements

My thanks first of all to the newspapers – The Star, Business Day, Cape
Times, The Witness, Daily Dispatch and Pretoria News – as well as to the in-
vestment houses – Standard Securities, Andisa Securities, Standard Bank
and Noah Investment Solutions – for whom I have written at various
times over these past ten years, for giving me the opportunity to stay
close to events as they unfolded during this fascinating new phase in
the building of a new democracy from the dreadful past of apartheid. It
has been an enriching new chapter in my long career as a journalist and
political analyst.
My thanks especially to my publisher, Jonathan Ball, for having the
courage and imagination to respond to an eccentric idea and for getting
this project under way. Also to publishing director Jeremy Boraine for
helping to resolve a lot of structural confusion at the outset and giving
shape to the idea; to Frances Perryer for helping with initial selections
from a daunting pile of paper; and to my step-daughter, Collette Hurt, for
the remarkable job she has done in scanning and collating the material
into digital form ready for the printers.

x
 Introduction

It was Philip Graham, legendary publisher of The Washington Post in the

1960s, who coined the epigram that the journalist’s role is to write ‘a first
rough draft of history’. It is a concept that has long fascinated me, ­because
it means that a collection of those rough drafts can present a different
kind of history, a contemporaneous history. As it is, all conventional his-
torical writing is retrospective. With the perfect vision of hindsight, histo-
rians can reconstruct events as they actually turned out, making the way
they unfolded look so clear and logical that one can only wonder at the
inability of the contemporary policy-makers and analysts and ordinary
folk to foresee what should surely have been obvious to them.
But the question is, what did it look like at the time when the fu-
ture was anything but obvious? Phil Graham’s full quote, before it was
sleeked down to the snappy sound byte that is today’s popular epigram,
puts the point more thoughtfully. Addressing foreign correspondents of
Newsweek, a subsidiary of his company, Graham spoke of ‘our inescap-
ably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history
that will never really be completed about a world we can never fully
understand’.
Edward Gibbon can tell us retrospectively about the decline and fall
of the Roman Empire, but how fascinating to read the contemporaneous
accounts of Lucretius, Cicero and Tacitus of what life was like in Rome
back in the first century AD. We all know the story of Nero fiddling while
Rome burned and of the persecution of the Christians. But how did all
this look to the Romans at the time? Tacitus tells us. After the great fire,
he wrote in his Annals, a rumour spread that Nero had ordered it to clear
space for his new palace. To quell the rumour, the Emperor sought a
scapegoat. Tacitus goes on:

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite torture on a class
hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus,
from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during

xi
xii  f irst dra f ts

the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate,
and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again
broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome.
… Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then upon
their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of
the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every
sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were
torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to
the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination when daylight had
expired.
Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, as if he was exhibiting a show
in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer
or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and
exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as
it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were
being destroyed.
(A History of Knowledge, Charles van Dooren, Ballantine Books, New York, p 82.)

It would be presumptuous to imply that the unfolding story of the new

South Africa has anything so stupendous to present to the world, but I of-
fer the example of Tacitus’s first draft of a great historical moment simply
to illustrate the special slant that contemporaneous reporting can bring
to our understanding of history.
In this selection of writings, taken from my syndicated column, ‘At
Home and Abroad’, which appears in several South African newspapers,
as well as reports that I have written as a political analyst for various
investment institutions, I have focused on the first decade of the new
millennium. I have done so for both political and personal reasons,
because this has been a special transformational passage of time for my
new-born country – and indeed for the world – as well as for me as an
individual.
As the old century drew to a close and the enchanted Nelson Mandela
era with it, the Thabo Mbeki presidency followed to trace an extra­
ordinary parabolic arc across most of the decade. The golden boy of the
African National Congress (ANC), born into the struggle as the scion of
an iconic family, came to power on a wave of expectations. He succeeded
brilliantly at first, focusing on black economic advancement to match
the political emancipation, which in turn produced an unprecedented
consumer-driven boom. The Mbeki era soured as the president’s complex
 Introduction  xiii

personality and manipulative ways generated a horde of enemies who

cut him down and cast him into the wilderness a year-and-a-half before
the completion of his second term.
Then came the even more controversial presidency of Jacob Zuma,
sworn into office in the closing year of the decade with a cluster of seri-
ous criminal charges hanging over him, from corruption and fraud to
racketeering and money laundering. It means that this decade has been
bracketed by the epitome of morality under the saintly Mandela and its
nadir under Zuma. What the future holds under this tainted presidency
is part of Phil Graham’s uncompleted history of a world we can never
really understand.
For the ANC, too, it has been a roller-coaster decade, starting with
stratospheric electoral majorities that made its dominance unassailable,
and ending with a self-inflicted split that will leave it open to defeat and
possible demise in the decade ahead.
For the world as a whole the parabolic pattern was the same, beginning
with 9/11 and the triumphalism of George W Bush as he launched his
avenging war on Iraq and on terror at large, causing his popularity rat-
ings to reach unprecedented heights only to plunge again to undreamed-
of lows until finally he exited near the close of the decade with a legacy of
having been perhaps the worst American president in history. A decade
that began with Rambo Bush as the most extreme right-wing president
there has been, is ending with his diametric opposite, the cool intellec-
tual liberal, Barack Obama, in power.
The decade was bracketed, too, by the most extravagant economic
boom in modern times and the worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression 80 years earlier; by the triumphalism of the free market fun-
damentalists and the total discrediting of their ideologies and certitudes;
by Wall Street’s dizzy heights and its ignominious collapse.
An extraordinary decade indeed, while for me personally it was also
a transformational time that fortuitously gave me a close-up view of
these tempestuous events. As the old century ended, so did my career as
a full-time employed journalist. A brief stint as Editor-in-Chief of SABC
Television News and Current Affairs, where I had been engaged to try to
ginger up the newsroom as it sought to transform itself from apartheid
propagandist into a genuine public broadcaster, was drawing to a close.
I was 66 years old, my wife was stricken with terminal cancer, and I
found myself facing a hiatus in my life. A colleague suggested I offer my
services to an investment institution as a political analyst. It sounded
xiv  f irst dra f ts

