At the official launch of his autobiography in Johannesburg in December 1994, seven months after his inauguration as president, Nelson Mandela joked, in his customary self-deprecating manner, that such were the rigours of office that he sometimes longed for the relative calm of prison. The magnitude of the task of transforming South Africa into a fully fledged democracy after centuries of white-minority rule was indeed daunting. The entire system that Mandela inherited had been designed largely to serve white interests. Other than parliament, all the main institutions – the civil service, the security forces, the business community, the universities, the media, the stock exchange, the banks and agriculture – were dominated by whites. As Mandela publicly acknowledged, South Africa’s fortunes still depended heavily on the skills, expertise and capital of the white community. Yet while recognising the need to reassure whites about their future under black rule, he also faced an avalanche of black expectations. In the aftermath of his election victory, the black electorate was impatient for change. Mandela’s pledges during the election campaign – of more jobs, more housing, better education and health services – still reverberated across the country. All at once, there were so many demands, so many priorities. At the age of seventy-five, after fifty years as a political activist in the titanic struggle to defeat apartheid, Mandela confronted yet another challenge, as formidable as anything that had come before. ‘I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb,’ he concluded in his autobiography.
What was required was not just a new administration capable of undertaking major programmes of economic and social development but a whole new structure of provincial and local government, involving the incorporation of former homeland territories into nine new provinces and the redesign of some 800 segregated local authorities into 300 multiracial bodies. The police service, once at the forefront of enforcing apartheid laws, required a complete overhaul to make it more acceptable to local communities. The new national defence force required reorganisation to absorb units from the ANC’s guerrilla army and former homeland armies. The entire education system, where each race group had previously been segregated, required restructuring. While white public education offered high standards, black public education had suffered from decades of deprivation: many buildings were derelict, one-third had no electricity, a quarter had no water, a half had no sanitation, one-third of teachers were unqualified and many more were under-qualified.
The legacy of apartheid included a massive disparity in wealth. The average white income was eight times greater than that of the average black. Whites, comprising 13 per cent of the population, earned 61 per cent of total income. Although the black middle class was growing apace, its share of total income was still comparatively small. Barely 2 per cent of all private-sector assets were black-owned. According to calculations published in the United Nations Human Development Report for 1994, if white South Africa was treated as a separate country, its standard of living would rank twenty-fourth in the world, just below Spain’s; black South Africa on the same basis would rank one hundred and twenty-third, below Lesotho and Vietnam. Overall, in terms of human development, South Africa ranked only ninety-third in the world. Out of a population of 40 million, 22 million lacked adequate sanitation, including 7.5 million in urban areas; 12 million lacked clean water supply; 23 million had no access to electricity; and some 2 million children were without schools. Almost half of all households in South Africa lived below the poverty line; a quarter lived on an income of less than half of the poverty-line income; some 8 million were estimated to be ‘completely destitute’. One-third of the population was illiterate.
The assets that South Africa possessed to help it overcome this legacy were considerable. They included one of the world’s richest stores of minerals, with 44 per cent of world diamond reserves, 82 per cent of manganese reserves and 64 per cent of platinum-group metal reserves. It was the world’s largest producer of gold, mining one-third of world production. Its financial, banking and legal systems were well established and efficient; the Johannesburg stock exchange was the tenth largest in the world. Its manufacturing base, though over-protected and uncompetitive by world standards, was capable of major expansion. The infrastructure of roads, railways, ports and airports was well developed. Telephone and electricity services were reliable. Universities and technical colleges turned out a ready supply of competent graduates. In statistical terms, South Africa, with a gross domestic product of $120 billion, ranked as one of the world’s twenty-five largest economies. In Africa, it stood out as a giant.
What Mandela discovered on taking office, however, was that South Africa’s economy was in dire straits. The ANC had expected to inherit an economic cornucopia; its ambitious development plans were based on that notion. But the coffers, in fact, were nearly empty. The previous government had run up a record budget deficit of 8.6 per cent of gross domestic product, and gross foreign exchange reserves were down to less than the equivalent of three weeks of imports. The government’s domestic debt, moreover, was huge. The cost of debt service together with current expenditure consumed 92 per cent of government revenue, leaving only 8 per cent for capital spending. ‘There was simply no money to do what we had planned,’ recalled one of Mandela’s key ministers, Mac Maharaj. ‘We had to dump our blueprints and start from the beginning.’
The unemployment figures on their own represented a sizeable crisis. Only about half of the economically active population had formal-sector jobs. Several million more earned a living in the informal sector – hawkers, small traders, domestics and backyard businesses. Even so, the official unemployment rate was calculated as 33 per cent. A high proportion of the estimated 5 million unemployed possessed no skills or training and had little prospect of ever finding a job. Of the 450,000 new entrants to the labour market in 1994, only 27,000 were expected to be able to find a job. On average, the formal sector of the economy could absorb no more than 6 per cent of new entrants to the labour market. When the new government advertised civil service vacancies for 11,000 managers, clerks and cleaners, more than 1.5 million people applied.
Economic growth in recent years had been dismal. In the longest recession in its recorded history, South Africa’s GDP fell by 0.5 per cent in 1990; by 0.4 per cent in 1991; and by 2.1 per cent in 1992, a drop caused mainly by drought disrupting agricultural production. Over the four-year period from 1990 to 1993, the aggregate fall in GDP amounted to 1.8 per cent. Formal employment between 1989 and 1993 fell by more than 350,000. Merely to absorb the annual number of new entrants into the labour market required an annual growth rate of 6 per cent. To make any inroads into the rate of unemployment required a growth rate of between 8 and 10 per cent.
Not only was the economic legacy none too healthy, but, as Mandela recognised, his ability to make progress on his development objectives depended heavily on attracting foreign capital. Even with the support of the private sector, local resources were not sufficient to raise the annual growth rate much above 3 per cent. Yet foreign investors were wary of the ANC’s long history of advocating nationalisation and state control of the economy and reluctant to commit themselves until they could see something of the new government’s track record. Mindful of the need to convince foreign and local investors about the government’s determination to pursue fiscal discipline and sound economic management, Mandela stuck to a cautious and conservative approach to economic policy. But the slow pace of change led to increasing restlessness. Labour unions, which had helped put the ANC in power, began to flex their muscles, wanting rewards for their endeavours. Within the ANC too, there was frustration at the compromises the government was required to make. ‘Are we in power or just in office?’ asked Tokyo Sexwale, premier of the Gauteng region, the country’s industrial heartland, in November 1994.
Mandela also had to contend with the legacy of protest politics from the apartheid era. The culture of protest ran deep. Township residents accustomed to years of boycotting rent and service-charge payments in protest against apartheid policies showed little inclination to start paying their dues even though a new government was in power. Outbreaks of lawlessness were commonplace. Students seized teaching staff as hostages, vandalised buildings and looted shops. Striking policemen set up roadblocks. Prison warders allowed dangerous prisoners to escape. Former ANC guerrillas in the defence force absconded without leave. Taxi drivers blockaded central Johannesburg. Squatters invaded vacant houses. Shop workers went on a looting rampage. Added to all this was an epidemic of violent crime.
