Mbeki and After: Reflections On The Legacy of Thabo Mbeki

MBEKI
AND AFTER
REFLECTIONS ON THE LEGACY OF THABO MBEKI
EDITED BY
DARYL GLASER
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MBEKI
AND AFTER
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MBEKI
AND AFTER
REFLECTIONS ON THE LEGACY OF THABO MBEKI
EDITED BY
DARYL GLASER
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Published in South Africa by:
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2001
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Published edition copyright © Wits University Press 2010

Compilation copyright © Edition editor 2010
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First published 2010
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
ACRONYMS ix
GENERAL REFLECTIONS
1 MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY: A critical introduction 3

DARYL GLASER
2 MBEKI’S LEGACY: Some conceptual markers 41

PETER HUDSON
3 WHY IS THABO MBEKI A ‘NITEMARE’? 51

MARK GEVISSER
THE MBEKI STYLE OF GOVERNANCE
4 MACHIAVELLI MEETS THE CONSTITUTION: 71

Mbeki and the law
RICHARD CALLAND AND CHRIS OXTOBY
MBEKI AND SOCIETY
5 THABO MBEKI AND DISSENT 105

JANE DUNCAN
6 CIVIL SOCIETY AND UNCIVIL GOVERNMENT: 128

The Treatment Action Campaign versus Thabo Mbeki,
1998-2008
MARK HEYWOOD
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MBEKI AND RACE
7 SEEING OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US: 163

Racism, technique and the Mbeki administration
STEVEN FRIEDMAN
8 TOWARDS A COMMON NATIONAL IDENTITY: 187

Did Thabo Mbeki help or hinder?
EUSEBIUS MCKAISER
MBEKI ABROAD
9 THABO MBEKI’S LEGACY OF TRANSFORMATIONAL 209

DIPLOMACY
CHRIS LANDSBERG
10 THABO MBEKI AND THE GREAT FOREIGN POLICY RIDDLE 242

PETER VALE
NOTES 263
CONTRIBUTORS 274
BIBLIOGRAPHY 278
INDEX 299
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their roles in inspiring, managing and copy editing this publication
I thank various members of the staff of Wits University Press, including
Julie Miller, Veronica Klipp and Pat Tucker. I thank too those – including
Abigail Booth, Gilbert Khadiagala, Shireen Hassim, Peter Hudson,
Tawana Kupe, Sheila Meintjes, David Shepherd and Ursula Scheidegger
– whose suggestions and organisational input made possible the
conference upon which this book drew. The conference was also made
possible by a grant from the University of Witwatersrand’s Faculty of
Humanities to its School of Social Sciences, gratefully received. I thank,
finally, the conference speakers, chapter contributors and anonymous
reviewers for supplying what lies at the heart of both the conference and
the book: intellectual stimulation and critical engagement.
Daryl Glaser, University of the Witwatersrand

August 2010
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ACRONYMS
AASROC Asian-African Sub-Regional Conference

AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
ALP AIDS Law Project
ANC African National Congress
ANCYL ANC Youth League
APF Anti-Privatisation Fund
APRM African Peer Review Mechanism
ARF African Renaissance and International Co-operation Fund
ARV Anti-retroviral
ASEAN Association of South East Asian Nations
AU African Union
AWC Anti-War Coalition
Azapo Azanian People’s Organisation
AZT Azidothymidine
BEE Black economic empowerment
BIG Basic Income Grant
CGE Commission on Gender Equality
CIDA Canadian International Development Agency
CNI Common national identity
CODESA Convention for a Democratic South Africa
Cope Congress of the People
Cosatu Congress of South African Trade Unions
CPS Centre for Policy Studies
CSAS Centre for Southern African Studies
DA Democratic Alliance
DFA Department of Foreign Affairs
DFID Department for International Development
DNE Department of National Education
DPSA Department of Public Service and Administration
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DRC Democratic Republic of Congo

DSO Directorate of Special Operations
ETT Electoral Task Team
FBI Forum of Black Journalists
FIFA International Federation of Association Football
FXI Freedom of Expression Institute
GCIS Government Communication and Information System
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GEAR Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy
HIV Human Immunodeficiency Virus
HSRC Human Sciences Research Council
IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency
IBSA India-Brazil-South Africa
ICD Independent Complaints Directorate
Idasa Institute for Democracy in South Africa
IEC Independent Electoral Commission
IMF International Monetary Fund
IRIS Incident Reporting Information System
JIOP Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons
JMPD Johannesburg Metro Police Department
JTI Joint Investigating Team
LPM Landless People’s Movement
MAP Millennium Africa Recovery Plan
MCC Medicines Control Council
MDGs Millennium Development Goals
NAASP New Asia-Africa Strategic Partnership
NACOSA National AIDS Co-ordinating Committee of South Africa
NAI New African Initiative
NAM Non-Aligned Movement
NAPWA National Association of People Living with HIV and AIDS
NBI National Business Initiative
NDPP National Director of Public Prosecutions
NEPAD New Partnership for Africa’s Development
NGO Non-governmental organisation
NIA National Intelligence Agency
NP National Party
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xi
NPA National Prosecuting Agency

NPT Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
NSP National Strategic Plan on HIV, AIDS and Sexually
Transmitted Infections
OAU Organisation of African Unity
OBE Outcomes-based education
ODA Official development assistance
ODAC Open Democracy Advice Centre
OECD Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development
PAIA Promotion of Access to Information Act
PMTCT Policy on mother-to-child transmission
RED Research and Education in Development
RGA Regulation of Gatherings Act
SABC South African Broadcasting Corporation
SACC South African Council of Churches
SACP South African Communist Party
SADC Southern African Development Community
SAHRC South African Human Right Commission
SAMA South African Medical Association
SANGOCO South African Non-Governmental Organisation Coalition
SAPA South African Press Association
SAPS South African Police Service
Scopa Standing Committee on Public Accounts
SECC Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee
TAC Treatment Action Campaign
UAS Union of African States
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural
Organisation
USAf Unites States of Africa
WSSD World Summit on Sustainable Development
WTO World Trade Organisation
YCL Young Communist League
ZANU-PF Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front
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MBEKI
AND AFTER
GENERAL
REFLECTIONS
MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY:

A critical introduction
DARYL GLASER
Is there an Mbeki legacy? Looking back at Thabo Mbeki’s presidency

from a vantage point of mid-2010 an observer might easily conclude that
that legacy – such as it is – consists in three classes of phenomena:
mayhem caused and now needing to be repaired (policies on AIDS and
Zimbabwe), batons merely passed from Mbeki’s predecessor to his
successor (a functioning democracy and mixed economy) and seemingly
equal-and-opposite reactions elicited among the former president’s many
enemies (the internal ANC rebellion against Mbeki and subsequent
efforts by the victorious rebels to establish a ‘not Thabo Mbeki’ style of
governance). It is the third class – the reactions elicited – that will seem
to many the most important for understanding South African governance
now, and therefore to constitute Mbeki’s most palpable legacy.
This being so, why should there be a book, now, about Thabo Mbeki
and his legacy? For one thing, public interest in Mbeki remains surp-
risingly strong – as evidenced, for example, by advance sales for books
about the former president. The interest is partly (still) in the man, even
as he sulks in retirement. Biographers, columnists and political scientists
have felt compelled to retool as amateur psychologists the better to
understand the former president’s psychic complexity. And Mbeki’s was
a consequential complexity: his sensitivity to racial slight directly influen-
ced government approaches to the AIDS pandemic and the crisis in
Zimbabwe; feelings of insecurity and even paranoia arguably lay behind
the former president’s efforts to run his political rivals out of town;
Mbeki’s contempt for those he considered of lesser ability than himself
doubtless fuelled his search for centralised command and control, his
secrecy, and his stubborn refusal of unsolicited advice (Gumede 2005:
163-4, 179-82; Gevisser 2007: 230-5, 284, 440-43, 740, 793; Johnson
2009: 178-221, 233-38, 340-67).
Just as ‘interestingly’, Mbeki seemed to be more than one man:
charmer of whites and race-baiter, technocrat and nationalist romantic,
free-market convert and developmental-statist, globaliser and Third-
Worldist, champion of the black bourgeoisie and bearer-of-warnings
about society’s descent into crass materialism. What made the man tick?
What else but fascination with this question could explain the turnout of
well over a thousand people to the launch of Mark Gevisser’s biography
of Mbeki, even as the president’s powers were waning?
There is more to his interestingness than that, however. There
remains a widespread sense that Mbeki cannot but have made a real
difference to the way South Africa is run even now – and that this
difference is not reducible to the aforementioned negative reactions to
his style and policies. The Mbeki period arguably encompassed South
Africa’s entire post-1994 democratic experience up to 2008. As
deputy-president Mbeki exerted considerable influence throughout
MBEKI AND AFTER

Nelson Mandela’s presidential tenure; according to some, he was ‘de

facto prime minister’ (Gevisser 2007: 658; see also Gevisser 2007: 702;
Johnson 2009: 54-6, 99-100, 137-8).
Mbeki was deeply present in establishing, even before he assumed
the presidency in 1999, the coordinates of South Africa’s pragmatic
but Third-Worldist foreign policy and its market-oriented economic
policy. These remain, essentially, the coordinates of this country’s
foreign and economic policy, notwithstanding the Left’s efforts to steer
the new administration onto a more decisively pro-poor course, or
indeed Mbeki’s own belated (re)discovery of the activist state. Mbeki
also helped to rally, augment and empower a black middle class.
Of course, even the ‘positive’ legacies are Mbeki’s only up to a
point. Some of them – notably the economic and class ones – doubtless
bear the impress of structural forces like the implosion of the Soviet
bloc, neo-liberal ‘globalisation’ and underlying socio-economic shifts.
Mbeki was, moreover, joined by other important figures (perhaps an
entire nascent elite) in exercising the choices that these structural forces
left open. It is, after all, precisely the legacies most clearly stamped
with Mbeki’s personal agency – notably on AIDS – that are now being
decisively overthrown. The ones that endure may be those Mbeki
served in part as a kind of historical vector.
It is thus not without some justification that three contributors,
Friedman, Vale and Duncan, implicitly question the framing of this
collection around Mbeki the man. At the same time few would deny
that Mbeki the man helped to shape South Africa’s particular local
reception of the ‘collapse of Communism’ and of globalisation and its
particular reconfiguration of race-class relations. Mbeki was no cipher:
notwithstanding the new ruling elite’s failure to secure economic power
comparable to its political sway, it gained remarkably rapid control of
a modern state and, for a good while, it remained in the thrall of
Mbeki, kept there by, amongst other factors, the call of black solidarity,
MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

the ANC’s collective discipline and the lure of executive patronage.