like a nice, low-key semi-retirement job, so I made an approach and was

accepted.
Thus began a whole new career that quickly and unexpectedly bal­
l­ooned in scale and fascination. I found myself covering not only the
fast-moving events in South Africa but in the world as a whole, because
it soon became apparent that my own country was no longer an iso-
lated entity. This was the age of globalisation, and any major event any-
where impacted on everyone. We were all living in Marshall McLuhan’s
global village, where an airplane flying into a skyscraper in New York
could cause economic shudders in Johannesburg, a war in the Middle
East could send oil prices and thus living costs rocketing world-wide.
Even the political ideologies being cooked up by the neo-conservatives
in Washington could impose constraints on the policy choices faced by
President Mbeki in Pretoria.
This awareness of global interconnectivity gained ground when I went
to the United States twice in the early part of the decade, first to the
Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington, then to Duke University in
North Carolina, to study, teach and write the third book of my trilogy on
the political transformation of South Africa, Beyond the Miracle. The first
sojourn was at the tail-end of the Clinton Administration, the second at
the start of the Bush Administration. Watershed events affecting both
South Africa and the US occurred during each sojourn.
The first was an acerbic letter from Mbeki to President Clinton which
revealed for the first time that the South African president, whom I had
known for years and greatly admired as both rational and highly intel-
ligent, was in fact an HIV/AIDS denialist. The American public was in-
credulous. What did this mean? What kind of new leader did we have?
I was at a loss to explain, but in time came to realise this was a turning
point in our status as the darling of the world.
The second great watershed event of the new century, the terrorist
attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, occurred while I
was at Duke. It was an event that was to change the course of world his-
tory, but what struck me first was the shock of the ordinary American
people. ‘Why do they hate us?’ was the ubiquitous question, revealing
a universal lack of awareness of the deep resentment of America’s domi-
neering foreign policies towards the Middle East going back many years.
The United States acts as though it has suzerainty over the region – en-
capsulated in the popular quip: ‘How did our oil get under their sand?’
Most Americans have an image of their country as a benign giant using
 Introduction  x v

its immense military power to bring the great benefits of their way of
life to the less fortunate of the earth, and it comes as a shock to them to
discover that the recipients do not always appreciate this.
I returned to South Africa in July 2002. I had kept in close touch with
events back home throughout my absences and continued writing politi-
cal analysis articles for the investment house I was contracted to, at that
time Standard Equities, but a few months after my return I decided to
again write a syndicated newspaper column as I had done some years be-
fore. Since by now I was deeply aware of the importance of understand-
ing global interconnectivity, I decided to call the column ‘At Home and
Abroad’ – a title appropriated from my old friend Anthony Lewis, who
had written a marvellous wide-ranging column under that tagline in The
New York Times for many years until his recent retirement. My idea was
to write primarily about the unfolding drama of the new South Africa’s
transformation, but to set it in the context of a transforming world with
all the cross-cutting influences between the two.
No sooner had I begun this than a new dimension opened up, when
fortuitously and quite out of the blue I was invited to become part of
an international committee of consultants to help advise Al Jazeera, the
highly successful Arabic television channel based in the Gulf state of
Qatar, on its plans to launch an international English channel. Under
its enlightened Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Qatar is a re-
markably free society by Arab standards, which, with Al Jazeera’s wide
network of correspondents, makes it a wonderful observation post from
which to study the Middle East. It is a tiny, neutral and extremely wealthy
Switzerland in the heart of the Arab world.
I quickly found myself drawn in to the fascinating social and politi-
cal complexities of this highly important region, the epicentre of the
post-Cold-War world’s most explosive problems. So I began writing about
Middle East issues, too, as I became more and more aware that our South
African experience gives us a special insight into binational conflicts –
in other words conflicts between two rival national groups both laying
claim to the same homeland territory – of which the Middle East has
several but none more intractable and dangerous than that between Jews
and Palestinians following the establishment of the state of Israel.
My travels there, which are ongoing, have taken me to Damascus to
meet and break bread with the exiled political leaders of Hamas – whom
the Israelis (supported by all the Western powers) execrate and refuse to
deal with, just as the old South African regime abjured and refused to talk
xvi  f irst dra f ts

to the ‘terrorist’ ANC until late in the day – but who in the end will have
to be central players in negotiations if there is ever to be any hope of a
lasting peace agreement in that fraught patch of land.
This selection of writings, then, is drawn from the full range of issues
I have covered over this decade in my syndicated columns and my arti-
cles for investors – plus one or two verbal presentations made to special
audiences. The central theme is the new South Africa, to try to present
in first-draft form the events as this journalist saw them unfold as our
new democracy left the safe haven of Mandela’s benign first years and
plunged into the stormy waters of the new millennium’s first decade. It
is contemporaneous history in snapshot form.
But the selection is not confined to South Africa. In keeping with my
deep-held belief that the interconnectivity of the global village makes
every key event everywhere relevant to our own society, and that we in
turn through our own unique transformational achievement have les-
sons to offer others in a similar situation, I have included articles on
Zimbabwe, the United States, and the Middle East. I have prefaced each
item with a brief introduction to set the context in which the events oc-
curred. The whole may be read either in sequence or by dipping in as you
please. My hope is that they may add to the reader’s understanding of the
sometimes bewildering times through which we are living.