The scale of disorder was serious enough to prompt Mandela to read the riot act. Opening the second session of parliament in February 1995, he launched into a tirade against workers and students who resorted to acts of anarchy and disruption to secure their demands. ‘Let it be clear to all that the battle against the forces of anarchy and chaos has been joined,’ he said. He was equally blunt about those who demanded immediate benefits from his government:
The government literally does not have the money to meet the demands that are being advanced. Mass action of any kind will not create resources that the government does not have. All of us must rid ourselves of the wrong notion that the government has a big bag full of money. The government does not have such riches. We must rid ourselves of the culture of entitlement which leads to the expectation that the government must promptly deliver whatever it is we demand.
It was a sober message to deliver after so much euphoria over the coming of majority rule. What Mandela was demanding was discipline and belt-tightening from a population which had been led to expect something different.
The lead that Mandela took in promoting national reconciliation proved far more rewarding. National reconciliation became his personal crusade. From the moment of his inauguration he strove to establish a new racial accord, constantly reassuring the white minority of their well-being under majority rule and stressing the importance of building a ‘rainbow nation’. Addressing a huge crowd on the lawns below Union Buildings in Pretoria on inauguration day, he urged a spirit of forgiveness. ‘Wat is verby is verby,’ he said in Afrikaans. ‘What is past is past.’
Towards his old political adversaries, he remained magnanimous. He welcomed F. W. de Klerk into his cabinet, praising him for his contribution to establishing democracy and commending him as ‘one of the greatest sons of Africa’. He was assiduous in cultivating right-wing Afrikaner politicians, determined to avert the risk of right-wing resistance. He ensured that statues, monuments and streets names commemorating events and heroes from Afrikaner history remained untouched. He regularly spoke in Afrikaans, describing it as ‘a language of hope and liberation’. When appealing to civil servants to support government reforms, he addressed them in Afrikaans. In changing the name of his official residence in Cape Town from Westbrook, he chose an Afrikaans word, Genadendal, meaning ‘Valley of Mercy’, the name of the first Christian mission in the Cape.
His gestures of goodwill were manifold. He organised what he called ‘a reconciliation lunch’, bringing together the wives and widows of former apartheid leaders and leading black activists. He made a special trip to visit the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, who was living in a small town on the banks of the Orange River which Afrikaner bittereinders had preserved as a whites-only colony. Even more remarkable was the lunch he arranged for Percy Yutar, the prosecutor in the Rivonia trial who had argued for Mandela to be given the death sentence and expressed regret when this did not happen.
The climax to Mandela’s efforts came when South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup tournament in 1995. Rugby was a sport embraced with almost religious fervour by Afrikaners, but regarded as a ‘Boer game’, a symbol of white supremacy, by much of the black population. White enthusiasm for the rugby festival was overwhelming but Mandela was determined to turn it into a national event. He arrived at the Springbok training ground near Cape Town, gave his personal blessing to the squad, all but one of them white, and urged blacks to rally behind them. ‘We have adopted these young men as our boys, as our own children, as our own stars. This country is fully behind them. I have never been so proud of our boys as I am now and I hope that that pride we all share.’
In the final match between South Africa and New Zealand, as the two teams took to the field, Mandela emerged on to the pitch wearing the green and gold number 6 jersey of the South African captain and a Springbok cap, sending the overwhelmingly white crowd into a frenzy of enthusiasm and excitement. When the Springboks went on to win the match, in one of the most intense afternoons of physical endeavour and emotion that any of those present were ever likely to witness, the whole of South Africa erupted in celebration, blacks as joyful as whites. It was a moment of national fusion that Mandela had done much to inspire.
There were critics within the black community who argued that Mandela devoted greater effort to reassuring whites than to addressing black grievances. But Mandela dismissed such criticism: ‘We had to allay the fears of whites to ensure the transition process took place smoothly. If we had not done so, the civil war that was threatening would have broken out.’ Reassuring whites, he said, involved no cost.
The honeymoon period came to an end over differences of how to deal with South Africa’s violent past. Mandela was determined that human rights violations during the apartheid era should be investigated by a truth commission, not for the purpose of exacting retribution but to provide some form of public accounting and to help purge the injustices of the past. Unless past crimes were addressed, he said, they would ‘live with us like a festering sore’. De Klerk, a deputy president in Mandela’s government of national unity, denounced the whole idea, arguing that a truth commission would result in a ‘witchhunt’ focusing upon past government abuses while ignoring ANC crimes. It was, he said, likely to ‘tear the stitches of wounds that are beginning to heal’.
In the national debate that followed, some argued, as the ANC had once done, in favour of Nuremberg-style trials, claiming that apartheid was ‘a form of genocide’ equivalent to Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, atrocities for which Nazi leaders were subsequently prosecuted. Some demanded reparations from the white community on the grounds that they were the main beneficiaries of the apartheid system. Others argued that the best way to improve the chances of peace and reconciliation would be to grant a general amnesty to all sides. A large proportion of the white community, like de Klerk, opposed the whole process, maintaining that the only result would be to open old wounds and revive old animosities still close to the surface. A common theme in the Afrikaans-language press was: ‘Atrocities were committed on both sides, so let us just forgive and forget.’
There were conflicting views about what the central purpose of a truth commission should be. Some argued that the overriding imperative was the need to achieve justice and to bring to account those guilty of gross human rights violations. Others maintained that truth was at least as important as justice and that knowledge of the truth alone would contribute significantly to the cause of peace and stability; avoiding trials would also reduce the risk of a backlash from security forces, still largely under the control of whites. Mandela himself once remarked privately that if he were to announce a series of criminal trials, he could well wake up the following morning to find his home ringed by tanks.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that emerged in 1995 was born inevitably of compromise. Its remit was limited to the investigation of gross violations of human rights – murder, abduction and the use of torture – in the thirty-four-year period from 1960, starting with the massacre at Sharpeville. Thus the wider injustices of the apartheid system – such as the forced removal of some 3 million people from their homes, the imprisonment of millions for pass-law offences and the widespread use of detention without trial – would not be addressed. Only the extremes of apartheid would be examined, not its normality.
The TRC was given powers of subpoena and of search and seizure and it was supported by its own investigative unit. It was required to pay as much attention to violations committed by liberation movements as by the security police. But it was not a judicial body or a court of law. It could not carry out prosecutions or hand out punishment. Its aim was not so much to reach a judgement about culpability as to establish a process of disclosure. In exchange for telling the truth, perpetrators who came forward were to be granted amnesty from prosecution on an individual basis provided the commission was satisfied that they had made full disclosure of their crimes and that their actions had been carried out with a political objective. If they failed to come forward, they would remain at risk of prosecution.
Few people at the time believed that the TRC would establish either truth or reconciliation let alone help solve murders and disappearances that had occurred as far back as ten or twenty years beforehand. The old security police network, the prime suspect in most cases, had long since covered its tracks and was determined to thwart any investigation. There was no shortage of victims or members of their families willing to testify to what they knew, but little solid evidence about the identity of the culprits or those who gave them their orders. TRC officials expected few perpetrators to take advantage of the offer of amnesty.
Against all odds, however, the commission eventually succeeded in breaking through the barriers of silence. In October 1996 five former members of a police death squad based in northern Transvaal, fearful of prosecution as investigators closed in, asked for amnesty for a tally of sixty murders. Their actions, they said, had all been carried out for political reasons, namely ‘to uphold the National Party government and apartheid, to fight communism and to resist liberation’. Members of other death squads followed suit. Stage by stage, the secret world of the security police was exposed, and many of the killers and torturers were forced out into the open.