For about ten years from the mid-1990s Mbeki enjoyed a margin of
real power to sculpt South Africa’s emerging order. That in the end he
lost control of it in so many ways – see violent crime, xenophobic
pogroms, service delivery protests, the Polokwane conference rebellion
– does not gainsay this point.
This collection arises out of a conference held from 30-31 March
2009 on Mbeki’s Legacy, hosted by the Department of Political Studies,
University of the Witwatersrand, at the instigation of Tawana Kupe,
Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, which, together with the School of
Social Sciences, joined our department in funding the event. Mbeki was,
by then, ‘history’, deposed from the ANC presidency and the presidency
of the Republic. Despite this, the conference was remarkably well
attended throughout and received television and radio coverage.
Our idea was to organise a conference that was overall critical in tone
– it is the job of academics to be critical – but something other than an
anti-Mbeki polemic. We invited a number of people we hoped would
defend the Mbeki record, but in the end only Siphamandla Zondi and
Chris Landsberg were there to champion the ex-president (both on
foreign policy issues), and of these only Landsberg agreed to contribute
to the book. We also – in the spirit of the times – sought a conference
that was balanced in terms of race and gender. While three black Africans
of a larger number invited agreed to address the conference, none chose
to contribute to the book (though others of colour have done so). Of the
three women speakers, only one agreed to participate in the book.
On all these counts, therefore, there is nothing ‘balanced’ about this
collection, or even (given the presence of Landsberg’s fulsome defence
of Mbeki amid otherwise much more critical chapters) anything
particularly coherent about it; it is a product simply of the way things
turned out – of who agreed to present at the conference and who agreed
to contribute to the book of the conference. With Wits University Press,
MBEKI AND AFTER

the Department of Political Studies decided nevertheless to press ahead

with a book, encouraged by indications of prospective reader interest.
The contributors are all connected to the academic world, and some
were also prominent public commentators on the Mbeki era or activists
in civil society organisations during his tenure.
This chapter offers a critical introduction to the collection, locating
its contributions within a larger anatomy of Mbeki and his legacy. It
is occasionally argumentative, and not all contributors will agree with
all the arguments made in it; I hope they will extend their forbearance,
especially where I quibble with positions they have adopted. Its length
and wide (perhaps too wide) range has mainly to do with the need to
cover Mbeki-related ground that our more specialised chapter contri-
butors could not. This sweep comes at a price: not every point can be
substantiated as thoroughly as would be possible in a more specialised
piece. I do, though, provide sources for factual claims that are not
common cause and flag – by using appropriately qualified language –
propositions that are disputable or speculative.
MBEKI: The man, his politics, his world-view

Biographical essentials
Thabo Mbeki was born in 1942 in the Eastern Cape, where he spent
his childhood. His father, Govan, became a celebrated ANC and
Communist activist, political prisoner and founder of the ANC’s armed
wing. Mbeki spent six years in domestic ANC-linked youth politics
before heading abroad, on ANC instructions, in 1962. In 1966 Mbeki
received a Master of Economics degree from the University of Sussex.
Heavily involved in ANC work in several countries during his period
of exile, he became political secretary to ANC President Oliver Tambo
in 1978, director of the ANC’s Department of Information and
Publicity in 1984 and head of the ANC’s international department in

1989. In the later 1980s and early 1990s Mbeki figured prominently
in the negotiations that led to the democratic constitutional settlement
of 1994. In 1993 he was elected chairman of the ANC and in 1994
first deputy president of the Republic of South Africa. The ANC’s
Mafikeng Congress of December 1997 saw Mbeki elected as ANC
president. In June 1999, following the ANC’s second election victory,
he assumed office as president of South Africa. He held the ANC
presidency until his ouster at the party’s conference held in Polokwane,
in Limpopo Povince in December 20071 and the presidency of the
Republic until his resignation in September 2008.
Since he was long considered an ANC heir apparent by virtue of
being the son of Govan Mbeki and close associate of Oliver Tambo,
both ‘ANC royalty’, Mbeki’s ascendancy seemed inevitable to many.
Even so, he was not universally popular in the movement. He incurred
suspicion in its armed wing (Gevisser 2007: 293-7), fell out with
Communist stalwarts Joe Slovo and Chris Hani and found himself, in
the 1990s, challenged for pre-eminence by, among others, former trade
unionist Cyril Ramaphosa. Adroit in sidelining a string of potential rivals
he finally fell prey, politically, to the coalition that gathered around one-
time Mbeki man and former ANC intelligence chief Jacob Zuma.
Mbeki’s ascendancy was in keeping with the prominent role in the
ANC of activists from the Eastern Cape, the area in which Bantu-speakers
first collided with white settlers in the 18th century – though the Mbekis
themselves were descended (on the paternal side) from the Mfengu, 19th-
century refugees from Natal dispersed by intra-African wars. The ‘Fingo’
stood out as Christianised and modernising outsiders amongst the Xhosa
and, indeed, were initially perceived as collaborators with the British; but
this group duly experienced the bitter taste of white power, in the Mbeki
family’s case in the form of downward social mobility from an earlier
near-gentry status. Mbeki was (quietly) accused of packing his Cabinet
and director-general posts with Xhosas (Johnson 2009: 557).
MBEKI AND AFTER

Mbeki’s rise to the presidency also signalled the ascendancy of the

exiles, who, in the 1990s, competed for influence with the Robben
Islanders and the ‘inziles’ – veterans of the United Democratic Front,
the Congress of South African Trade Unions and other domestic
formations active inside South Africa during the uprisings of the 1980s.
Zuma continues the dominance of the exiles, though in ethnic terms
(which matter in South Africa) his rule marks a passing of the
presidential baton to the Zulus, historically rivals of the Xhosa for
dominance in the ANC.
Ideology/world-view
For some of his critics and admirers alike, Mbeki was the quintessential
post-ideological figure: a man who wanted, above all, to get things
done, even if that meant deserting his movement’s socialist dogmas or
his predecessor’s feel-good rainbowism. This characterisation does not
seem quite right. Mbeki did jettison socialist goals (perhaps as early as
1979)2 and, indeed, for some on the left he was an ideologue of a
different kind: a ‘neo-liberal’ one, committed with a convert’s zeal to
a limited state, free trade and monetary orthodoxy (‘Call me a
Thatcherite!’, he invited an audience in 1996). This does not seem quite
right either. It is difficult to square with Mbeki’s bemoaning of selfish
materialism, his questioning of globalisation after the Asian financial
crash (Gevisser 2007: 740-1, 779-80) and his post-1998 affirmation
of the ‘developmental state’.
Mbeki was (is) a pragmatic ideologue. His pre-1994 role as an ANC
diplomat and publicist demanded that he maintain connections with
parties as diverse as Black Consciousness, Swedish social democrats,
American liberals and, later, the white South African establishment.
Attuned to the balance of forces, Mbeki could read the meaning of
white military power and Soviet decline. He eschewed the romantic
maximalism of guerilla comrades like Chris Hani. But his pragmatism