Allister Sparks
Rivonia, 2009
 A generational change – from
struggle to delivery
21 J un e 1999

Even as I wrote this the signs were there that Thabo Mbeki would run a less
open administration than Nelson Mandela, that he would centralise power on
an imperial presidency, scornfully dismissing his alliance partners’ objections to
his market-friendly GEAR policy. Yet he did achieve much, more than he is given
credit for, in building up a black middle class and bringing about 36 consecutive
quarters of economic growth for the first time in South Africa’s history. His was
an important presidency, if an ill-fated one.
Some of my comments about the relative abilities of Mbeki’s first Cabinet
turned out to be justified, others less so. Steve Tshwete did not do well as
Minister of Safety and Security. And for all his charm, energy and fine academic
qualifications, Kader Asmal’s decision to introduce Outcomes-Based Education in
our schools was a major blunder. But the real, unmitigated disaster was Manto
Tshabalala-Msimang, Mbeki’s cat’s-paw and prime provocateur in his disastrous
AIDS denialism.

THE TRANSFER OF power from Nelson Mandela to Thabo Mbeki is more

than just a smooth political transition, rare though that is in Africa. It
also marks a generational change within the ANC, from a generation
that was committed to struggle and liberation to a younger one whose
task is to deliver. The roles are sharply different, and it is apparent from
Mbeki’s statements since becoming President and from his Cabinet ap-
pointments that he has a clear perception of this.
It was the theme that ran through his inaugural address on 16 June.
Paying tribute to a generation – epitomised by his own parents sitting on
the stage beside him – that had ‘pulled our country out of the abyss and
placed it on the pedestal of hope on which it rests today’, he said it was
now the task of ‘we who are their offspring’ to deliver on that hope.
As a new light dawned over the land, he said, ‘what [it] must show is
a nation diligently at work to create a better life for itself ... What we will

1
2  f irst dra f ts

have to see in the rising light is a government that is fully conscious of

the fact that it has entered into a contract with the people, to work in
partnership with them to build together a winning nation.’
This is the kind of language business in particular has been waiting
to hear. It will wait now to see whether the new President’s deeds match
his words. So far the signs are promising. The Cabinet appointments an-
nounced on 17 June contained some good merit appointments in what
might be called the key delivery portfolios, with some under-performing
ministers either dropped – something Mandela never did – or shunted
into relatively minor portfolios. Plus a few appointments that reflect
Mbeki’s one known weakness of favouring old allies of mediocre ability.
The most pleasing appointments were the retention of Trevor Manuel
as Finance Minister, Alec Erwin as Minister of Trade and Industries, and
Membathisi Mdladlana as Minister of Labour. This team in the key eco-
nomics portfolios was strengthened by the appointment of Phumzile
Mlambo-Ngcuka, who did a good job as Erwin’s deputy at Trade and
Industry, to the important Ministry of Minerals and Energy Affairs where
Penuell Maduna had been a conspicuous failure.
Another welcome appointment was that of Jeff Radebe as Minister of
Public Enterprises – the key to faster privatisation that can produce rev-
enues to reduce domestic debt, which in turn is crucial to reducing inter-
est rates to promote growth. Radebe, who performed well in the Public
Works portfolio, replaces the ineffective Stella Sigcau whom Mbeki has
retained in the Cabinet (at Public Works) for purely political reasons. As
the daughter of the Paramount Chief of a major Transkei tribe he needs
her to prevent the United Democratic Movement’s Bantu Holomisa from
making inroads into ANC support in what has historically been the
Congress’s main power base.
Taking a longer view, the single most important appointment is that
of Professor Kader Asmal as Minister of Education. If South Africa is to
compete successfully in the global marketplace it is vital that it upgrade
its skills base, crippled by generations of apartheid and the industrial
colour bar which prevented the black population – the country’s working
class – from doing skilled work. This was probably the single most dam-
aging thing that apartheid wrought on South Africa’s future economic
prospects, and sadly the first five years of democratic government did
little to start the process of rectification as the Department of Education
stumbled from one blunder to another under the inept Sibusiso Bengu,
who has now mercifully retired.
 A generational change – from struggle to delivery  3