What was even more unexpected was that once the security police network began to unravel, the TRC found it possible to probe higher and higher up the chain of command, reaching the highest levels of government. At the apex of the security establishment was the State Security Council, where senior generals and key politicians met regularly to decide what action to take to crush opposition both at home and abroad. It was here that P. W. Botha’s policy in the 1980s of ‘total strategy’ was fashioned. Summoned to appear before the commission, the generals and politicians of the apartheid era struggled to explain away documents obtained by TRC investigators authorising the ‘elimination’, ‘neutralisation’ and ‘removing from society’ of targets they selected. When Botha himself, a former chairman of the State Security Council for twelve years, was issued with a subpoena by the TRC, he adamantly refused to attend.
De Klerk made three appearances before the TRC. As the most prominent Afrikaner leader of the time, he was presented with an opportunity to shoulder responsibility for past crimes on behalf of his community. But he turned out to be a petty politician, concerned only with trying to absolve himself from personal blame. Although he offered a fulsome apology for all the hardship and suffering caused by apartheid, he rejected all notion of responsibility for security force abuses, blaming ‘rogue elements’ for taking ‘unauthorised action’ and ‘lower ranks’ for ‘misinterpreting’ government policy.
The ANC’s appearances before the commission were of even greater significance, for how it accounted for its own involvement in murder, bombing and torture, had an immediate bearing on its fitness for government. The ANC was called upon to answer for the activities not just of its combatants but also of supporters who had carried out ‘necklace’ murders and other human rights violations. It also had to account for its role in the internecine conflict with Inkatha, in which thousands had died.
The position the ANC adopted from the outset was that there was little for which it had to answer. In his first submission to the commission, Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s deputy, argued that the ANC had been engaged in a ‘just war’ against an evil system of government. It would be ‘morally wrong and legally incorrect’, he said, to equate resistance to apartheid with defence of it. The ANC had resorted to violence as a ‘last resort’, only after the apartheid regime had blocked all possibilities of non-violent resistance. It had set out to avoid civilian casualties, but the brutal activities of the security forces in the mid-1980s had inevitably led it to broaden its range of targets. Some actions might have occurred ‘outside the established norms’, but they had to be understood in the context of irregular warfare.
The ANC’s penchant for self-exoneration caused the TRC serious difficulty. When senior ANC officials declared that ANC members need not seek amnesty for bombings and killings on the grounds that their fight against apartheid had been part of a ‘just war’, the TRC chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, threatened to resign. ‘If parties are able to grant themselves amnesty, what is the point of having a truth commission?’ The legislation setting up the TRC was quite clear, he said. It made no provision for a moral distinction between gross violations of human rights. ‘A gross violation is a gross violation, whoever commits it and for whatever reason. There is thus legal equivalence between all perpetrators. Their political affiliation is irrelevant.’
In its second submission, the ANC was more forthcoming about details of its armed operations but remained ambivalent about issues like ‘necklace’ murders, by which at least 400 people had died. When it came to dealing with its internecine warfare with Inkatha, the ANC evaded virtually all responsibility. Mbeki delivered a long, rambling explanation notable for its misleading answers. Indeed, many of the answers Mbeki gave were as self-serving as those given by de Klerk.
The TRC’s report, completed in 1998, after nearly three years of investigation, delivered some damning verdicts. It concluded that it was Botha’s government in the late 1970s that had entered ‘the realm of criminal misconduct’. Whereas previous governments had ruled by repression, Botha’s government had adopted a policy of killing its opponents. It was also responsible for the widespread use of torture, abduction, arson and sabotage. Botha, said the report, by virtue of his position as head of state and chairman of the State Security Council, had ‘contributed to and facilitated a climate in which . . . gross violations of human rights could and did occur’.
The ‘realm of criminal misconduct’, the report continued, extended into de Klerk’s period in office. It criticised de Klerk for failing to tackle the activities of the ‘third force’ – the network of security force members and right-wing groups seeking to wreck any transition that would lead to an ANC government. It also accused him of failing to make a full disclosure to the commission of gross human rights violations committed by senior members of his government and senior police officers. ‘His failure to do so constitutes a material nondisclosure, thus rendering him an accessory to the commission of gross human rights violations.’
The TRC was no less forthright in dealing with the ANC. During its armed struggle, said the report, the ANC had engaged in bombing and land-mine campaigns resulting in civilian casualties. In fact, the TRC pointed out, its armed actions had ‘ended up killing fewer security force members than civilians’. While accepting that targeting civilians had not been ANC policy, the TRC concluded: ‘Whatever the justification given by the ANC for such acts . . . the people who were killed or injured by such explosions are all victims of gross violations of human rights perpetrated by the ANC.’ It also censured the ANC for regarding state informers and state witnesses as legitimate targets for assassination. Their killing, it said, constituted gross violations of human rights. Furthermore, the ANC was held ‘morally and politically accountable’ for creating a climate during the armed struggle that allowed its supporters to regard violence against opponents – urban councillors, rural headmen, members of Inkatha and others perceived to be collaborators of the system or enemies of the ANC – as a legitimate part of a ‘people’s war’. During the period from 1990 to 1994, it added, the ANC was responsible for the death and injury of hundreds of its opponents. It had also contributed to the spiral of violence by creating and arming ‘self-defence units’ that ‘took the law into their own hands’ and committed atrocities.
Two months before its report was due to be published in October 1998, the TRC, in accordance with its statutory obligations, sent summaries of its findings to some 200 individuals and organisations that it had named in connection with human rights abuses. Their reaction was uniformly hostile. De Klerk was livid that he had been named ‘an accessory to human rights violations’ and applied to the High Court for an interdict preventing publication of a thirty-line passage referring to him.
Far more of a shock was the ANC’s reaction. Outraged that it had been roundly condemned for war crimes, the ANC insisted on a meeting with the TRC, intending to get it to rewrite its findings. The TRC invited the ANC to make a written submission but refused a meeting. The ANC retaliated by accusing the TRC of ‘criminalising’ the anti-apartheid struggle. Its findings were ‘capricious and arbitrary’. The TRC had ‘grossly misdirected itself’.
In an astonishing lapse of judgement, Thabo Mbeki went to the High Court, just like de Klerk, to apply for an urgent interdict to block publication of the report. Unable to conceal his anger and frustration, Archbishop Tutu conducted a series of media interviews warning of the dangers of a new tyranny in South Africa. ‘We can’t assume that yesterday’s oppressed will not become tomorrow’s oppressors. We have seen it happen all over the world, and we shouldn’t be surprised if it happens here.’ He urged all South Africans to be on their guard against government abuse and corruption.
Though nothing came of Mbeki’s ill-fated attempt to muzzle the commission, it caused severe damage to the ANC’s reputation and serious misgivings about his leadership ability. When the TRC finally presented its five-volume report to Mandela in October 1998, it was a sombre occasion, overshadowed by the ANC’s wrecking manoeuvre. Mandela himself made clear his support for the TRC and its work. ‘We are confident that it has contributed to the work in progress of laying the foundation of the edifice of reconciliation.’ But there was a cacophony of contrary voices. Mbeki continued to insist that the TRC was ‘wrong and misguided’. De Klerk accused the TRC of seeking vengeance not reconciliation.