10
served an ideological world-view, one that influenced both his goals

and methods. That world-view changed in pattern and hue over time,
but it retained some important shaping elements.
Thus Marxism-Leninism remained visible, even as the socialism
ceased to be. Mbeki was brought up in a communist family; an SACP
member from early 1961 or 1962 until 1990 (Gevisser 2007: 148), he
was elected to its Central Committee in 1970, received ideological and
military training in Moscow in 1969-71 and, for a while, was groomed
as a future SACP leader. ‘M-L’ was visible most obviously in Mbeki’s
vanguardist approach to politics and governance, which are considered
in more detail below. It was much less evident in his market-friendly
economics. Ironically, though, Marxism-Leninism helped Mbeki to
justify his accommodation of capitalist globalisation and his commit-
ment to fostering a black ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’ (Gevisser 2007: 462-4;
Johnson 2009: 79). The communist two-stage theory of revolution
explained the priority of ‘national democracy’ over socialism and,
correspondingly, why the ANC should remain a nationalist rather than
become a socialist organisation.3 ‘Scientific’ Marxism stressed too, with
Mbeki, the importance of objectively analysing the balance of class
forces in determining what was possible at a given conjuncture; Lenin,
in particular, offered Mbeki a vocabulary for attacking ultra-leftism
(an ‘infantile disorder’, according to Lenin). Here was Marxism-
Leninism as per the Lenin School, but emptied of its socialist content.
Mbeki’s other ideological strand is radical anti-colonial nationalism.
In his case this manifested itself in pan-Africanism and, more generally,
in a racialised Third-Worldism. Mbeki insistently attributed Africa’s
failings to European colonialism, offered solidarity to leaders in the
South under attack from the West and tried to launch an Africa-wide
‘Renaissance’. For some leftist critics (e.g., Patrick Bond [2004])
Mbeki’s pan-African, Third-Worldist and anti-imperialist positioning
was simply his way of ‘talking left’ while ‘walking right’, especially
MBEKI AND AFTER

11
economically. Certainly, Mbeki showed little interest in the statist

socialism and pre-capitalist communalism punted by earlier gener-
ations of leftist African nationalists. But few who have perused Mbeki’s
online screeds, or who have tried to make sense of his actions and
silences, can doubt that he held his anti-colonialist stance with a sincere
bitterness. It is a merit of Landsberg’s exegesis that he takes Mbeki’s
foreign-policy idealism seriously. Whatever one thinks of Landsberg’s
defence of Mbeki’s foreign policy, it proceeds from a correct premise,
that Mbeki possessed and acted on a world-view, one that joined
realism to a politics of Third-Worldism and racial redress. While Vale
is more (properly, in my view) critical of Mbeki-era foreign policy, he
is arguably too quick to reduce it to neo-liberal and realist calculations.
If human rights came second in Mbeki’s foreign policy this was
probably due as much to the former president’s ‘idealistic’ notions of
racial and South-South solidarity as it was to calculations of South
Africa’s interests, economically conceived or otherwise.
The prominence of race in Mbeki’s world-view requires special
attention. The puzzle, for many observers, lay in his apparent metamor-
phosis from affable Anglophile into prickly racial nationalist. Visible as
a significant concern already during his deputy-presidency, race became
a central motif of Mbeki’s presidency. In various ways and forums he
came to champion a world-view according to which whites at home and
in the North were now, as ever, determined to exploit and degrade
Africans – to impoverish them; use them as fodder in medical experi-
ments; stereotype them as violent, venal and lustful; impose upon them
heartless Western values and to prove they were incapable of self-govern-
ment. Africans appeared in his account as a warm and communal people,
wronged by Western evildoers, collectively morally pristine prior to their
corruption by white violence and materialism, and still very much victims.
Why this apparent racial turn? It is proper to acknowledge one
likely stimulant to it: the fact that, years after 1994, whites in South

12
Africa remain disproportionately economically powerful, materially

privileged and – in a good many cases – unreconciled to black rule.
There is also the fact that, for all its post-1950 non-racialism, the ANC
never abandoned its commitment to the liberation of ‘blacks in general
and Africans in particular’.
But there appears to be more at work than these facts in Mbeki’s own
transmogrification into racial nationalist. It now seems likely that he
was never the straightforwardly westernised non-racialist some whites
imagined they saw in the 1980s. Mbeki’s pre-1994 diplomatic role may
have required him to overplay his Western side even as, inwardly, he felt
a powerful urge to ‘reclaim his Africanness’ (Gevisser 2007: 574-5).
The split in Mbeki’s persona between cosmopolitanism and return-
to-the-source yearning may originate, or so Gevisser’s biography implies,
in the ambiguities of the educated and relatively well-off Mbeki family’s
insider-outsider status amongst the ‘red’ Xhosa (2007: 49-52). During
his 1960s British exile Mbeki engaged appreciatively with the ideas of
W E B du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz
Fanon and Malcolm X and established links with Black Consciousness
activists. Later he fell out spectacularly with his one-time mentor, the
white revolutionary Joe Slovo (Gevisser 2007: 220, 314-27, 384-5; 459-
70). Mbeki forged a tacit alliance with Africanists during his 1990s
rivalry with the non-racial left and inziles and resented white support
for Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership ambitions (Gumede 2005: 39;
Gevisser 2007: 604-10, 639-47). As President, Mbeki was eager to
escape the shadow of the iconic Mandela, whom he privately accused
of not doing enough to help blacks (Gumede 2005: 53-7; Gevisser 2007:
707-12). He found in white racism a reassuring explanation for
phenomena he found disconcerting, notably the medical-scientific claim
that Africans were victims of a lethal disease sexually transmitted within
their ranks and the criticism to which he was subjected over his policies
on AIDS, Zimbabwe and the arms deal. To these factors reinforcing his
MBEKI AND AFTER

13
race consciousness must be added his alliance with elements of a rising

black middle class eager to displace class-struggle rhetoric with a more
congenial rhetoric of racial competition.
Governing style
Mbeki was the elected leader of a democratic state, one that has (at least
until the advent of recently proposed media restrictions) been amongst
the more plausible African exemplars of Huntington’s ‘third wave of
Democratisation’ (Huntington 1991). But to his many critics Deputy
President, later President Mbeki appeared to be an authoritarian figure
trapped (comfortably housed, some leftists might contend) in a liberal-
democratic (or ‘bourgeois’) institutional shell. He personified in these
critics’ eyes a politics of centralisation, paranoia, aversion to criticism
and indifference to the pain of his fellow citizens. Mbeki, from 1994, led
a centralising trend evident in, among other moves, the high-handed
imposition of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR)
economic strategy in 1996, the top-down deployment of cadres to ANC-
controlled provinces and municipalities from 1997 and the creation of a
super presidency from 1999. His authoritarianism found expression in
broadsides against real or imagined critics, delivered at Tripartite Alliance
organisation conferences or in his online column, and directed sometimes
at individual citizens; and also in plotting, some of it involving the state
security apparatus, to sideline perceived rivals. Mbeki talked and, more
occasionally, acted in ways that seemed threatening to many in the media,
judiciary, opposition parties and organised civil society.
Part of the explanation for Mbeki’s undemocratic ways surely lies in
his ideological lineage. Marxism-Leninism and radical nationalism pulled
him, and the ANC, towards authoritarianism. The model proffered by
earlier Marxist-led anti-colonial movements legitimated a conception of
the ANC as the embodiment of a revolutionary mission and people. Both
ideologies encouraged a distrust of political pluralism, formal democracy

14
and the idea of a neutral or non-partisan state, favouring, in its stead, a

unitary and purposive conception of the state, one that looked to inclusive
mass mobilisation behind a shared historical task rather than to open-
ended contestation amongst competing societal projects.
Leninism and left-inflected nationalism jointly supplied a vocabulary
for tarring critics (black, white, left, right) as ‘reactionaries’, ‘counter-
revolutionaries’ and ‘agents’. (We catch an early glimpse of Mbeki’s
view of dissent in his enthusiastic endorsement of the Soviet crushing
of the Prague Spring in 1968 [Gevisser 2007: 184, 260].) The impress
of Leninism can be seen also in Mbeki’s preference for vanguardism
over populism (‘better fewer but better!’, he admonished his hostile
audience at Polokwane, in Lenin’s own words) and in his commitment
to democratic-centralist party organisation. Lenin’s ruthless strategic
realism could only have encouraged Mbeki’s own personality-rooted
preoccupations with power and conspiracy. Mbeki never repudiated
the liberal- and social-democratic Constitution negotiated in the early
and middle 1990s, but his Leninism and radical nationalism surely help
to explain the kind of cavalier attitude to constitutionalism that the
Calland and Heywood chapters show – in detail – to characterise the
former president’s tenure.
How much this matters depends, in part, on where one is coming
from. Hudson’s theoretical contribution raises provocative questions
about the appropriateness of a standard liberal yardstick for measuring
Mbeki’s record. Hudson’s hope is invested in the possibility of more
radically transformative metrics. For this editor at least, the clear
implication of Duncan’s and Heywood’s contributions is that repressive
(or illiberal) aspects of the Mbeki government were as likely to be
directed at radically transformative critics of ANC rule as they were
at reactionary ones. Liberal-democratic values and institutions protect
progressive as well as conservative forces. Hudson complains that some
socialists who insist, still, on the possibility of alternative economic
MBEKI AND AFTER