Kader Asmal is a horse of an altogether different colour. He is a major

academic with degrees in law from the London School of Economics and
Trinity College, Dublin, who qualified as a barrister at both the London
and Dublin bars, and who later lectured in law at Trinity. On his return
to South Africa Asmal founded the Chair of Constitutional and Human
Rights Law at the University of the Western Cape.
Even more important than his deep involvement in education – he
was a school teacher in Natal before going into exile – is that Asmal is
an action man. He was the driving force behind the establishment of the
highly effective Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, then its equivalent
in Ireland. He was also the star performer of the Mandela Cabinet, turn-
ing the ­hitherto dull Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, for years
the dumping ground of inept ministers, into the success story of the new
regime by delivering water to 3-million households in squatter camps and
rural areas, so transforming the quality of life for the poorest of the poor.
Typically, Asmal has already leaped into action in his new job. As the
Sunday Times has reported, within 24 hours of taking over he summoned
a meeting to shake up the management of the Education Department,
firing the inept Director-General and ordering reports from key sectors to
be on his desk within two weeks.
The other critical area is crime. The appointment of Steve Tshwete as
Minister of Safety and Security has come in for media criticism, but I
think he may do well and in fact tipped him for the job in a pre-election
analysis paper. If it is toughness that is required – and there has been a
huge public demand for the Government to ‘get tough on crime’ – then
Tshwete is your man. With his solid frame, gravelly voice and blunt man-
ner, he is the quintessential tough guy with a long record as a rabble-
rousing speaker and guerrilla fighter.
Tshwete spent 15 years in prison for guerrilla activities, and later be-
came first political commissar and then chief of staff of Umkhonto we
Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the guerrilla arm of the ANC. He is not pol-
ished nor is he a diplomat, but he does have a gruff charm and a one-of-
the-boys manner that may enable him to get on well with the police.
Although Defence is no longer a portfolio of high importance in the
new South Africa, Patrick Lekota will be an asset to the Cabinet as an
intelligent and independent thinker. He is a man of considerable charm
who was one of the driving forces in the United Democratic Front, the
alliance of civic organisations which mounted the massive internal dem-
onstrations against apartheid during the 1980s.
4  f irst dra f ts

Mbeki’s axe has fallen most heavily on the Department of Environmental

Affairs and Tourism, where he has fired both the Minister, Pallo Jordan,
and his Deputy, Peter Mokaba. Delivery failure is the main reason. The
government sees tourism as the main labour-intensive sector where
large numbers of jobs can be created to compensate for the employment
squeeze in other sectors of the economy. Although under Jordan and
Mokaba South Africa has moved to the top as Africa’s most popular tour-
ism destination, ahead of Egypt and Morocco, insiders say Mbeki feels
they have not shown the degree of energy and commitment he wants in
that department. Jordan in particular is notoriously laid back: colleagues
euphemistically describe him as a ‘hands-off’ minister.
That, however, is not the only reason. Jordan is highly intelligent,
perhaps the only one in the ANC leadership with an intellect to match
Mbeki’s, and there has long been a tense relationship between the two.
During their exile years they clashed ideologically in the vicious arena of
Marxist interpretation, with Jordan taking a more Trotskyite line. Their
personalities clash as well. Where Mbeki is a hands-on workaholic, Jordan
affects an air of arrogant aloofness and indolence. There can be no doubt,
though, that Jordan’s sharp intelligence and independent-mindedness
will be a loss to the Cabinet – something that again reveals the most
worry­ing feature of Mbeki’s personality, which is his preference for per-
sonal loyalty rather than strong advisers with challenging ideas.
The most widely criticised appointment is of the grouchy Nkosazana
Dlamini-Zuma as Foreign Minister. She is a controversial figure who ruf-
fled many feathers at home and abroad with her high-handed action as
Health Minister in banning tobacco advertising and overriding patent
rights to allow the use of cheaper generic drugs. There is no doubt she is a
hard worker and an achiever, but she has handled these and other contro­
versies with a singular lack of diplomacy. Tony Leon, the new Leader of
the Opposition, has described her appointment to the country’s top dip-
lomatic job as ‘letting a bull loose in a china shop’.
What is clear, however, is that Mbeki himself, as the ANC’s top dip-
lomat for the past 25 years, will in fact be running foreign affairs – and
he will do so through one of his closest allies, Aziz Pahad, who remains
in place as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. Pahad is experienced and
competent, having already done a face-saving job as number two to the
less than impressive Alfred Nzo who has now retired. Why he didn’t
get the top job himself as just reward is puzzling. Presumably it is be-
cause Mbeki was keen to project a progressive image by promoting more
 A generational change – from struggle to delivery  5

women: already he has boasted that the new Cabinet has 100 per cent
more women than the old one. Another factor is that Dlamini-Zuma is
a long-standing Mbeki ally whom the new President recruited into the
ANC in Swaziland in the mid-1970s.
Other Mbeki loyalists who have been retained or promoted into the
Cabinet are the new Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang,
who left the country with Mbeki in 1962, and the ongoing Minister of
Housing, Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, an Mbeki protégé from exile days
in Lusaka.
Most noteworthy of all is Aziz Pahad’s brother Essop, Mbeki’s oldest
and closest buddy from student days at Sussex University, a man of lim-
ited ability and sometimes abrasive personality, who is now Minister of
State in the President’s Office – arguably the most powerful position in
the country after the President himself.
The restructuring of the President’s Office is one of a number of sub-
tle changes Mbeki has made to increase the centralisation of power on
himself. He has incorporated the Deputy Presidency into the President’s
Office, which will operate under the direction of Essop Pahad and have
four Deputy Directors-General reporting to the DG, Frank Chikane.
Mbeki has also bumped up the Department of Intelligence Services to
a full Ministry under old ANC spook Joe Nhlanhla, who will now report
directly to the President instead of the Minister of Safety and Security
whose Deputy he was in the Mandela administration.
At another level, Mbeki has changed ANC procedures to assume the
power to appoint and dismiss regional Premiers instead of leaving this to
the democratic choice of the ANC branches in the provinces they control.
This is ostensibly aimed at gaining disciplinary control over corruption
in the provinces and ending factional squabbles that have undermined
some provincial administrations, but it will also give Mbeki more direct
control to co-ordinate policies throughout most of the country.
Not least is the fact that, despite the government’s insistence that the
Reserve Bank’s independence is not being diluted, there can be no doubt
that the appointment of two ANC members, Tito Mboweni as Governor
and Gill Marcus as Deputy Governor, intelligent and independent-
­minded though they both are, is bound to result in a closer co-ordination
of monetary policy than has been the case in the past with interest-rate
hawk Chris Stals, inherited from the old apartheid regime, as Reserve
Bank Governor. Marcus takes up her new job on 1 July, Mboweni on
1 August.
6  f irst dra f ts