Obscured by the furore, the achievements of the TRC were considerable. It had established beyond all doubt that death squads had operated not as aberrations but as part and parcel of the system of government repression; that torture had been used systematically and in effect condoned as official practice; and that violence between rival black factions had been officially encouraged, supported and financed. It had established the chain of command leading directly to the highest levels of government. It had helped solve many of the murders and disappearances that for so long had troubled so many families. It had confronted the liberation movements with their own crimes of murder, torture and necklacing, refusing to judge these crimes any differently from government crimes. It had also provided a hearing for thousands of victims and their families, affording many people relief from their burden of suffering and grief for the first time. As Lukas Sikwepere, a victim blinded by police gunfire, summed up the experience: ‘I feel that what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn’t tell my story. But now it feels like I got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story.’
All this, however, had come at a high price: amnesty. Though the amnesty process had persuaded many perpetrators eventually to come forward, throwing light on past atrocities, the disturbing consequence was that guilty men who had been seen and heard to confess to appalling crimes then walked entirely free.
Moreover, there were few signs that the proceedings of the TRC had advanced the cause of reconciliation. The white community would have preferred to let the past slip by into amnesia. Few whites attended TRC hearings, watched them on television, or listened to the radio broadcasts. What most heard were mere fragments of evidence. Many whites were genuinely shocked when they learned of the activities of death squads and other atrocities, but they believed them to be no more than one part of the picture, the part on which they claimed the TRC was concentrating. The more shocking the disclosures became, the more they felt able to distance themselves from them.
Opinion polls consistently showed white distrust and resentment about the TRC. In a survey carried out in July 1998, some 72 per cent of whites felt that the TRC had made race relations worse; almost 70 per cent felt that the TRC would not help South Africans to live together more harmoniously in the future; and some 83 per cent of Afrikaners and 71 per cent of English-speaking whites believed the TRC to be biased. In effect, it was a massive vote of no confidence.
The black community, by contrast, followed the proceedings of the TRC with avid interest. Writing in the Sowetan at the end of the exercise, Mathatha Tsedu recalled:
We were moved by the testimony, the fears, the sobs and the wailing of survivors and relatives who could not take the memories and the revelations. We cried a little too in our homes.
We also sat glued to the radio and television screens as killers of our patriots spoke of the murders they committed to defend white hegemony.
We hissed as the men, with no visible remorse, spoke of the pyres and burning of human bodies alongside the lamb chops and steak barbecues on the banks of various rivers of our land.
We got even more angry as the men walked away scot-free after such testimony.
Indeed, the work of the TRC provoked as much anger in parts of the black community as it did among the whites, particularly over the way that security force operatives responsible for heinous crimes were given freedom in exchange for a bit of truth-telling, while victims and their families were denied access to the courts. What many wanted more than truth was justice – prosecutions and prison sentences.
Opinion polls reflected nearly as much disillusionment with the work of the TRC among the black population as among the white community. The survey carried out in July 1998 showed that though a majority of blacks – 60 per cent – believed that the TRC had been fair to all sides, some 62 per cent thought that its work had made race relations worse. Significantly, however, blacks were more optimistic than whites about the future: nearly 80 per cent felt that as a result of the TRC’s work people in South Africa would now live together more harmoniously.
In answering criticism levelled at the TRC, Tutu argued that the truth often turned out to be divisive. ‘Reconciliation is not about being cosy; it is not about pretending that things were other than they were. Reconciliation based on falsehood, on not facing up to reality, is not true reconciliation and will not last.’ Though truth might not always lead to reconciliation, there could be no genuine reconciliation without truth.
However much Mandela tried to focus attention on the poorer sections of society, the immediate beneficiaries of the new South Africa were the black middle class. In the civil service and parastatal corporations, blacks rapidly gained positions of status and responsibility from which they had been barred for so long. The business sector followed suit, anxious to be seen redressing the legacy of inequality. Only 10 per cent of managerial posts were held by blacks, despite years of talk about the need for black advancement. The opportunities for those with skills and qualifications were vast. Yet the reservoir of trained and experienced blacks was all too small. Out of a total of 14,000 chartered accountants, for example, only 65 were black. One consequence was that in one business deal after another, as white-owned corporations sought to promote the development of black capitalism, a small group of successful black entrepreneurs made all the running, enriching themselves hugely in the process. The black middle class were also the main beneficiaries of the government’s corrective discrimination measures that accorded preferential treatment for ‘previously disadvantaged’ groups in hiring, promotion and the award of government contracts.
What the Mandela years witnessed, in fact, was a significant widening of the income gap within the black community. The gap had been growing since the late 1970s. During the 1980s, while the poorest half of the population slid ever deeper into poverty, the black middle class fared well, their rising incomes making them the most upwardly mobile group in the country. During the 1990s the black elite – politicians, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, managers, businessmen – prospered as never before, many acquiring the lifestyle and status symbols so prized in South Africa – executive cars, swimming pools, domestic staff, private-school education, golf handicaps and foreign holidays. Perhaps 5 per cent of the black community reached middle-class status. But for the majority, the same struggle against poverty continued.
From an early stage in his presidency, Mandela began to prepare South Africa for the post-Mandela era. He was adamant that, regardless of popular demand, he would not stay in office for a second term after 1999. ‘At the end of my term, I’ll be eighty-one,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s wise that a robust country like South Africa should be led by an octogenarian. You need younger men who can shake and move this country.’
Indeed, there was a noticeable lack of decisiveness about Mandela’s administration, a tendency to let government business drift. It was as though the sheer size of the agenda it faced was too daunting. Mandela himself contributed to the muddle and confusion into which the government sometimes fell. In his old age he was prone to act as impetuously as in the days of his youth. On occasions, he wielded his massive authority unwisely. His bouts of stubbornness and quick temper were legendary. When ministers he had appointed proved incompetent or corrupt, he rode to their rescue out of perverse loyalty rather than sack them. Despite the overwhelming need to attract Western investment, he persisted with personal initiatives to develop close ties with dictators like Gaddafi and Castro likely to deter Western investors.
Nevertheless, whatever the faults and failures of his administration, Mandela managed both to sustain his popularity among the black population and to retain the respect and admiration of the white community. As a mark of his standing, the name by which he became affectionately known, by black and white alike, was Madiba, his clan name dating from an eighteenth-century chief. National sporting victories in rugby, soccer and cricket were sometimes attributed to ‘Madiba magic’ – the effect of his presence among the spectators.
Mandela enjoyed the fame but remained unmoved by it. A patrician by nature, he possessed a common touch rare among African leaders. He often stopped to talk to children or youths with genuine interest. He greeted workers and tycoons with the same civility. He was invariably courteous and attentive to individuals, whatever their status or age. Amid an endless stream of meetings, speeches and official functions, he nevertheless found time to respond to individual requests, readily accepting invitations from schoolchildren and from ordinary citizens, telephoning strangers when the occasion arose and making himself available for snapshots. Despite the ailments of old age, he brought to his years as president remarkable energy, as if anxious to make up for lost time.
Indeed, so much confidence, so much trust came to be placed in Mandela that there were deep apprehensions about the prospect of his departure from government. He was seen not only as the founding father of democracy but also the guarantor of its stability. Rumours of his ill-health were enough to send the stock exchange and the currency into a tailspin. Mandela sought to minimise his own importance in government, emphasising the talent and ability of his cabinet colleagues. ‘Many of my colleagues are head and shoulders above me in almost every respect. Rather than being an asset, I’m more of a decoration.’