15
systems proceed as though there is no alternative to liberal democracy

as a political system. An alternative take is that liberal democracy is
precisely the name of the political system that permits, at least in prin-
ciple, a public choice between rival economic programmes. These
choices are subject, under liberal democracy, to constitutional checks
and to the ever-present possibility of reversal by future publics, elec-
torally reconvened. But how else would Hudson have it? Nor need the
choices favour self-interested individualism or confound trans-
formative goals, as Hudson implies; South Africa’s liberal-democratic
Constitution permits a considerable leeway for social-democratic
experimentation; indeed it mandates some.
One oft-heard justification of Mbeki-style centralisation was that it
was necessary to the rational governance of a sometimes chaotic polity
and society (see, e.g., Gevisser 2007: 716). Centralised executive leader-
ship is viewed by such defenders as a precondition for ‘delivery’ in the
face of incompetent or corrupt lower tiers of state, conflicting juris-
dictions and bureaucratic resistance. This line of argument, in turn, elicits
the claim, reiterated in this volume by Friedman, that Mbeki’s ANC
imposed a technocracy on South Africa. Friedman intriguingly links its
technocratic style to the new elite’s racial insecurities; for him, it issued
from a collective anxiety to prove to whites that blacks were capable of
‘good governance’. This attempt to appease racist whites was an error,
according to Friedman, committing the ANC to a path of high-handed
managerialism, suppression of legitimate ideological debate and the
imposition of elitist norms of excellence and order. There was clearly a
technocratic aspect to, say, the Mbeki-era (1994-2008, that is) encourage-
ment of new public management in state bureaucracies, the delegation
of fiscal and monetary decision-making respectively to the Treasury and
Reserve Bank, the attempt to replicate Japan’s MITI within the
presidency and the aspiration to create ‘world-class cities’. Clearly, too,
Mbeki was determined to prove to the world that South Africa was not

16
going to repeat the mistakes of Africa, mistakes that he perceived to

include economic populism and state mismanagement.
Still, there are grounds to quibble with the technocracy thesis in its
unalloyed form, with its implication of commitment to instrumental
rationality, rule by experts and above-the-fray objectivity. It under-
estimates, surely, the crosscutting imperatives of race-based recruitment,
ANC partisanship and personal loyalty running through the rule of
Mbeki and his subordinates. These are not meritocratic imperatives.
And if ANC rule under Mbeki was technocratic, then it arguably failed,
even on its own terms – for Mbeki presided over the deterioration of
hospital and educational services, energy provision, infrastructure and
other goods that technocrats might be supposed to be good at
delivering. Friedman’s ready solution to this latter puzzle is to argue
that the ANC set itself up for failure: instead of drawing on its
strengths as a popular movement (it would be useful to have these
detailed), it embarked on an elitist and technocratic course that it
lacked the capacity to see through. My own inclination is to think of
Mbeki-ism as torn between technocratic and nationalist dogmas, but
Friedman certainly posits a powerful alternative to the mainstream
thesis that the ANC suffered from too little, rather than too much,
concern with technical competence.
On the issue of state (in)capacity, more later.
Conception of the relationship between knowledge and power

Mbeki was commonly charged with being a ‘denialist’, and this charge
touches on an aspect of Mbeki-ism that receives insufficient attention:
his peculiar conception of the relationship between knowledge,
discourse and power. Denial can mean a number of things: a refusal
to admit that something is so; a reluctance to confront or address an
acknowledged reality; a cognitive subordination of ‘is’ to ‘ought’ (as
in, ‘this cannot be true because it ought not to be’); a belief that reality
MBEKI AND AFTER

17
can be altered by assertion, or by damning those bearing bad news.

All of these meanings found expression, I would argue, in Mbeki’s
denialism. Medical orthodoxy on AIDS ought not to have been true –
because in Mbeki’s reading it confirmed stereotypes and blamed
victims – therefore could not be. If the orthodoxy could not be true,
its bearers must be malicious: in this case, agents of a colonialist
discourse of medical-scientific domination. If the orthodoxy serves
colonialist domination, it is proper – indeed, a revolutionary require-
ment – to counter it, whether through passive-aggressive silence,
textual resistance (as in online polemics) or by diverting the resources
of state to dealing with other social maladies that can be more plausibly
attributed to Western colonialism and the poverty it spawned. Similar
thought patterns are detectable in Mbeki’s approaches to topics like
crime, Zimbabwe and xenophobia.
South Africans (and Zimbabweans) paid a terrible price for this
epistemology. The most egregious was in lives, but a belief that
shooting messengers alters reality also poses a direct threat to media
freedom. This threat seemed to materialise in 2000, when the South
African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) launched an inquiry
into media racism, one that branded as racist (and presumably
therefore as untrue) all criticisms of the ANC government that stood
to reinforce racial stereotypes. That inquiry also bore testimony to the
commission’s belief in the occult power of the textual and sub-textual,
a power that it presumed to shape and supersede the objective facts of
any given matter. Critiques of the ANC needed to be addressed, not
by changing the external reality referred to by media critics – not, that
is to say, by acting to make government less corrupt, greedy or incom-
petent – but by ‘proving’ the subliminally racist nature of critical texts
(Glaser 2000). The inquiry was led by then SAHRC chairperson
Barney Pityana and a white researcher, but it conveyed in every detail
the spirit of Mbeki-ism.4

18
It is not clear why Mbeki adopted this way of thinking, but

plausible candidates include his intellectual pride and his massive
personal investment in his ideas. Bereft of a family or private
hinterland, Mbeki ‘sublimate[d] all emotions, all relationships, all
desires, into the struggle for liberation’ (Gevisser 2007: xxix). The
wrongness of his revolutionary ideas, one may surmise, stood to
annihilate him. And the principal idea in which he was invested was,
again according to Gevisser (2007: xxxii, 322-26), the idea that black
people should determine their own lives and identity. Blacks should
escape the gaze of the West. They should, with Fanon and Steve Biko,
judge themselves by their own lights. It is not many steps from here to
the conviction that Africans, or at any rate those who had attained
psychological self-emancipation, should redefine reality on their own
terms. Mbeki appeared to view this task of black self-definition, and
reality redefinition, as a crucial aspect of his role as philosopher-king
of South Africa’s transition. Certain fashionable ideas, mostly drawn
from the discursive universe of post-socialist cultural radicalism – anti-
scientism, Foucauldian preoccupation with the knowledge/power
nexus, Afrocentrism, post-colonialist theory – probably helped to
shape an intellectual climate in which Mbeki could believe the things
he did with authority and confidence. The trendiness of such ideas
guaranteed him at least a small cult following (see, e.g., Ronald Suresh
Roberts, Anthony Brink, Christine Qunta).
NARRATIVES OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE
How one rates Mbeki overall is, in this as in many matters, inseparable
from one’s values and affiliations. Mbeki won praise in two kinds of
circles. In the 1980s, 1990s and into the 2000s, he elicited widespread
admiration amongst representatives of business and white society for the
kind of persona he projected to them, sincerely or otherwise: the persona
MBEKI AND AFTER

19
of a conciliatory veteran, economic pragmatist and political moderniser

in the mould of, say, Tony Blair. This line of praise for Mbeki never
entirely died out; business economists continued to the end of his tenure
to hail Mbeki’s economic management, crediting his government’s – and
in particular, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s – business-friendliness
for the boom of 2004-7. Post-2005 whites generally took Mbeki’s side
in the face-off with what they perceived as a less educated, more corrupt
Jacob Zuma. By the end, though, most white commentators had joined
others in excoriating Mbeki’s failings. Whites had never loved Mbeki in
the way many did Mandela, and such love as there was dwindled as his
tenure progressed.
It was precisely Mbeki’s race obsessions that won him his other,
much more affectionate constituency: racially-nationalistic middle-
class blacks. President Mbeki understood his mission as one of
accelerated transformation, by which he and his supporters meant the
redress of racial inequality. Mbeki gathered around himself Black
Consciousness and Africanist ideologues, most notably his legal
adviser, Mojanku Gumbi, and semi-official hagiographer Ronald
Suresh Roberts. The Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo)’s
president sat in his Cabinet as science and technology minister. Black
professionals organised in bodies like the Black Management Forum
and Black Lawyers’ Association joined him in pushing for black
economic empowerment (BEE) and affirmative action. For sure, a
handful of nationalist radicals (like Andile Mngxitama) dismissed
Mbeki for doing too little to dislodge white privilege and economic
power; in doing this they held the torch for the leftist Black
Consciousness thinking that Azapo and the Pan Africanist Congress
largely abandoned. One now-notorious Africanist faction, Julius
Malema’s ANC Youth League (ANCYL), defected to Zuma. Their
move to Zuma requires fuller explanation (more about it below). But
Africanism, though hardly a dissident position in Zuma’s ANC, no

20
longer has its driver at the top. Many key black-nationalist figures saw
their careers eclipsed with that of Mbeki.
Mbeki’s most persistent ideological critics came from the Left, both
inside the ruling Tripartite Alliance – within which the SACP and the
Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) came to feel
increasingly marginalised – and from the civil-society and far left beyond.
All these critics held Mbeki responsible for what they perceived, with
some justification, to be a decisive shift to the right on economic policy
in 1996. The Left coupled the critique of Mbeki-ite neo-liberalism with
the charge that Mbeki imposed this policy change by fiat. Opposition to
neo-liberalism spawned a whole array of leftist social movement
organisations from the end of the 1990s, one that dovetailed with the
international anti-capitalist or ‘anti-globalisation’ movement. The most
successful of the left-activist social movement organisations, the Treat-
ment Action Campaign, had, of course, its own preoccupation: Mbeki’s
denial of life-saving treatment to millions of HIV/AIDS sufferers.
There also crystallised a strand of robust liberal criticism of Mbeki
and his government. The white-led Democratic Alliance (DA) formed
one centre for this critique; media commentators, many of them black,
the other. These institutions and actors formed a kind of liberal ‘public
opinion’ that was determined to subject the government to a level of
scrutiny – and, in the case of the DA, to a Westminster-style adversarial
opposition – that many in the ANC and government appeared to
consider culturally disrespectful and racially insensitive.
Representing a spectrum that stretched from rightwing liberal
organisations like the Helen Suzman Foundation through to liberal-
left NGOs like the Institute for Democracy in Africa (Idasa), the
bearers of liberal public opinion lambasted the Mbeki government for,
among other sins, its ‘reracialisation’ of South Africa, cronyism and
incipient authoritarianism. Though Mbeki more or less observed
liberal-democratic constitutional ground rules, he came, for many of
MBEKI AND AFTER