It all points to a less collegiate and more imperial presidency than

Mandela’s, with Mbeki the technocrat very much in charge of the direc-
tion and co-ordination of policies on all fronts. Nothing will be allowed
to divert or disrupt the drive for delivery.
An early example of this is the way the trade union federation,
COSATU’s, threat to mount a campaign of ‘rolling mass action’ in protest
against the coalition between the New National Party and the Democratic
Party to keep the ANC out of power in the Western Cape has melted
away. Moving quietly behind the scenes, as is his style, Mbeki put a swift
stop to the strike plans which were alarming business in the region and
would have sent the wrong kind of message to potential investors abroad
right at the start of the Mbeki presidency. Today the ANC’s provincial
leader, Ebrahim Rasool, is saying there will only be demonstrations to
protest against transformation failures by the coalition as these become
apparent.
If delivery is going to be the keynote theme of the new adminis-
tration, then GEAR – the market-friendly Growth, Employment and
Redistribution policy – will be the means to achieve it. The ANC’s alli-
ance partners, COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP),
are not happy with GEAR but Mbeki made it clear at their respective
congresses last year that he will brook no public opposition from them.
They may grumble in private, but GEAR is entrenched as fundamental
ANC policy and, as Mbeki told them at the congresses, ‘We are not going
to change it because of your pressure.’
Now he has gone a step further and in a classic act of political co-
option has drawn the entire top echelon of COSATU’s leadership into
government – Mbhazima Shilowa, the powerful secretary-general, has be-
come Premier of Gauteng province, while John Gomomo, the president,
Connie September, the first vice-president, and Ronald Mofokeng, the
national treasurer, have all become ANC Members of Parliament.
Once there, experience has shown, the responsibilities of government
and the economic realities it faces soon outweigh their narrower unionist
concerns. Thus both Finance Minister Manuel and Trade and Industries
Minister Erwin, both trade union leaders before they entered government
in 1994, are now the two lead players in the GEAR programme.
Mbeki’s imperial presidency is going to be a little less open, perhaps
even a little less democratic than the Mandela administration. But it is
likely to be significantly more effective on delivery.
 A three-in-one revolution
14 J un e 2000

I spent the fall of 2000 at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for International Scholars
in Washington, studying the phenomenon of globalisation and its effects on
emerging economies such as South Africa’s in preparation for my third book,
Beyond the Miracle. Towards the end of my stay I was invited to give a talk to a
high-profile audience on ‘The making of the new South Africa’.
As the text shows, I was aglow with pride at my country’s achievements. But
the talk had one major flaw. I let President Thabo Mbeki off the hook by suggest-
ing that he had clarified his murky position on HIV/AIDS during his first visit to
the US, which he had just completed. He had in fact compounded the confusion
and I did not see at the time what a serious flaw in his personality this revealed
and what grave consequences it could have.

MY AIM TODAY is to try to portray the transformation of South Africa

in a global context. As a revolution within a revolution, if you will. The
South African revolution, the transformation of my country’s grievously
distorted socio-economic structure, is taking place within a global revolu-
tion of historic dimensions.
I am referring, of course, to globalisation, a revolution as profound
in its impact as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and
which at the same time is replacing the old, familiar bipolar world of the
Cold War with a whole new and radically different geopolitical frame-
work. This global revolution is itself a stormy sea for any country to navi-
gate, as witness the Asian crisis of 1997–98, which almost wrecked those
much-vaunted ‘tiger’ economies. How much tougher, then, to be under-
taking a massive internal transformation in the midst of such a global
storm.
In fact I see the making of the New South Africa as a three-in-one
revolution. There is the socio-political revolution of transforming the
country from apartheid authoritarianism to a nonracial democracy – in
itself as daunting a transformation as any country has ever attempted,

7
8  f irst dra f ts

especially in a world that has seen so many intractable ethnic and sectar-
ian conflicts from Northern Ireland to the Indian subcontinent, to say
nothing of Rwanda and Angola, Ethiopia and Eritrea and the inappropri-
ately named Democratic Republic of Congo.
This is the revolution so many predicted could never happen in South
Africa, which would surely end in a racial bloodbath.
The other two are transforming an isolated, inward-looking economy
that was under siege and facing sanctions, into a competitive player in
the global marketplace. And thirdly, transforming a primary producing
economy based on mining and agriculture into a manufacturing ­exporter.
Gold is fading fast as the mainstay of the South African economy – the
equivalent, if you like, of Saudi Arabia’s oil. Its price is falling and it is
getting finished. The 1980 price of gold was above $800 a fine ounce;
yesterday it was $291. And as the price falls, more of South Africa’s deep-
level shafts have to be closed. So there is less gold earning a third of the
price. Agriculture is also dwindling as a contributor to the economy.
The main problem is that the requirements of these three interlock-
ing revolutions tend to be in conflict. The socio-economic revolution
requires the ANC government to deliver on Nelson Mandela’s pledge to
his people of ‘a better life for all’. That means more jobs and better pay.
Yet, as we are finding out, becoming a competitive player in the global
market­place means privatising, rationalising, downsizing, outsourcing
and generally cutting labour and other production costs as much as pos-
sible. So globalisation increases unemployment and squeezes wages.
Meanwhile, the transformation from a resource-based economy to a
manufacturing economy is doing the same. The closure of gold mines
and the decline of agriculture have thrown tens of thousands of people
out of work. This combination of factors has resulted in the loss of half a
million jobs in the six years since the ANC government came to power.
That’s tough for a liberation movement that came to power promis-
ing its people ‘a better life for all’ after generations of oppression and
exploitation.
Worse still, globalisation tends to widen the gap between rich and
poor, at least in the short term. And the new South Africa began life
with the second highest gap between rich and poor in the world – the
highest being Namibia. A black middle class is emerging now to join the
wealthy whites, but the gap between this new multiracial middle class
and the overwhelmingly black underclass is actually widening even as
the economy as a whole grows.
 A three-in-one revolution  9