He kept the prospect of retirement firmly in view, using his remaining time in office to foster a climate of tolerance in the hope that it might take root permanently. ‘I am nearing my end,’ he told Afrikaner students. ‘I want to be able to sleep till eternity with a broad smile on my face, knowing that the youth, opinion-makers and everybody is stretching across the divide, trying to unite the nation.’
His legacy was a country which had experienced greater harmony than at any previous time in its history.
His successor, Thabo Mbeki, arrived with a new set of priorities. While Mandela had placed the need for reconciliation above all else, Mbeki put far greater emphasis on the need to transform South African society. ‘You cannot find reconciliation between blacks and whites in a situation in which poverty and prosperity continue to be defined in racial terms,’ he said. ‘If you want reconciliation between black and white, you need to transform society. If we have an economy that is geared to benefit the whites and disadvantage the black majority, and you do not address that, you will not have reconciliation.’ What Mbeki feared most was what he described as the ‘mounting rage’ of millions of blacks denied the opportunity of advancement. ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’ he asked, quoting the black American poet Langston Hughes. ‘It explodes.’
There was also a marked change in the style of leadership. While Mandela had presided over South Africa as a benign patriarch, floating above the political hurly-burly, Mbeki was known as a back-room operator, a shrewd intellectual who enjoyed quoting Shakespeare and Yeats but who lacked the common touch and who played his cards close to his chest. While Mandela took a broad-brush approach to government, Mbeki immersed himself in detail.
Mbeki had been nurtured in the business of nationalist politics from an early age. His father, Govan Mbeki, a hardline communist and ANC stalwart, had dedicated his life to political struggle and expected Thabo, his eldest son, to follow suit. A studious, introverted boy, who spent much of his spare time reading his father’s books at the family home in rural Transkei, he joined the ANC Youth League at the age of fourteen, launched a pro-ANC student organisation at the age of nineteen, then joined the Communist Party a year later. In 1962, at the age of twenty, he was sent abroad by the ANC, along with twenty-six other students, to further his studies and he did not return until 1990. In his years in exile he earned a degree in economics from the University of Sussex in England, underwent military training in the Soviet Union, became a member of the Communist Party’s politburo and represented the ANC in a series of foreign postings.
During the 1980s, when Western leaders like Britain’s Margaret Thatcher regarded the ANC as ‘a typical terrorist organisation’, Mbeki came to be seen in the West as its acceptable face – a soft-spoken, articulate pragmatist, who favoured a negotiated settlement to end apartheid rather than revolutionary violence. He was particularly skilful in handling contacts with the stream of white South Africans – businessmen, academics, churchmen and opposition politicians – who travelled from South Africa to talk to the ANC, in defiance of the government, seeking a way through the impasse. Dressed in a tweed jacket and puffing his ubiquitous pipe, Mbeki spoke more the language of the middle class than the rhetoric they expected of revolutionaries. Once back in South Africa, he performed much the same task, pacifying businessmen alarmed by talk of nationalisation, right-wing Afrikaners demanding a separate volkstaat, and Zulu nationalists threatening civil war. ‘He can be diplomatic to the point where many people regard him as weak,’ Mandela once observed.
As Mandela’s deputy, Mbeki took over much of the routine business of government, acting in effect as his chief executive. He was given particular responsibility for fashioning economic policy. The outcome was a policy document called Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) that endorsed an orthodox free-market strategy. Published in 1996, it advocated strict fiscal discipline, lower government deficits, privatisation, trade liberalisation and export-driven growth. Its stated aim was to stimulate economic growth to reach 6 per cent a year and to create 500,000 jobs by 2000. A key part of Mbeki’s strategy was to promote black business and foster the development of a black middle class. Addressing a conference of black business leaders, he declared: ‘As part of the realisation of the aim to eradicate racism in our country, we must strive to create and strengthen a black capitalist class.’ Blacks had no need to be embarrassed about the emergence of a successful and prosperous black bourgeoisie, he said. It was part of the process of the ‘deracialisation’ of the economy and society. The benefits would spread to the poor.
Mbeki’s free-market strategy won him the approval of foreign investors and the business community but infuriated the ANC’s traditional allies – the trade unions and the Communist Party. He was accused of betraying the revolution, of selling out to international capital, of forsaking ‘the soul of the ANC’. At a conference of the Communist Party in 1998, after listening to one speaker after another denounce the ANC’s ‘treachery’, he hit back, accusing its leaders of ‘fake revolutionary posturing’, describing them as ‘charlatans’ and ‘confidence tricksters’ attempting to build their organisation ‘on the basis of scavenging on the carcass of a savaged ANC’. They were, he claimed, trying to ‘propagate the understanding that our government has failed, as all other African governments have failed’.
By the time Mbeki took over as president in 1999, he had acquired a mixed reputation. His critics portrayed him as an arch-manipulator, ruthless in disposing of rivals and trusting only a small cabal of loyal advisers. He was known as a dedicated workaholic who insisted on mastering detail, but bungled a number of assignments Mandela gave him and showed abysmal judgement when handling the TRC report. The press noted how hostile, even paranoid, he had become about criticism and pointed to his tendency to react to criticism with accusations of racial malice. When Mbeki was elected unopposed to succeed Mandela as the ANC’s leader at the party’s fiftieth conference in 1997, Mandela expressed his own concern, his remarks prompting applause. ‘There is a heavy responsibility for a leader elected unopposed,’ he said. ‘He may use that powerful position to settle scores with his detractors, to marginalise or get rid of them [applause] and surround themselves with yes-men and yes-women [applause]. His first duty is to allay the concerns of his colleagues to enable them to discuss freely without fear within internal structures.’
Mbeki’s first term as president started well enough. He was bolstered by an election victory in 1999 won by the ANC with an even larger majority – 66 per cent of the vote – than in 1994. In his inaugural address, after paying tribute to the older generation for rescuing South Africa from the abyss, he spoke of the hope of a better future for the millions still living in misery. Quoting a proverb of the Tswana people, he said the country was at the stage of ‘the dawning of the dawn’, when only the tips of the cattle’s horns could be seen etched against the morning sky. But within a year Mbeki had become embroiled in a senseless controversy over Aids which not only damaged his authority but called into question his fitness for office.
Like other African states, South Africa reacted lethargically to the onset of the Aids crisis. The first significant batch of HIV-positive cases was reported among migrant mineworkers from Malawi employed on Rand gold mines in 1986. By 1990 the adult HIV infection rate, measured in an ante-natal survey, stood at 0.7 per cent; by 1992 it had trebled to 2.2 per cent. But when the apartheid government eventually stirred into action, launching Aids education and prevention programmes, it met considerable resistance. Anti-apartheid activists claimed the programmes were a government plot to control population growth by convincing black people to have less sex and produce fewer babies and thereby check the advance of African liberation; they lampooned the Aids acronym saying it stood for ‘Afrikaner Invention to Deprive us of Sex’. Others interpreted the epidemic as the product of malevolent individuals employing witchcraft.