21
them, to personify the ANC’s ‘awkward embrace’5 of liberalism. Then

again, the socially conservative and populist Zuma personifies it more
unambiguously – which is why liberals did not join the Tripartite
Alliance Left in welcoming Zuma as Mbeki’s successor. (Many in the
independent Left were sceptical about Zuma too, it should be added.)
Can one divine from these distinctive lines of critique a unified
theory of Mbeki’s rule? It is notable that there was a convergence
between liberal and leftist critics on at least two points: that Mbeki
practised a democracy-threatening style of government and that his
politics of delivery did too little to help ordinary citizens. They also
agreed in their criticism of Mbeki’s policies on AIDS and Zimbabwe.
This convergence may have fuelled Mbeki’s perception of an unholy
alliance against him, stretching from white liberals to black trade
unionists – the sort of alliance that, Mbeki may have noticed,
challenged Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The convergence also helps to
explain why Mbeki was so isolated in the end, especially when Left
and liberal criticism was echoed from within the ANC by a coalition
of KwaZulu-Natal ethnoregionalists, Youth Leaguers and a parade of
‘walking wounded’ – those who had been summarily shunted aside by
the president. The fact that diverse factions concurred in key criticisms
of Mbeki does not itself validate their complaints; each had its own
axe to grind. The fact that Mbeki left quite so many feeling shut out
nevertheless seems telling, at least about Mbeki’s high-handedness.6
THE MBEKI RECORD: A critical overview
The legacy of leaders lies not only in the quality of their innovation but
also in the quality of their custodianship. Mbeki was custodian of at
least two widely valued legacies: that of the Freedom Charter of 1955,
with its ringing commitment to non-racial and multiracial unity, popular
democracy and mass upliftment; and the 1996 Constitution, announcing

22
the new country’s fealty to an extended array of rights. These included

‘blue rights’ (equality before the law, freedoms of expression and
association, political pluralism, lifestyle freedom, government by
consent), ‘red rights’ (to housing, education, health, substantive equality
and participatory democracy) and what might be termed rainbow rights
(to group recognition and equality). What sort of a custodian of these
legacies was Mbeki? I assess this briefly under three headings:
democracy, nation building and socio-economic advance of the poor.
Curiously enough, considering Mbeki’s authoritarian instincts and
actions, he left the democratic legacy relatively intact. The ‘new’ South
Africa started its life as a liberal democracy based on multiparty
competition, free elections, political pluralism and an autonomous civil
society; and it is a polity and society of this sort that Mbeki handed
on. Many organisations outside the state felt threatened by Mbeki’s
verbal attacks, but they never experienced outright repression.
Even so, Mbeki was no friend of democratic pluralism. His authori-
tarianism was felt most directly within the ANC and the Tripartite
Alliance. This mattered in a country where the ruling party swallows
up so much political space. Thus the ruling party controlled both the
National Assembly and the executive it was supposed to oversee,
enabling Mbeki effectively to neuter Parliament (Gumede 2005: 140-1).
The ANC national leadership exploited its electoral dominance
nationally, in the provinces and locally to exert a centralised control
of all levels of the state through its top-down deployment strategy. This
was part of a longer-term programme, evidence suggests, for exercising
comprehensive hegemony over the state and society (Chipkin 2008:
134; Johnson 2009: 305-318). It also placed enormous patronage in
Mbeki’s hands. Constitutionally-prescribed ‘cooperative governance’
between provincial and central government, legislative provision for
‘floor crossing’ by parliamentarians (now abolished) and an electoral
system based on competition between closed party lists played into the
MBEKI AND AFTER

23
hands of ANC political centralisers. As the ANC absorbed the state,

the state was, in turn, drawn into ruling party squabbles and plots. As
Calland and Oxtoby show, police, intelligence and legal agencies
became aligned with particular ANC factions, engaging in selective
prosecutions, surveillance, leaks and forgery to damage members of
rival factions. The single most frightening episode in the short history
of post-1994 South African democracy occurred when, in 2001, Mbeki
falsely claimed, on the basis of specious intelligence, that there was a
plot by a range of prominent ANC figures to overthrow his govern-
ment. Mbeki was forced to back off, as he was on other occasions. If
Mbeki did not lethally damage South African democracy, there is little
doubt that his leadership endangered it and that it bequeathed
democracy-endangering precedents to succeeding governments.
Did the Mbeki-era state respect citizens’ political civil rights?
Political violence fell away dramatically after the 1994 elections, but
remains a feature of local-level politics, as do occasional assassinations
and attempted assassinations, notably of corruption whistleblowers
(Mpumalanga is an example). As Duncan valuably documents, the
state’s tolerance of mass protest has proven thin; how much Mbeki
had personally to do with this intolerance is unclear, but ANC-
controlled or ANC-chosen municipal and police officials are certainly
culpable, and they operate in a climate Mbeki fostered. Hundreds of
criminal suspects and prisoners die every year at the hands of the
police, who also harass undocumented immigrants and extort bribes
from the general public.
State violence reacts to, feeds off and (if Duncan is right) sometimes
fuels the violence of society itself, the latter manifested in a murder rate
about ten times higher than that of the United States, killing of strike-
breakers, service-delivery riots, xenophobic pogroms, even lethal driving.
The democratic limitations of the state are thus matched by those of an
uncivil society. If I have a quibble with Duncan it is that she does not

24
acknowledge the incivility of the latter, the nature and extent of which
has never been fully explained and which, too, violates human rights.
Nation-building arguably suffered more immediate injury under
Mbeki than did democracy. Much, of course, turns on how nation-buil-
ding is understood (leave aside whether it is a good idea in a globalised
world and a xenophobic country). Is it about forging a colour-blind polity
and society? A multicultural one, celebrating unity in diversity? Or is it
about cementing national unity around a majoritarian culture?
Mbeki probably understood himself to be forging a single nation
anchored in an African identity. The signifier ‘African’ is, itself, ambi-
valent. In his famous ‘I am an African’ speech, celebrated in this collection
by Calland and Oxtoby, Mbeki embraced a racially syncretic version of
its meaning; but even in that rendition the term African was counterposed
to European and Western. Other Africanists, like Malegapuru Makgoba
and Malema (and Peter Mokaba in the 1990s), vested African with a
more explicitly racial meaning, taking it to refer either to a racially
defined people or to their ways. At least in this racialised variant nation-
building depends less on whites accepting a non-racial civic-national
identity, or celebrating their European heritage as part of a multicultural
mix, than on their coming to terms with the fact that this is a black-
African continent – and that black Africans are now in charge. Whites,
in this version, can conceivably become African themselves, but only
by embracing black-African culture.
Coloureds and Indians find themselves in a still more complicated
place in the nation-building project. They are black according to a
convention in anti-apartheid politics going back to the 1970s and
according to employment equity and BEE legislation, but for many
nativists it is Africanness that counts and African means specifically
Bantu-speaking African. In the racial-Africanist scheme these mino-
rities, just like whites, are called upon to embrace the political and
cultural ascendancy of Africans defined in this narrower way.
MBEKI AND AFTER

25
But however the nation is conceived – whether as non-racial,

multicultural or African – one crucial measure of the success of nation-
building must be its capacity to bring racial minorities into a shared
sense of nationhood. If that is the operative criterion Mbeki must be
judged to have been much less successful than his predecessor.
Mandela’s combination of non-racialism and ‘rainbow’ multicultural-
ism made way, under Mbeki, for an assertive black, sometimes African
racial nationalism that alienated not only whites but also many
coloureds and Indians. The new ruling elite’s constant berating of
sporting codes and businesses for being insufficiently ‘transformed’;
the insistence on race-based recruitment, promotion and procurement;
rows over name changes and the Afrikaans language, all of these
helped to maintain race relations in a permanent state of bickering.
Whether an assertive racial nationalism was anyway justified – say, in
the name of equality – constitutes a separate matter for debate, but the
egalitarian case for it seems hardly clear cut given that BEE and even
affirmative action have benefited only a small minority of blacks. Non-
racial socialists and social democrats persist in their preference for
class-based redistribution.
If McKaiser is right, Mbeki-ite nation-building need not have turned
out the way it did. He claims to have identified an earlier Mbeki – by
which he means an earlier post-1994 Mbeki – who skilfully synthesised
a necessary politics of racial redress with an equally necessary project
of cross-racial nation-building. McKaiser’s early Mbeki thus performed
the trick that Mandela did not. More tragic is it, therefore, McKaiser
argues, that the ‘later’ Mbeki threw away this advantage in the pursuit
of an increasingly obsessive racial essentialism. It’s an interesting idea,
though one whose verification will require still closer textual parsing
of the former president’s speeches and online output.
A pessimist might suspect that racial tension is inherent in the South
African condition, whether Mbeki is in charge or not (and irrespective