The heart of the problem is that globalisation rewards the skilled and
punishes the unskilled. And apartheid deliberately kept the black popula-
tion unskilled. Not only was education separate and manifestly unequal,
but black people were prohibited by law from doing skilled work. A black
person could carry the paint pot but not do the painting; he could hand
the white mechanic the tools but not do the repair job, and so on.
Black people were shut out of the major universities and technical
training institutions. Until 1979 they were prohibited by law from join-
ing trade unions and so could not become apprentices. They were pro-
hibited from forming companies or business partnerships. They were not
allowed to buy shares on the stock exchange. They could not establish
businesses in the major urban areas except for small stores supplying
what were called ‘the basic necessities of life’, which means things like
bread, milk, fresh groceries, wood and coal.
It must be the only instance in history where a government, as a mat-
ter of policy, deliberately and systematically destroyed the skills base of
its working class.
And now the liberation movement, which freed its people from this
iniquity, must build a new manufacturing economy that can compete
in the global market-place on that base. Of all apartheid’s crimes against
humanity, this was surely the worst. Certainly it was the longest lasting
in its deleterious effects.
There are other daunting problems, too, some of which you read about
endlessly in your newspapers to the exclusion of just about everything
else. Such as crime, which is endemic to all transforming societies but
which in South Africa is aggravated by the collapse of the policing struc-
ture. The police were the front-line defenders of the apartheid system,
indoctrinated to believe that they were fighting a holy war against com-
munist atheism and terrorism. They were equipped with draconian laws
and they went about their task with fanatical zeal, committing appalling
crimes against humanity in the process.
Then suddenly they saw their political masters, who had trained and
encouraged them in this work, strike a deal with the hated enemy – and
leave them hanging out to dry. It doesn’t require much imagination to
understand that such a police force is going to be seriously disillusioned,
demotivated and angry. And of course once the big international crime
and drug syndicates smell a weak law enforcement system anywhere,
they close in like scavengers. The only solution is to build a new and
more effective police force. But that takes time.
10  f irst dra f ts

The other daunting problem is AIDS. It is a problem that crept up on

South Africa, making its silent inroads between 1990 and 1995, at a time
when the country was massively preoccupied with the great national ne-
gotiating process. So no red-alert buttons were pushed until well into the
Mandela era.
According to William Makgoba, a world-renowned micro-biologist
who is now president of the Medical Research Council of South Africa,
the pandemic could have been curbed during this period. But it wasn’t,
and when the new ANC government found itself facing a daunting array
of problems, the HIV epidemic, Makgoba suggests, was ‘simply one chal-
lenge too many’. The ANC, in his judgment, went into denial. First, it en-
dorsed a cheap quack remedy called Virodene which it hoped would re-
duce the crippling costs of dealing with the disease. Then, says Makgoba,
it ‘retreated behind revisionist theories’.
I believe it has emerged from that retreat now. I think President Mbeki
made his position clear during his recent visit to the United States and
that South Africa is now doing all it can, with its limited resources, to
cope with the disease. But there is no doubt much damage has been done
by the confusion, both to the country’s image and to the welfare of its
people.
Despite these massive problems, the new government has made sig-
nificant strides.
It has crafted and bedded down a new Constitution that is arguably the
most progressive in the world, guaranteeing all the basic human rights,
including for all the ethnic groups, for women, for gays and for the disa-
bled, and which guarantees freedom of expression and of the media. It
has run three free and fair elections, two national and one local. It has a
Parliament in which 10 parties and all races are represented and in which
a third of the legislators are women, including the Speaker and Deputy
Speaker. It has a Cabinet in which a third of the ministers are women,
and it has a woman as ambassador to the world’s most important coun-
try. It is transforming the judiciary, which used to be all-white, and it has
established a multiracial Constitutional Court.
The new South Africa is now a firmly established constitutional de-
mocracy functioning under the law.
At the same time the new government has redrawn the political map
of the country, rearranging four provinces and 10 tribal ‘homelands,’
four of them nominally independent, into nine completely new prov-
inces with their own legislative and executive arms. And it has rebuilt
 A three-in-one revolution  11