Mandela’s government purported to give the Aids campaign a high priority, but with so many other causes demanding attention – housing, education, jobs and wider health problems – it achieved little. Though designating it a ‘Presidential Lead Project’, Mandela found the topic uncomfortable and failed to throw his weight behind it. An expensive musical show, Sarafina II, that the Department of Health commissioned intending to take Aids education to the masses, became mired in controversy and caused a rift with Aids-prevention field workers. There was further controversy when the health minister, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, announced in 1998 that an anti-retroviral drug, Azidothymidine (AZT), which tests had shown could cut vertical transmission from infected mothers to babies by 50 per cent, would not be made available on the grounds of cost, even though AZT’s manufacturer had drastically cut the price. By the time Mandela stood down in 1999, official estimates of the number of HIV-positive cases stood at 4 million people – 10 per cent of the population; the number who had already died of Aids was put at 500,000.
Despite the gravity of the crisis, Mbeki became increasingly obsessed with the view of a small group of maverick scientists who questioned whether HIV existed at all or, if it did, whether it was not simply a harmless ‘passenger’ virus. They challenged the orthodox view of the causes of Aids, accepted by the vast majority of the world’s medical establishment, claiming it was part of a conspiracy by large pharmaceutical companies to profit from the misery of Africa’s poor. Anti-retroviral drugs, they argued, were not only expensive, they were toxic, more lethal than the disease they were supposed to be treating. Aids was not contagious; it was the result of poverty aggravating old disease patterns.
Early in 2000 Mbeki decided to set up a ‘Presidential International Panel of Scientists on HIV/AIDS in Africa’ to establish what he called ‘the facts’, suggesting that the orthodox view of the causes of Aids was no more than a ‘thesis’. To the outrage of the scientific and medical fraternity, he invited a number of well-known ‘dissidents’ to take part, even though their theories had long since been discounted. In a letter sent in April 2000 to world leaders, including UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, US President Bill Clinton and Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, he explained that he had included the dissidents because he believed all opinions needed to be considered in the search for a response to the epidemic. He then went on to make an alarmingly intemperate defence of the dissidents’ position, portraying them as victims of intimidation similar to that which had occurred during the apartheid era. ‘Not long ago in our country people were killed, tortured and imprisoned because the authorities believed that their views were dangerous,’ he wrote. ‘We are now being asked to do the same thing that the racist apartheid tyranny did, because there is a scientific view against which dissent is prohibited.’
In Washington the White House was so astonished at this piece of chicanery that officials checked to see whether the letter was a hoax. The president of the Medical Research Council in South Africa, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, a renowned microbiologist, complained of the ‘lengthening list of politically-driven decisions regarding the South African AIDS crisis’ and warned that the country was ‘rapidly becoming a fertile breeding ground for the types of pseudo-science embraced by politicians’.
Apart from the confusion and paralysis the controversy caused in South Africa, it took on a worldwide significance. In July 2000 South Africa was due to host an international Aids conference. Hoping to keep the atmosphere calm, the conference chairman, Professor Hoosen Coovadia of the University of Natal, urged Mbeki to steer clear of scientific debates. Mbeki’s response, however, was to authorise his ministers to make personal attacks on Coovadia and other critics, questioning their academic credentials and suggesting they were operating as ‘frontline troops of the pharmaceutical industry’. When 5,000 scientists, including Nobel Prize winners and directors of leading research institutions and medical societies, signed a declaration, in advance of the conference, stating that HIV was the direct cause of Aids, Mbeki’s health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, dismissed it as an ‘elitist document’ signed only by health scientists. ‘You can’t have a certain exclusive group of people saying this is what we believe about HIV and Aids.’ Mbeki’s spokesman, Parks Mankahlana, warned that if the drafters of the declaration gave it to the president or the government, it would find ‘its comfortable place among the dustbins of the office’.
Opening the conference in Durban, Mbeki made no attempt to pull back into the mainstream. He reiterated his doubts about the gravity of the epidemic and dwelt on the findings of a 1995 World Health Organisation report which argued that the world’s biggest killer was extreme poverty – a theme favoured by the dissidents. Following the conference he retreated further into semantics, conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, continuing to ridicule the link between HIV and Aids. ‘Aids is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,’ he told parliament. ‘I don’t believe it’s a sensible thing to ask: “Does a virus cause a syndrome?” It can’t. A virus will cause a disease.’ His office issued a statement accusing anti-Aids activists who wanted the government to provide anti-retroviral drugs in public hospitals of trying to poison black people. ‘Our people are being used as guinea-pigs and conned into using dangerous and toxic drugs,’ said the statement; it likened this to ‘the biological warfare of the apartheid era’. He told the ANC’s parliamentary caucus that criticism of his Aids policies was a plot by the CIA acting in alliance with drug companies to discredit him as the leader of efforts by the developing world to obtain a better deal in the international economic system. Interviewed by a Cape Town television station, he said he was not prepared to set an example by taking a public HIV test because it would send a message that he supported a particular scientific viewpoint – the dominant medical ‘paradigm’. In a lecture he gave at Fort Hare University, he suggested that medical scientists and anti-Aids activists engaged in public campaigns had racial motives. ‘It does happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards to demand that because we are germ carriers and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange options, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease.’ In other words, the explanations of the causes of the epidemic as set out by Mbeki’s critics were part of a racial conspiracy against Africans. The effect of Mbeki’s embrace of dissident arguments was to increase public resistance to Aids education.
Whatever contorted reasoning Mbeki tried to use, the evidence of catastrophe continued to mount. The UN Aids agency estimated that 250,000 people in South Africa died of Aids in 2000. The World Health Organisation estimated that one in five South African adults in 2000 was HIV-positive. The South African paediatric association estimated that 70,000 babies were born with HIV in 2000. Health Department surveys in 2001 showed that one-quarter of all South African women receiving support from public ante-natal clinics were HIV-positive. A study by the Medical Research Council concluded that, in the period from 1999 to mid-2001, Aids had become the leading cause of death. In 2000 40 per cent of deaths among those aged from fifteen to forty-nine, and 25 per cent of total deaths, including children, were from Aids-related illnesses. It warned that if the epidemic went unchecked it would claim between 5 and 7 million South Africans by 2010; 2 million children would be left as orphans; life expectancy would have plunged from a pre-epidemic high of sixty-five years to forty-one years; and the annual death toll from Aids would have reached 800,000.
Mbeki’s obduracy over Aids caused considerable dissension within the upper echelons of the ANC. A senior ANC official told a reporter that Mbeki had ‘exposed a side of his personality which some of us were aware of: terrible conceit and paranoia’. Mandela made clear his disapproval and demanded government action. ‘This is a war, it has killed more people than has been the case in all previous wars,’ he told a newspaper. ‘We must not continue to be debating, to be arguing, when people are dying.’ Professor Makgoba accused Mbeki of a ‘Soviet-style’ attempt to intimidate his critics and warned doctors and scientists against remaining silent in the face of ‘genocide’. Trade unions called for the epidemic to be declared a national emergency. Provincial governments, on their own account, began authorising the use of a new anti-retroviral drug called nevirapine, helped by an offer from its manufacturer of five years of free supply. Comedians jumped in on the act, ridiculing Mbeki’s attitude. ‘Not everyone regards you as a pretentious, arrogant, paranoid, heartless, ruthless Stalinist,’ wrote Evita Bezuidenhout, the alter ego of satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, in a letter to the Cape Times. Her son Izan, she said, serving a prison term for racist crimes, had become a big fan of Mbeki because official confusion over Aids meant that the disease, by killing off the black majority, ‘will succeed where apartheid failed’.