26
of which Mbeki is in charge). The post-liberation presence of a large

white population, disproportionately affluent and skilled, may serve as
a permanent source of irritation to an aspirant black African middle
class competing for the same business and professional places. The
black working class and poor do not compete with whites in the same
way (white-collar workers apart) and, some survey evidence suggests,
are accordingly less committed to affirmative action (Johnson 2009:
114-16). They are more likely to compete amongst each other – for
example, Africans with coloureds for houses and jobs in the Western
Cape. And they compete collectively, primarily over work and trading
opportunities, with the migrants who have entered the country in
considerable numbers from elsewhere in Africa since about 1990. What
the black poor want, empirical and anecdotal evidence implies (HSRC
2008; Mkhwanazi 2008), is affirmative action, not for blacks but for
South Africans. One might be tempted to say that they are thereby
engaging in a form of inclusive South African nation-building, one that,
however, demonstrates the other – darker – side of national unity and
identity; one would be tempted to say this, were it not for the fact that
the xenophobia seems to construct some black South Africans (Xhosa,
Sotho-Tswana, and especially Zulu) as more authentically national than
others (Venda, Pedi, Shangaan, Swazi). While xenophobic attitudes
straddle racial and class lines, its violent expression in shack settlements
and around hostels caught many in the black elite off guard, and
occasioned one of the starkest episodes of Mbeki denialism.
Finally (and not unrelated), there is the question of Mbeki’s success
or otherwise in transforming the life-circumstances of the poor. Though
no socialist, Mbeki was committed to inter-racial redress and to lifting
the poorest South Africans out of poverty. ANC rule has certainly
contributed in practice to interracial redress, evident in the burgeoning
black middle class. Its record in terms of absolute and relative poverty
is contested amongst academics. The balance of evidence suggests a
MBEKI AND AFTER

27
persistence of poverty and inequality in the second half of the 1990s,

with improved access to services for the poorest offset by rising
unemployment (see, e.g., Seekings & Nattrass 2006: 300-375). From
the early 2000s the spreading net of social grants and, later, an
economic boom began to ameliorate absolute income poverty and,
perhaps, also inequality (see, e.g., Everatt 2009). But at the end of the
Mbeki era South Africa remained one of the most unequal countries in
the world; one embarrassed by world-beating unemployment, declining
life expectancy and rising infant mortality. The ANC in power
undoubtedly enhanced the access of the poor to subsidised housing,
electricity for lighting, potable water, clinics and grants, but it could
also be punitive to the poor, as witness the willingness of ANC-run local
authorities to cut off urban householders’ access to water and electricity
for non-payment. Many of the social services provided for the poor
suffered from low-quality output, shoddy maintenance and fraud.
The amelioration of poverty and inequality is not, to be fair, straight-
forwardly in the gift of governments of the day. The ANC in power had
to act to ameliorate poverty and unequal life-chances in the context of
inherited economic constraints and the external shock of the HIV
pandemic. In the case of HIV the Mbeki government made matters
worse for itself: the withholding of ARVs aggravated unnecessarily the
toll of AIDS on mortality, productivity and household income.
There was never an ‘ARV’ for managing the impact of inherited
economic weaknesses. South Africa’s middle-income economy may look
rich in African terms, but it has never regained the high growth path it
was on between the mid-1930s and the mid-1970s. It has consequently
fallen behind many comparable or even initially poorer economies.
However ‘competent’ a manager in orthodox macro-economic terms,
the ANC in power has yet to surmount inherited economic challenges.
These are various. Economic growth bumps against a balance of pay-
ments constraint, the net result of dependence on imported capital

28
goods, the middle class’s debt-fuelled appetite for imported luxuries and
an internationally uncompetitive manufacturing sector. The economy
relies on primary product exports to earn foreign exchange and on
foreign investment to offset low domestic savings – dependencies that
leave it vulnerable to declining commodity prices, flights of ‘hot’ money
and currency fluctuation. Despite a long-accumulating surplus of
unskilled labour, there is a bias towards capital intensity in production
that is a legacy of apartheid-induced urban labour shortages, the
dominance of large companies and, from the 1980s, relatively high
formal sector wages. The apartheid era also bequeathed a legacy of
political and industrial unrest as well as a painfully narrow skills base.
In its neo-liberal phase (1996-c2000) the ANC government gambled
on being able to lift South Africa onto a decisively higher growth path
by limiting government spending, privatising or outsourcing state
services, withdrawing agricultural subsidies, stabilising the currency
through high interest rates and freeing up the movement of goods and
capital across South African borders. The hope was that the inevitable
export of capital and the competitive shock to textile, auto and farm
workers would be more than offset by burgeoning industrial exports
and inward investment.
The gamble largely failed. Many workers lost their jobs in manu-
facturing, mining and farming. Successful deficit containment yielded a
downside in new constraints on energy supply and deteriorating
infrastructure. Secondary-industrial export opportunities were con-
stricted by South Africa’s disadvantageous geographical location,
persistent local skill shortages (notwithstanding heavy investment in
public education), relatively high manufacturing wages and an often too
strong currency. With alternative ‘emerging market’ attractions in
Eastern Europe and China, and deterred by strong unions, political
uncertainty and crime in South Africa, foreign direct investment failed
to pour in as predicted. Instead, South Africa experienced premature
MBEKI AND AFTER

29
deindustrialisation. Per capita growth remained mediocre. Real gross

domestic product per head would only catch up with the 1981 level in
2006 (Johnson 2009: 581).
In the early to mid-2000s the ANC government changed tack, at
least to a degree. Out went the idea (never vigorously pursued) of large-
scale privatisation; in came a commitment to strategically deploying
state-owned enterprises. Infrastructure investment was earmarked for
acceleration. The Reserve Bank pursued a less punishing interest rate
regime. The social grant net was extended to pick up the pieces left by
job losses, a new public works programme initiated, the local cost-
recovery regime relaxed. An economic boom ensured that the Mbeki
government, in its final years, basked in 4-5% annual growth rates.
These policies and developments enabled welfare gains, but have yet
to provide the needed fix for the country’s structural economic
problems. The boom itself was propelled less by structural shifts in
economic performance and potential than by debt-based consumption,
speculation and rising global commodity prices. And it failed to make
a decisive dent in unemployment.
While the new strategy depends on an active state, South Africa’s
government and public administration remain hobbled by ‘capacity’
problems at national, provincial and local levels. The story of how this
came to be so is now reasonably clear (see, e.g., Picard 2005; Southall
2007; Chipkin 2008; Gumede 2009: 55-62; Johnson 2009: 70-1, 102-
114, 172-75, 446-506; Ngoma 2009). Rushed Africanisation post-1994
conspired with a ‘rightsizing’ of the public sector to bleed the state of
skills and experience. Departments poached scarce skilled black personnel
from each other, causing high turnover, or left jobs vacant for want of
suitable black candidates. The state attempted to fill its skills gap by
purchasing – at elevated cost – the services of white private consultants.
Meanwhile, an upwardly mobilising managerial elite used the state to
enrich itself via nepotism, exorbitant salaries and perks, tenders for

30
cronies and bribe-taking. Well-organised public sector workers blocked

efforts to improve service quality, notably in education. The merger of
apartheid-era racially segregated bureaucracies imported ethnic, racial
and geographical divisions into new unitary administrations and allowed
the corruption and incompetence of former Bantustan administrations
to colonise new provincial governments. Implementation of New Public
Management, designed to create a strategic, pro-active and consumer-
responsive managerial class, multiplied the managerial layer while
making unrealistic demands upon inexperienced personnel. The result
was an unravelling state rather than one fit for developmental purpose.
Another requirement of a developmental state under capitalist
conditions, cooperative relations between capital, labour and the state,
remained elusive. Unions and the left complained about the Treasury’s
budget surpluses, the Reserve Bank’s inflation targeting and a surge of
Chinese imports, evidence, to them, of ongoing neo-liberalism at policy
level. The white-dominated business class, though generally supportive
of the state’s fiscal and monetary management, continued to complain
about BEE and labour regulations and increasingly despaired of electricity
supply. Neither established white capital nor new black capital showed
much inclination to play the role of a ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’ committed
to socially inclusive domestic growth. The Mbeki government, for its
part, continued to approach white capital with an unstable mixture of
pragmatic encouragement and race-laced antagonism, echoing the
unsettled mindset of a black business elite that saw in white-dominated
corporations both a competitor and a source of economic rent.
MBEKI’S LEGACY, OR THE ANC’S?
How much of this record is Mbeki’s, how much the ANC’s? We are
back, here, to matters of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. There can be little
doubt that Mbeki imbibed much of what other ANC cadres did, most
MBEKI AND AFTER