the local government structures of every city, town and village to bond
together their segregated sectors, such as Soweto and Johannesburg, into
single municipal councils.
Most striking of all is that the new regime has achieved a degree of ra-
cial reconciliation that few would have thought possible only a few years
ago, to the point where in last year’s national election the far right-wing
party of the hardline white separatists achieved less than 1 per cent of the
vote, and the Afrikaner National Party, which ruled the country for half a
century, slipped from 20 per cent of the vote to 7 per cent and was ousted
as the main opposition party by the liberal Democratic Party.
Segregated education has been ended, and residential segregation is
gradually ebbing as members of the emerging black middle class move
into the formerly whites-only suburbs. And even though the poor are
still poor, their quality of life has improved. One apartheid era statistic
that has stuck in my mind is a 1993 finding that the average rural black
woman had to walk eight miles (12 km) every day of her life to fetch
water and firewood – and the water was often foul. Today more than a
million rural households have been provided with clean tap water within
100 yards, and three-quarters of a million of those households have been
electrified.
It is one of the terrifying statistics of our electronic information age
that there are more telephones in the city of New York than in the entire
African continent. And if you don’t have a telephone you can’t get on
the internet, and if you can’t get on the internet you can’t become part
of the information age. You can’t become part of the globalised world.
You become what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman calls globali-
sation’s ‘roadkill’.
But since 1997, in just three years, South Africa’s Telkom has provided
1,6-million telephones in squatter camps and remote rural areas that
didn’t have them before.
These are solid material achievements. But the biggest task by far has
been the total restructuring of the economy. In this the new South African
government has faced many of the same problems as the countries of
Eastern Europe. For it is one of the great paradoxes of modern times that
the old regime in South Africa, which presented itself as one of the most
passionate anti-communist regimes on earth, in fact presided over the
largest amount of state-owned industry in the world outside the Soviet
bloc. And now the ANC, which for 50 years was committed to ‘nation-
alising the commanding heights of the economy’ and which has come
12  f irst dra f ts

to power in alliance with the left-wing labour union federation and the
South African Communist Party, is privatising many of those industries
and committing itself to a free market economy.
It has brought down tariff barriers, eased interest rates back from 25
per cent to 14 per cent and brought inflation down from 25 per cent to a
current 8 per cent and set a target of between 3 per cent and 6 per cent.
It has brought results. Foreign investment has increased substantially.
All the US companies which disinvested have returned, plus a crop of
new ones. There has been a surge of new investment from some of the
emergent Asian economies: Malaysia has been the biggest foreign inves-
tor since 1994. Trade with Australia has increased sixfold and is rising
with Latin America as well. There is a comprehensive new trade agree-
ment with the European Union.
Economic growth, which had been in a 20-year decline, has started to
rise again. It touched 6 per cent in 1996, two years after the new govern-
ment came to power.
But again, South Africa is learning along with other emerging econo-
mies that globalisation can be as treacherous as it is enticing. You can
do all the right things and still find that events over which you have no
control can knock you sideways. Just as the South African economy ap-
peared to be taking off in 1998, the Asian crisis struck and the rand cur-
rency plunged 26 per cent against the dollar in two months, while the
Johannesburg Securities Exchange lost 40 per cent of its value.
Slowly the economy recovered and by the end of last year prospects
were looking bright once more. Then President Robert Mugabe had a rush
of madness in neighbouring Zimbabwe, encouraging state-sponsored ter-
rorism and the seizure of white farmland without compensation, rebel
forces ran riot in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia went to war against Eritrea, civil
wars continued in Congo and Angola – and The Economist ran a cover
story bewailing ‘The Hopeless Continent’. Promptly the rand currency
fell back another 7 per cent to its lowest level ever and South African
share values declined once more.
The distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs has noted that it helps a lot
if a developing country is close to a strong developed one, as Poland is
to Germany. It is South Africa’s lot to be in a reverse situation. We are lo-
cated in ‘The Hopeless Continent’. That is not only a disadvantage, it also
imposes a heavy obligation. For this is our continent, and just as Federal
Reserve chairman Allan Greenspan once observed about the United States,
we can’t prosper as an island of affluence in an ocean of poverty.
 A three-in-one revolution  13

We are the only regional superpower, just as the US is the only global
superpower, and with the world backing away in a mixture of despair and
indifference from Africa’s apparent hopelessness, South Africa must try to
do something about it.
We are Africa’s last best hope. If South Africa fails, Africa as a whole
will fail. And if Africa with its close on a billion people fails it will be a
problem for the world as a whole. Because this is indeed the global vil-
lage and in the global village you are, you must be, your neighbour’s
keeper. Because if you are not, if you ignore your neighbour’s plight as
you grow wealthier and he sinks ever deeper into despair, he may pollute
your property, his family may contract diseases that infect yours, he may
burgle your home, he may try to invade it, and in his resentment at your
indifference he may even throw a bomb at it.
 SADC leaders must pin Mugabe down
10 S e p te mb e r 2001

What a hope! The Abuja Agreement, signed by Zimbabwe’s Foreign Minister

and agreed to ‘in principle’ by Mugabe verbally afterwards, could have ended
the Zimbabwe crisis there and then had the SADC leaders and President Thabo
Mbeki in particular had the political will to pin him down. The threat of sanctions
coming from his fellow African leaders would have made it hard for Mugabe to
defy them. But sadly, the SADC leaders lacked that will, so the Abuja Agreement
was stillborn and the Zimbabwe election the following year was indeed rigged.

