Mbeki re-writes to South Africa as we turn thirty.

Published on 28 April 2024 in the Sunday Times

Listening to President Thabo Mbeki on the occasion of the launch of a book about the ANC Today letters issued in his name and on the eve of the 30th anniversary of RSA freedom, it became apparent that his recall or departure from our politics was a loss to the broader intellectual architecture and achievements of the ANC. How he articulated what informed the decision to claim 'the megaphone' of communicating the ANC message from its highest policy nodal point, and the known impact the letter had on the collaborative policy coordination between the office of the ANC President and the State President's office, clearly indicate how his presidency was hegemonic on the post-apartheid narrative about RSA. How Mbeki reclaimed the interpretation power of the media at the time the ANC needed to manage the transition from a President Mandela GNU, political transition, and new Constitution drafting era to a democratic and constitutional order-building second administration he led will for a while be a political science marvel for teaching, ideation, and scholarship. 

 

The re-centring of the letters, in a historical and future-directing context presented at the launch, represents another monumental recall of Mbeki into the centre of all manner of discourse about South Africa. The growing uncertainty about how the ideational future of the ANC will derive its functionality from its perceived changeability is what the book will address. The letters close the glaring gap widening on how the ANC, as the undisputed nexus of politics in South Africa, stopped thinking about the changeability of the future without also imagining itself comprehensively altering it. One of the fundamental advantages of living in a democracy where past leaders, as elder statesmen, continue to influence, and not direct, discourse present, as opposed to them being nodes of societal polarisation or brazen counter-revolutionary, is that the value or benefits of them sharing their accumulated wisdom is experienced in a non-partisan way by society. The risk of leaders and wisdom being perpetually partisan in the national scheme of things gets minimal without vitiating the legacy claims of parties that created them into wisdom nodes they become. 

 

Going through some of the letters in the first volume, an experience of what it meant for those very youthful leaders which Mbeki created the first administration in terms of the 1996 Constitution to be confronted by a mandate to repurpose a State to be about healing the divisions of the past, and establishing a functioning democratic order etched on the fulfilment of the rights in the Bill of Rights, human dignity, and social justice. 

 

A feature in the content of the letters is the science that as the frontiers of the Mbeki cohort of leaders and thinkers around him knowledge were extended, new mysteries other than the pursuit of a better life, just beyond the frontiers, came into sharper focus. 

The mysteries have snowballed to proportions where a complex of investigation reports kowtowed his later success to characterise the ANC, albeit contestable, as "accused number one in the dock". The aggression of unfamiliar interests as the currency of inside the ANC and South African politics, which started to blur the pursuit of the National Democratic Revolution, permeated the thematic thrusts of Mbeki's smithing of the letters. 

 

Even if the current leaders and members of the ANC will not deliberately coordinate the core leadership themes in the messages, the book will not surpass their reluctance but push the themes as theoretical constructions which will influence society long after the physical departure of Mbeki. Their repetition and echo in teaching and learning spaces will make them more credible and persuasive. They are now curated. As a synopsis of what the democratic order under him sought to communicate to us, these letters magnify the strength of the policy prowess or otherwise of those who thought and led with Mbeki. The GEAR policy, for instance, has been able to help South Africa liquidate its debt to manageable levels and, by extension, expand the fiscal capacity of the State to fulfil its constitutional obligations. The letters took the nation along the policy meanders of Mbeki and his leadership complex.

 

His letters contain platitudes, which were codes and directives to society. Only those interiors to the contestations, which blew into the open in Polokwane and NASREC 2017, would have had the decoding capability to understand. The launch was a convergence point for several ‘abavikel’shlaloes’ (defenders of the throne) and ‘abavikela usihlalo’ (defenders of the one on the throne who were there to listen to Mbeki as an elder stateman metamorphosing into an impeccable nodal point for  ‘abavikela ikusasa lombutho’ (defenders of the ANC legacy or future). It is a pity that, as a society, we could not witness all that served in the presidency as an institution gracing the occasion and writing a letter to the nation through imagery.

 

In the absence of a cohesive story narrated to Tintswalo, except to celebrate what it means to be Tintswalo, the Mbeki book has been rewritten for the next generation. It clears the clutter of personal aggrandisement and factional battles within the core political hegemony parenting institution of societal leadership, the ANC. In his speech, he subtly announced a series of publications the Thabo Mbeki knowledge creation, curating, and translation complexes are working on to put the necessary guardrails for Tintswalo to hold on to. Global practice and convention dictate that every historical epoch will be remastered, whether the incumbents do it, the new entrants do it, or the battle between them will do it. However, it cannot be done unless those who led, or those who were there, are deliberate it happens. The Book itself is a remarkable non-biotic and yet organic Tintswalo.