31
of it already alluded to: Marxism-Leninist class analysis, organisational

style and rhetoric, conveyed by energetic Communist Party comrades
and Soviet sponsors; the understanding of South Africa as undergoing,
with the fall of apartheid, a national democratic revolution; the special
commitment to black, especially African liberation; and the view of the
ANC as the sole authentic liberation force. The ANC stressed discipline
and unity, and it constituted Mbeki’s only family. Was not everything
Mbeki did simply an effusion of the ANC’s collective mind and body?
There are some grounds for this notion, but it is necessary to
recognise, too, that the ANC embodied diverse trends and possibilities.
Mandela, like Mbeki, was no instinctive democrat. He valued unity of
purpose above pluralism, and acted unilaterally at crucial moments.
At the same time, though, Mandela crystallised the ANC’s will to
nation-building and non-racial inclusiveness. He was marked by a
humbleness that allowed him to depart from power after a single term,
an implicit rebuke to African ‘big men’ who cling to office at all costs.
In Mbeki different ANC traditions surfaced, including that of sectarian
Africanism. In governing he domesticated the elitism and centralism
endemic to exile politics, displacing the more heterogeneous and
community-anchored politics of the ANC’s 1980s internal counterpart,
the United Democratic Front. When he tried to extend his de facto
power beyond his second presidential term he was acting in defiance
of the wishes of the majority in his party. Mbeki thus crystallised quite
particular ways of ‘being ANC’.
Secondly, Mbeki enjoyed, for a while, an almost unquestioned
authority in his party that enabled him not simply to reflect its collective
ways but to shape and reshape them in turn. Mbeki the internet-trawling
intellectual forged distinctive (for the ANC at least) ideas of his own, and
made them his party’s. His views on AIDS, and perhaps Mugabe, fall
into this category. There was nothing inevitable about the ANC’s brief
career in AIDS dissidence, but few in the party were willing to challenge

32
it during the peak of Mbeki’s authority between the late 1990s and the
early 2000s (Gumede 2005: 167-8, Johnson 2009: 202-3).7
Mandela, despite his loyalty to dictators who previously supported
and now probably funded the ANC, liked to bask in the approval of the
world’s human rights ‘community’ (if we can call it that). Mbeki much
preferred African and global-south validation, as he first showed in
shaping South Africa’s (pusillanimous) response to Nigerian strongman
Sani Abacha (Gumede 2005: 178-9; Gevisser 2007: 703-706; Johnson
2009: 222-8). Again, there was nothing inevitable about the ANC
choosing this course rather than building on its potential role as a
continental and global moral leader that Mandela, with Archbishop
Desmond Tutu at his elbow, demonstrated in the euphoric infancy of
the ‘rainbow nation’. The ANC had always played to different audiences
and, with the Cold War over, it could have played quite comfortably to
the cross-ideological (but primarily left-liberal) global audience for a
politics of democracy, human rights and social justice. Guided by Mbeki
it chose not to and, indeed, chose a new kind of pariah-hood.
Still, Gevisser, in his chapter, is surely right to cast a sceptical eye upon
Mbeki’s current universal bogeyman role. Contrary to a widespread
myth there was no democratic, debate-loving ANC that Mbeki wrecked.
The ANC in exile was a hierarchical, secretive organisation, largely
controlled by a Communist Party elite. Dissidents and suspected spies
in its ranks faced torture or assassination. The much-romanticised UDF
harboured intolerant sectarians and revolutionary enforcers who were
implicated in sometimes brutal popular violence (see, e.g., Bozzoli 2004;
Jeffery 2009). Mbeki’s governance included nothing comparably violent.
Nor is there evidence that his departure has heralded a renewed
commitment to democratic ways, despite celebration by some of a
supposed Polokwane opening. While Mbeki may have brought with him
a particular brand of imperial presidentialism he was, on the democracy
issue, no wild outlier in ANC history.
MBEKI AND AFTER

33
Fairness demands that both Mbeki and the ANC be given some credit
for South Africa’s broadly democratic trajectory since 1994. The man
and the party both proved ideologically adaptive enough to sign up to
constitutional liberal democracy. The ANC’s electoral dominance has
enabled it to serve as a source of stability, just as does its cross-ethnic
appeal. We cannot be sure that the ANC’s break-up into politically
warring factions will be good for democratic peace. It could stir ethnic
and ideological passions that find expression in violence. Its electoral
successors, should there one day be some, may see their own time in
office simply as their turn to ‘eat’, in the established sub-Saharan pattern.
Still, we should not mistake the ANC for an instinctively democratic
force, or fail to note the paradoxical nature of the argument that one
party ought to remain forever in office in order to preserve democracy.
Prudential arguments for the ANC’s ascendancy are plausible only
because the democratic institutions of South Africa are unproven. Nor
should we avert our eyes from the costs of the ANC’s 15 years of rule.
Those were arguably made greater than they need have been by the
way Mbeki personally steered the ruling party.
MBEKI IN THE POST-MBEKI IMAGINATION
How, in 2010, does Thabo Mbeki figure in the South African collective
mind? The corporeal person is largely invisible, despite the odd
appearance in, for example, negotiations over the future of Sudan.
There is evidence in his interview with the journal Thinker (founded
by former Mbeki sidekick Essop Pahad) that he is still quietly awaiting
his vindication, notably on HIV/AIDS.
ANC members aggrieved at Mbeki’s treatment during and after the
Polokwane Conference broke away to form the Congress of the People
(Cope), which won a respectable 7% of the vote in the 2009 general
elections but is now self-destructing. The extent of the former president’s

34
hand in the founding of Cope is unclear, but it would be straining

things to say that the party is carrying Mbeki’s torch – partly because,
unlike Mbeki himself, Cope appears to be the genuinely post-
ideological article, uninterested in Mbeki’s race politics or Marxist-
Leninist analytic frame. There are Cope members who loudly celebrate
Mbeki, but their affinity with him seems, on the face of it, personal or
ethnoregional rather than ideological.
Mbeki torchbearers are certainly scarce inside the ANC. Factional
conflicts underway in the party are pitting against each other not Zuma
and Mbeki supporters (many of the latter have anyway been purged,
left voluntarily or joined the Polokwane victors) but different elements
of the Zuma coalition. Ironically, the contender in these battles that
seems most Mbeki-ite is the ANC Youth League, an organisation that
played a significant role in Mbeki’s downfall. For sure, the ANCYL is
thoroughly unlike Mbeki in its predilection for policy adventurism and
rabble-rousing. But it does seem to share, albeit to propagate in more
straightforwardly Africanist form, his racial nationalism. It may be no
coincidence that Malema has come out strongly against the
prosecution of Mbeki for his policy on HIV/AIDS, and generally
against the prosecution of African leaders for gross human rights
violations – a very Mbeki-ite position. Unsurprisingly, the ANCYL is
also more pro-Mugabe than the Zuma-supporting left.
We can summarise Mbeki’s place in the current South African
imagination – and in current South African politics – in terms of four
processes: erasure, diversion, inversion and continuity. Mbeki has been
erased insofar as he talks little and is remarkably little talked about.
Drained of power and direct influence, he has been partly expunged
from the ANC’s own account of its recent history.8
Mbeki also serves as a diversion: as the scapegoat depicted in
Gevisser’s chapter. Anything wrong in the current state of South Africa
can be attributed by ANC leaders to Mbeki’s failings. Mbeki is (as
MBEKI AND AFTER

35
Gevisser puts it) the ‘lightning rod’ of the bad past, freeing the ANC
to start afresh.
Third, and again related, Mbeki appears now, as it were, in the
negative: in style at least, the new government is setting out to be
everything that Mbeki was not, including being honest about South
Africa’s problems, accounting for itself to the ANC leadership and
seeking to unite South Africans across racial and ideological lines. This
is Mbeki as the inverse of the present.
Finally, and in partial contradiction of the above, there is continuity
with the Mbeki era: continuity not only on the ground, as measurable
in the absence of radical policy breaks, but continuity as a theme in
public discourse. Racial minorities and businesspeople needed to be
reassured that nothing fundamental was going to change in economic
policy with the arrival of the populist, left-backed Zuma. In the
discourse of reassurance offered them, Mbeki-era economic prag-
matism is still with us, signalled by the retention of Trevor Manuel in
the economic policy team and by the continuation of the Reserve
Bank’s inflation-targeting mandate. Mbeki is, thus, many things at
once, and perhaps different things to different audiences. No longer
an active agent, he now serves whatever role the new leadership
chooses for him to play.
AFTER MBEKI
The outlines of the post-Mbeki era are still forming. Prior to the 2009
elections many middle-class South Africans assumed that Zuma’s
ascendancy would trigger a descent into populism, a rollback of
democratic rights, and runaway corruption. From his inauguration
onwards Zuma surprised many with an almost statesmanlike
inclusiveness, which, however, segued into a seeming reluctance to
demonstrate clear leadership in a country confronting desperate

36
challenges. More recently the coalition that bore Zuma to office has
begun to tear itself apart in public, leaving in shreds the ANC’s
legendary discipline. So, what is to be the hallmark of the Zuma era?
Collective leadership under a benign figurehead? Mob rule? Essential
continuity with Mbeki, for good and ill? A leftward thrust? All this
remains to be seen.
Zuma-ism represented a phenomenon that Mbeki despised:
populism. The movement propelling the ‘Zunami’ fostered a cult of
leadership, lacked ideological coherence and appeared sometimes to
disregard constitutional order. It mobilisied an inchoate coalition of
the disenchanted, including the left, rural traditionalists and the urban
poor, against the country’s urban-based political, intellectual and
cultural elites. Its demagogic and expressive political style contrasted
with Mbeki’s urbane intellectualism and predilection for order and
control. Populist revolts against the ANC leadership have dotted ANC
history: most were led by Africanists, some by the left, some articulated
an ideologically indeterminate or issue-driven discontent. Mostly these
revolts were held off, including by previous ANC presidents Albert
Luthuli, Tambo, Mandela and Mbeki. In Zuma one such revolt, a
particularly ideologically capacious one, seemed to win out.
Having borne Zuma to power, is this populism now spent? There are
competing possibilities. Since the election the ANC leadership has
emphasised economic policy continuity, even while threatening crack-
downs on corruption, cronyism and incompetence. But economic policy
remains unresolved, delegated by Zuma to an ‘economic cluster’ whose
ideologically diverse members jostle for pre-eminence. Some in Zuma’s
coalition seek a break with capitalism; the majority in the executive
branch favours a socially responsive, developmental version of it.
Muddling through economically, as the country has done since the mid-
1970s, seems much more likely for now than either scenario. Meanwhile,
a dynamic of radicalisation has been introduced by the ANCYL, which
MBEKI AND AFTER