In August 2001 an activist organisation, the Treatment Action Campaign, which had spent four years trying to persuade the president to change course, started legal proceedings aimed at forcing the government to provide nevirapine to help reduce mother-to-baby transmission. The government argued that the courts had no right to make policy decisions. But it lost its case, first in the High Court and then in the Constitutional Court. In July 2002 the Constitutional Court ordered the government to provide nevirapine to all HIV-positive pregnant mothers at all public hospitals free of charge ‘without delay’, leaving Mbeki humiliated.
Even then, Mbeki continued to drag his feet. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a crony from exile days, recommended quack remedies such as eating garlic, beetroot or olive oil which she claimed had produced ‘astounding results’. Only when further court action was threatened did the government finally respond with an Aids drugs programme. By then, 1 million people had died from Aids; the number of people infected by HIV had reached 5.3 million; an estimated 2,000 were infected with HIV every twenty-four hours; and some 600 people were dying from Aids each day. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health published in 2008 estimated that by denying anti-retroviral drugs to Aids patients and to pregnant women, Mbeki had caused the premature death of 365,000 people, including 35,000 babies.
Other aspects of Mbeki’s presidency also proved controversial. In place of the multiracial approach that Mandela had favoured, Mbeki threw his weight exclusively behind black advancement. He pursued a programme of ‘black economic empowerment’ that encouraged white-owned corporations to sell off stakes to blacks, claiming it would provide broad-based openings for black entrepreneurs, but its main effect was to enable an elite group of well-connected millionaire businessmen to become even richer. Leading ANC members were quick to seize the same opportunities, trading political contacts for shareholdings. ‘I did not struggle [only] to remain poor,’ declared one prominent ANC official. ‘Crony capitalism’ began to take root.
Mbeki also used affirmative action aggressively to give places to blacks in the civil service, local government and parastatal organisations, such as railways, ports and power generation, regardless of merit and qualification. Thousands of skilled whites were cleared out of government service and parastatal posts. The state bureaucracy became, in effect, an arm of the ANC. The sense of common citizenship and national pride that Mandela had worked so hard to engender was swiftly eroded. Many whites decided to leave South Africa altogether for opportunities abroad, citing affirmative action, high crime rates and deteriorating public services. In all, an estimated 750,000 whites emigrated over a ten-year period, seriously depleting the reservoir of skilled personnel.
Mbeki also began to display dictatorial tendencies. Resentful of criticism of any kind, he surrounded himself with a clique of weak personalities only too willing to agree to all he said. Party committees and conferences were tightly controlled. Critics were subjected to tirades of abuse from loyal party hacks. Anyone deemed to challenge Mbeki was quickly eviscerated. Mbeki himself was more than ready to spread smears about rivals in order to discredit them. What Mbeki wanted above all was loyalty; it mattered far more to him than competence. Government jobs were handed out on that basis.
Parliament’s role soon went into decline. Whereas Mandela had accorded parliament due respect, regarding it as one of the main pillars of democracy, Mbeki sought to emasculate it. ANC members were expected to follow his diktat. According to one former ANC MP, the ANC became ‘a party fearful of its leader, conscious of his power to make or break careers, conscious of his demand for loyalty, for conformity of thinking’. As Mbeki began to pursue a more ‘Africanist’ agenda, several prominent white ANC members found their presence less welcome. He treated opposition parties with contempt and rarely appeared in the assembly to answer questions. In due course, parliament became little more than a rubber stamp.
Mbeki’s handling of Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe further damaged his reputation. South Africa possessed a unique ability to bring pressure to bear on its landlocked northern neighbour. It provided transport links, electricity supplies and other services vital for Zimbabwe’s welfare. In the 1970s, the South African government, for reasons of self-interest, used these means to force Ian Smith to concede black majority rule. In 2000, when Mugabe began his sustained campaign of terror to stay in power – crushing political opponents, violating the courts, trampling on property rights, rigging elections, suppressing the independent press and precipitating economic collapse – the reaction of Western governments was to issue a torrent of condemnation and eventually a package of personal sanctions, but Mbeki chose what he termed ‘quiet diplomacy’.
There were, initially, sound enough reasons for Mbeki to take a cautious approach. Britain’s attempt at megaphone diplomacy had merely exacerbated the problem and enabled Mugabe to portray Britain as a neo-colonial power throwing its weight around to protect the interests of white settlers. Mbeki hoped that discreet persuasion offered a better prospect. His efforts, however, failed again and again. On one occasion, after holding discussions with Mbeki, Mugabe pledged at a televised news conference, with Mbeki sitting beside him, that ‘war veterans’ would be removed from all commercial farms they had occupied and would be resettled elsewhere. The following day, Mugabe claimed he had been ‘misquoted’ and ordered land seizures to be speeded up. Time and again, Mugabe promised Mbeki that he would negotiate a solution with the opposition but never made any attempt to do so. Despite numerous other examples of Mugabe’s perfidy, Mbeki continued to insist that ‘quiet diplomacy’ would produce results. Not once did he speak out in defence of human rights in Zimbabwe. Indeed, he began to parrot Mugabe’s argument that the root cause of the trouble was Britain’s failure to honour its commitment to finance land redistribution and its interference in supporting its own ‘white kith and kin’ in Zimbabwe. The only reason why such a fuss had been made about Zimbabwe was ‘because white people died and white people were deprived of their property’, he claimed. The fact that Mugabe’s tyranny had inflicted violence, hardship and misery on millions of blacks did not seem to Mbeki sufficient cause to protest. As the lawlessness continued, Mbeki, far from becoming more critical of Mugabe, acted to shield him against the onslaught of Western outrage, making strenuous efforts to overturn Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth.
Mbeki’s determination to back a brutal African dictator, rather than stand up for human rights, followed a long tradition by leaders in Africa of turning a blind eye to the nefarious activities of their peers for the sake of group solidarity. It won him support in Africanist circles in South Africa who celebrated Zimbabwe’s example of giving the whites a good kicking and hoped for something similar in South Africa. But it caused apprehension among foreign investors, nervousness among the white population and aroused further misgivings about Mbeki’s commitment to democratic values. Moreover, it sullied the reputation of the ANC, which had received so much help in its own struggle for human rights and now remained indifferent to the struggle that others in the neighbourhood faced. In a thinly veiled rebuke, Archbishop Tutu, forever the voice of conscience in South Africa, pronounced himself ‘baffled’ by African leaders who supported dictators like Mugabe. ‘Human rights are human rights and they are of universal validity or they are nothing,’ he said.
Mbeki’s presidency descended further into ignominy over growing evidence of high-level corruption and his determined efforts to cover it up. The cancer of high-level corruption had first surfaced during Mandela’s term of office, as he ruefully acknowledged shortly before stepping down. ‘We came to government with the zeal of a group of people who were going to eliminate corruption in government,’ he said in 1999. ‘It was such a sad disappointment to note that our own people who are there to wipe out corruption themselves become corrupt.’
Although Mandela’s own lifestyle as president was notably frugal, several of his close colleagues leapt at the opportunity to make personal fortunes from their positions in government. Among them was a group of ANC ministers and officials who pushed through a massive arms-procurement programme that was designed as much to provide them with kickbacks from foreign defence contractors as to improve South Africa’s defence capability. Their spending spree – purchasing submarines, navy frigates and air-force fighter jets – cost South Africa $5 billion, at a time when the government was supposed to be focusing on delivering housing, sanitation, schools and ‘a better life for all’. Overseeing the process was a cabinet subcommittee headed by Mbeki.
When the arms deal was publicly announced in 1999, there were immediate suspicions that it had involved bribery and corruption. An opposition politician first raised the matter in parliament shortly afterwards. A preliminary report by the Auditor-General’s Office subsequently identified a litany of irregularities in the awarding of contracts and recommended further investigation. A parliamentary watchdog committee urged the government to call in a special anti-corruption unit which had wide-ranging powers.
Mbeki’s response, however, was to organise a full-scale cover-up. A cabal of cabinet ministers was wheeled out to attack both the auditor-general and the watchdog committee. In a paranoid speech on television, Mbeki resorted to his habit of blaming the outcry on the work of conspirators hired to discredit the government. He adamantly refused to allow the anti-corruption unit to get involved. He moved swiftly to get rid of troublesome members of the watchdog committee and to force parliament into line. And he made sure that an official report compiled jointly by the Auditor-General’s Office, the National Prosecuting Authority and the Public Protector’s Office exonerated the government of any wrong-doing – by rewriting it.
The full extent of high-level corruption only became clear in subsequent years as a result of investigations carried out in Britain, France and Germany that revealed that at least $300 million had been paid out by foreign defence contractors in bribes and ‘commissions’ to politicians, officials, middlemen and the ANC. Among the discoveries made was that Mbeki himself had held secret discussions in France with a defence contractor which had subsequently been awarded a contract worth 2 billion rands to supply the navy with four ships. Mbeki claimed, implausibly, that he did not recall the occasion.
Within a few brief years of the advent of democracy, therefore, South Africa’s image as a beacon of hope for the continent had been severely tarnished. The heady optimism of Mandela’s rainbow nation had been replaced by despair at Mbeki’s increasingly delinquent leadership. The ANC itself was shown to have become just another political party on the make, dominated by a corrupt elite bent on self-enrichment.
Worse was to come. Mbeki’s attempts to enforce greater personal control of the ANC provoked a vicious feud within the party. For a period of five years, South Africa was dragged through a morass of intrigue and infighting between two rival factions, one supporting Mbeki, the other led by Jacob Zuma, a former deputy president. At the centre of this sordid struggle was the issue of high-level corruption emanating from the arms deal, which had spread through the ANC like a poison. Although Zuma was only one of several senior ANC officials implicated in taking bribes, he became the central target for state prosecutors. The charges levelled against him included not only racketeering, money laundering and fraud but rape.
The case against him for rape had all the hallmarks of a ‘honeytrap’ orchestrated by his opponents. His accuser was an HIV-positive family friend. Zuma admitted having sex with the woman but denied rape. State prosecutors devoted huge resources to winning a conviction, presenting a list of twenty-eight witnesses. But it transpired that the complainant was an unstable woman with a long history of making rape accusations, four of them against priests. Zuma was duly acquitted.
However, his testimony in court turned him into a figure of national ridicule. He claimed that the woman had solicited his attention by wearing a short skirt and went on to explain that in Zulu tradition it would have been an insult if he had refused to gratify her. He admitted that he had had unprotected sex with someone he knew to be HIV-positive. But, he said, as a former head of the National Aids Council, he knew that the risk was ‘minimal’. In any case, he had taken a shower after sex to minimise the risk of contracting the disease.
Meanwhile, the corruption charges remained outstanding. Despite the clear evidence against him, Zuma put himself forward as a candidate for the post of ANC president, standing against Mbeki in party elections in 2007; and he succeeded in gaining a two-thirds majority. Many delegates voted for him simply to get rid of Mbeki. Zuma swiftly took his revenge. Within days, the ANC forced Mbeki to resign as state president and replaced him with a caretaker politician for the interim before a general election in 2009. Shortly before the election, the ANC split asunder. A rump of Mbeki loyalists left to form their own party. The bulk of the ANC backed Zuma. Zuma’s fortunes were further boosted when state prosecutors decided, on technical grounds, to withdraw all outstanding charges against him, though they also made clear that their action did not amount to his acquittal. At the polls, the ANC won nearly two-thirds of the vote. But it was a victory that inspired as much a sense of foreboding as of celebration.
In its first fifteen years as a democracy, South Africa recorded significant achievements. It established a high degree of political stability, all the more remarkable after such a prolonged and violent contest for power. It held a series of orderly elections – in 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2009 – generally acknowledged to be free and fair. It produced a new constitution robust in its protection of individual rights. And it enjoyed an independent judiciary, an assertive press and a vigorous civil society.
Moreover, its siege economy was transformed into an internationally competitive one, no longer dependent on gold-mining profits but including flourishing sectors in manufacturing, tourism, banking and insurance. The economic growth rate more than doubled, averaging about 3 per cent a year. National finances were restored to good order. Inflation and interest rates fell. Education rather than debt repayments took the largest share of government spending. Major strides were made in the provision of housing, sanitation, electricity, primary medical care and pension benefits.
But the magnitude of the problems that South Africa faced still remained daunting. Despite economic growth, unemployment rates stood at more than 40 per cent. The number of job seekers continued to outpace the growth in jobs. Fewer than 7 per cent of school-leavers could expect to find jobs in the formal economy. In some rural areas, the unemployment rate was as high as 95 per cent; sometimes, a dozen people survived on one old-age pension. Out of a population of 50 million, more than 3 million lived in squatter camps or informal settlements, many enduring abject poverty, with little or no sanitation, clean water or power and no visible means of support. In all, 18 million people lived without any sanitation; 5 million lacked safe water supplies; and 7 million struggled below the national poverty line. Crime for many was the only means to survive; South Africa suffered from one of the highest crime rates in the world.
Furthermore, the growing gap between rich and poor produced serious tensions. There was overt public anger at the profligate lifestyle of the ruling elite and the corruption that fuelled it. In a memorable outburst in 2010, a prominent trade-union leader, Zwelinzima Vavi, branded the new elite as ‘predators’ and castigated them for ‘spitting in the faces of the poor’ while enjoying the highlife at parties where sushi was ‘served from the bodies of half-naked ladies’. Addressing union delegates, he fumed: ‘It is the sight of these parties where the elite display their wealth – often secured in questionable methods – that turns my stomach.’ The message the elite sent out was clear, he said: graft pays. ‘Why sweat when political connections and greasing the hand of those in political office can make you an instant billionaire? We are rewarding laziness, greed and corruption and discouraging hard work, honesty and integrity.’
The ANC administration was riddled not just with corruption but rank incompetence. Because of a failure by government ministers to plan ahead, South Africa was hit by an energy crisis in 2008 that caused widespread economic disruption. The impact was long-term. The state power corporation, Eskom, was obliged to warn foreign companies against investment in new power-intensive projects until at least 2013. South Africa’s place in the global economy began to slip badly. Advances that the government made in providing housing, piped water and electricity to poor communities were soon overshadowed by failing education, health and other public services. At every level there was an acute shortage of skills, much of it aggravated by Mbeki’s drive to dispense with white expertise. Street protests against deteriorating public services became increasingly common.
ANC leaders, however, remained confident of their position in control. By setting up a series of front companies to acquire government contracts and other such practices, they managed to increase the party’s investments to 1.75 billion rands. The objective was to ensure that the ANC elite had the means to entrench themselves in power for ever more, or, as Jacob Zuma put it, ‘until Jesus comes back’.