THE MEETING IN Harare today of six leaders of the Southern African

Development Community (SADC), including South Africa’s President
Thabo Mbeki, will be critical in determining whether last Thursday’s
Abuja Agreement ostensibly ending Zimbabwe’s land crisis can be made
to stick or not.
President Robert Mugabe, who mysteriously disappeared for a week
on what has now been described as a ‘working holiday’ in Libya and did
not attend the negotiations in the Nigerian capital, turned up in Harare
yesterday and announced that he accepted the agreement in principle.
That is encouraging, but inevitably there is still a great deal of scepticism
about what he will actually do, for Mugabe has gone back on his word
many times in the past. It also remains to be seen whether the so-called
‘war veterans’ will heed him if he does order them to back off and vacate
the commercial farms they have occupied.
This makes it imperative that the SADC leaders pin him down to firm
time frames for implementing the Abuja Agreement in all its details. They
must also extract a solid commitment from the Zimbabwean President to
hold a free and fair presidential election next March with international
observers allowed in to certify as much. And they must spell out serious
consequences that will follow – such as the withholding of recognition of
a rigged election result and the closing of his borders with them – should
he renege on any aspect of the agreement. All of which will require a

14
 SADC leaders must pin Mugabe down  15

good deal more resolution and courage than the SADC leaders have dis-
played thus far. But if they fail and let Mugabe off the hook, the whole
region will suffer irreparable damage.
There are signs that they recognise this, which gives one hope. For
President Mbeki the moment of truth came in late July when he con-
fessed to a BBC interviewer that ‘Mugabe is not listening to anyone’. It
amounted to a recognition that his strategy of ‘quiet diplomacy’ had
failed.
Since then Mbeki has worked quietly behind the scenes with Nigeria’s
President Olusegun Obasanjo and the new British Foreign Secretary,
Jack Straw, to develop a tougher strategy. The Commonwealth, of which
Mbeki is currently chairman, became the instrument of that strategy.
With its summit, or CHOGM, meeting due in Australia next month,
the threat of suspending Zimbabwe’s membership was raised, adding to
sharpened threats of European Union and United States sanctions plus
international travel restrictions on members of the Mugabe Cabinet and
senior ZANU-PF officials, and, toughest of all, the freezing of their per-
sonal assets abroad.
All this was wrapped into a package and quietly presented to the
Zimbabwean delegation, led by Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge, at Abuja
last Thursday. This was a different kind of ‘quiet diplomacy’, with Mugabe
in Libya, the South African President and Foreign Minister both heavily
involved in the Durban racism conference and most international atten-
tion focused on that event. Quietly Nigeria’s Obasanjo, a tough and expe-
rienced negotiator, put the chips on the table – and Mudenge folded.
Ten hours after the meeting began Mudenge signed the far-reaching
agreement, which commits Zimbabwe to halt all further occupation of
farm lands, to speedily de-list farms that don’t meet agreed criteria for
redistribution, to move occupiers from farms that are not designated on
to legally acquired land, and – most important of all – to restore the rule
of law to the process of land reform. Zimbabwe also pledged to ‘take firm
action against violence and intimidation’.
In return, Britain has pledged to honour a commitment to pay £36-mil-
lion (about R4,4­-billion) towards a programme that will compensate
white farmers transferring land to black farmers – and to encourage other
developed countries to help financially.
Mugabe’s absence, however, left a cloud of doubt hanging over the
deal. Mudenge, still quivering with doubt as to how his boss might re-
act, tried a preliminary wriggle himself as he landed back in Zimbabwe,
16  f irst dra f ts

saying all the agreement meant was that the government would move
occupiers off land that had not been designated for resettlement, which
was less than 5 per cent of all commercial farmland. What he ignored
was the clause committing the government to return to the rule of law:
the Supreme Court has already declared the whole ‘fast track’ land reform
programme illegal.
Joseph Chinotimba, leader of the ‘war veterans’, also sought to dismiss
the agreement, saying his supporters would not move off the land yet.
‘I don’t know about any deals in Abuja,’ he said. ‘I don’t get my news
from the radio. I am waiting for my Foreign Minister to come back and
tell me.’
Opposition leaders and the white farmers are equally sceptical. ‘It’s
hard to imagine that a government which has failed to respect bind-
ing treaty agreements such as the United Nations Charter can be trusted
now,’ said Tendai Biti, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) shadow foreign secretary, while a leading white farmer remarked
wryly: ‘I don’t know whether I should celebrate this or question it.’
The scepticism was reinforced on Saturday, just two days after the agree-
ment was signed, when 150 ‘war veterans’ invaded a farm in the Beatrice
area, 40 km south of Harare. They assaulted farm workers, burnt down
20 of the farm workers’ houses, threatened to kill the farmer’s wife and
children, then left. The police, who were alerted, failed to intervene.
But now Mugabe has publicly accepted the agreement. He did so
­after a two-hour meeting yesterday with the Nigerian Foreign Minister,
Sule Lamido, who flew in ahead of him and briefed him on the Abuja
agreement.
Make no mistake, Mugabe does not want this deal. It will carry im-
mense political costs for him, for as this service has noted for many
months the redistribution of land is not the real issue behind the vio-
lence afflicting Zimbabwe. It has been no more than a populist pretext
for launching a campaign of violent intimidation against opposition sup-
porters in a desperate bid to ward off otherwise certain defeat for Mugabe
at the polls next March.
His massive egotism aside, Mugabe also fears the consequences of
such a defeat. He ordered his military to crush political opposition in
Matabeleland in 1983 in an operation that led to thousands of deaths,
and he also unleashed a violent campaign against MDC supporters dur-
ing last year’s parliamentary elections that resulted in 34 of them being
killed and hundreds injured. He has every reason to fear arraignment