37
is competing with the SACP to prove its superior leftist credentials on

nationalisation. The prevailing atmosphere is thus one of uncertainty,
even as the global economic recession overwhelms Mbeki’s boom.
Mbeki-era macro-economic conservatism left the country to face
the recession with reserves for counter-cyclical fiscal expansion, but it
may also be partly responsible for the fact that the country has entered
recession with already brutal levels of unemployment and too little
electricity to climb out quickly. The recession is also dampening the
Left’s hopes for accelerated state spending on the poor, having
vaporised the budget surplus it had eyed for some time.
On the positive side, the state is now united in a clear-eyed
recognition that HIV/AIDS has reduced life expectancy way below
where it lay in 1994, and that the pandemic needs to be treated as an
urgent priority. Even, here, though, the president’s well-publicised
unprotected extra-marital sex rather blunts the message.
Difficult to establish, too, is the safety or otherwise of constitutional
democracy under Zuma, though clearly the threat level is now way up.
During Zuma’s long campaigns for the party and national presidencies,
his supporters threatened to ‘kill for Zuma’ and dismissed judges as
‘counter revolutionaries’ when they made decisions unfavourable to their
champion. Zuma filed suits against journalists and the cartoonist
Zapiro. The victors of Polokwane purged Mbeki-ites from leadership
positions in the ANC, SACP and COSATU.
Upon ascending to the presidency of the Republic Zuma assured all
that the Constitution was safe in his hands. He and his ministers
encouraged Parliament, the ruling party, even ordinary citizens to hold
them to account, and the party, if not Parliament (or, yet, the citizenry)
has done so. The ruling party’s affiliates and partners openly challenge
ANC leaders. The Youth League was, until recently, loudly threatening
with political extinction ANC elders who disagreed with it on policy
issues. Cosatu bemoans ruling-party corruption. The hands of Cosatu,

38
the South African National Civic Organisation and the SACP are
detectable in public sector strikes and local ‘service delivery protests’.
In these senses, the rebellious spirit of Polokwane – which some saw
as a heroic pushback against the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ that supposedly
governs large-scale organisations – has not subsided, even if it paused
for the 2010 soccer World Cup hosted by South Africa.
Yet those of a democratic or constitutionalist bent will find little that
is reassuring in the demagogic rhetoric and personal attacks exchanged
recently by competing factions of the Tripartite Alliance. These do not
constitute ‘democratic debate’. (It is thus difficult to know whether the
ANC’s official disciplining of Malema, an authoritarian demagogue given
to turning the police on his rivals, was good or bad news for democracy;
the danger lies in the precedent it sets for the disciplining of others who
speak out.) Meanwhile, Zuma has rewarded shady-seeming loyalists with
senior positions in the security apparatus and moved swiftly to place
supporters in the Judicial Service Commission and Constitutional Court.
The police, now remilitarising their system of ranks, are on order still
to ‘shoot to kill’ criminal suspects. Media freedom is under seriously
alarming assault, with plans afoot for protection-of-information legis-
lation and a statutory tribunal to curb newspaper reporting on
corruption and perhaps to limit oppositional journalism generally.
Meanwhile, liberal-left fears of regressive policies on gender and sexuality
have been revived by news of fresh Zuma sexual conquests outside an
already expanding polygamous marriage and by the appointment of a
confirmed homophobe as ambassador to Uganda, perhaps the world’s
most homophobic land.
Zuma is more friendly than Mbeki to racial minorities. He seems
to picture South Africans as a racially mixed family united under the
ANC, with himself as benign patriarch. He has made elaborate
gestures of reconciliation towards, in particular, white Afrikaners –
see, notably, his inclusion of the Vryheidsfront Plus in the Cabinet and
MBEKI AND AFTER

39
gestures of sympathy toward the new white poor. He smacked down

efforts by the ANCYL to stir up a so-called ‘debate’ on race, taking
the opportunity to declare his fealty to non-racialism. On the other
hand, the Africanist faction in the Zuma coalition is audible. Malema’s
racially polarising rhetoric has occluded Zuma’s friendlier gestures.
And while some whites doubtless appreciate Zuma’s racial
inclusiveness, many others fail to reciprocate his warmth, viewing him
as the incarnation of their stereotype of bad African leadership.
There is also the unsettling side of inclusiveness: the implicit threat
that those who insist on adversarial politics are rejecting the hand of
friendship, even undermining nation-building. This is roughly the spirit
in which opposition leader Helen Zille’s characteristically caustic
response to Zuma’s post-inauguration friendliness was greeted –
interestingly enough, by a wider section of the political and media
establishment than that encompassed by the ANC. There was, for a
while after Zuma’s inauguration, a positive will to national harmony
in which, for example, talking about the ‘cloud of corruption’ hanging
over Zuma’s head came to seem distasteful, even passé.
What fresh light does this still-clarifying picture of the early Zuma
era cast upon the now-buried Mbeki one? It reveals, by the speed of
their repudiation, the extent to which certain policies and styles of the
previous period, notably its politics of denialism, were products of
Mbeki personally. That capitalism and democracy outlived Mbeki
speaks at least in part to the fact that these were, by contrast, supported
by forces larger than the former president, including by global shifts in
power and ideological fashion that he was good at reading. Still, as the
current crackdown on the media suggests, democracy’s survival in
South Africa is not inevitable; the forces supporting it can be worn
down by an authoritarian and securely ensconced ruling alliance. If the
political elite does finally extinguish the democratic order, Mbeki’s
personal agency may still feature strongly in the history of its undoing.

40
Finally, the brief history of the Zuma era so far reminds us that the
ANC is larger than Mbeki. His departure has done nothing to arrest
the party’s authoritarian drives or ideological divisions. Far from having
the last word on the shape of post-1994 South Africa Mbeki manifestly
left unresolved fundamental questions about the type of society South
Africans wish ultimately to constitute. Will it be free-market, social-
democratic or Leninist-socialist? Non-racial, multicultural or racially
majoritarian? Western-oriented or authentically African? Democratic
or Putinesque? The battle to resolve these issues has been a signature
spectacle of the Zuma era thus far – with the president himself largely
(it seems) an onlooker.
MBEKI AND AFTER

Mbeki and After: Reflections On The Legacy of Thabo Mbeki

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MBEKI

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

Published edition copyright © Wits University Press 2010

First published 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

Edited by Pat Tucker

1 MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY: A critical introduction 3

2 MBEKI’S LEGACY: Some conceptual markers 41

3 WHY IS THABO MBEKI A ‘NITEMARE’? 51

THE MBEKI STYLE OF GOVERNANCE

4 MACHIAVELLI MEETS THE CONSTITUTION: 71

MBEKI AND SOCIETY

5 THABO MBEKI AND DISSENT 105

6 CIVIL SOCIETY AND UNCIVIL GOVERNMENT: 128

MBEKI AND RACE

7 SEEING OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US: 163

8 TOWARDS A COMMON NATIONAL IDENTITY: 187

9 THABO MBEKI’S LEGACY OF TRANSFORMATIONAL 209

10 THABO MBEKI AND THE GREAT FOREIGN POLICY RIDDLE 242

Daryl Glaser, University of the Witwatersrand

AASROC Asian-African Sub-Regional Conference

DRC Democratic Republic of Congo

NPA National Prosecuting Agency

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY:

Is there an Mbeki legacy? Looking back at Thabo Mbeki’s presidency

MBEKI AND AFTER

Nelson Mandela’s presidential tenure; according to some, he was ‘de

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

the ANC’s collective discipline and the lure of executive patronage.

MBEKI AND AFTER

the Department of Political Studies decided nevertheless to press ahead

MBEKI: The man, his politics, his world-view

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

MBEKI AND AFTER

Mbeki’s rise to the presidency also signalled the ascendancy of the

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

served an ideological world-view, one that influenced both his goals

MBEKI AND AFTER

economically. Certainly, Mbeki showed little interest in the statist

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

Africa remain disproportionately economically powerful, materially

MBEKI AND AFTER

race consciousness must be added his alliance with elements of a rising

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

and the idea of a neutral or non-partisan state, favouring, in its stead, a

MBEKI AND AFTER

systems proceed as though there is no alternative to liberal democracy

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

going to repeat the mistakes of Africa, mistakes that he perceived to

Conception of the relationship between knowledge and power

MBEKI AND AFTER

can be altered by assertion, or by damning those bearing bad news.

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

It is not clear why Mbeki adopted this way of thinking, but

NARRATIVES OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE

MBEKI AND AFTER

of a conciliatory veteran, economic pragmatist and political moderniser

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY

MBEKI AND AFTER

them, to personify the ANC’s ‘awkward embrace’5 of liberalism. Then

THE MBEKI RECORD: A critical overview

MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY