Is the Thabo Mbeki era under historical revision?

It is often noted that for as long as lions do not learn to write their own history, tales involving lions and hunters will always be about the heroism of hunters. Or something along those lines.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon quite a bit lately, as I frantically scour the length and breadth of our media landscape (electronic or print) for the last remaining morsels of good news involving our outgoing president. It’s becoming an increasingly difficult exercise. Now, you might argue that the media can only report the facts and that Thabo Mbeki has not really done anything good in the eight months since Polokwane. You wouldn’t get too much resistance from me. I do not know enough about the intricacies of governance to offer any significant challenge to that assessment.

So I’ll just take it at face value that Mbeki is a horrible president who has been doing nothing but deny the existence of Aids, pretend that everything in Zim is hunky dory, cover Selebi’s ass, fire Pikoli without cause and generally sit there twiddling his thumbs a la a demented Nero while Rome burns. Hell, you won’t even get any lip from me even if you submitted to me that Mbeki himself started the fire. He may even have instigated the attacks on immigrants from neighbouring states just to ensure that Zuma inherits a weakened, chaotic state as has been suggested from some quarters. No disputes from this side on that one either.

But none of that interests me too much. What does interest me, however, is my favourite pastime. I’m talking about observing human behaviour in situations such as this. What fascinates me as the Thabo Mbeki era comes to an end is how, in 2008, trying to find anyone who didn’t see through the Thabo Mbeki façade from the get-go is becoming a near impossibility. It’s almost as difficult as finding a white dude who thought apartheid was a swell idea. Heck, even Pik was an anti-apartheid mole who tried hard to reason with a demented PW, to hear the story being told now. As for your average caller on 702 Talk Radio, you’d swear that Parktown North was a hub of underground activism.

It’s just as difficult trying to finding any black oke who wasn’t involved in the struggle. I can honestly say that I do not know that many people who weren’t in the self-defence units, or in exile, or involved in campus politics back in the struggle days. One of them is a guy I attended varsity with in the early 90s that I bumped into at the airport recently. He was with some important-looking, foreign types and introduced me as ‘a comrade from my student activist days’.

I guess one could say that I was a student activist if activism involved purchasing those dirt-cheap ‘Viva Mandela’ T-shirts, running from the police and screaming like a kudu being pounced on by a hyena when a vicious constable caught up with me on the foyer of the library. But all I have to say about that is, if this country was liberated by my airport buddy and me, then those Rivonia trialists were a bunch of underachievers for taking so long. Because toppling the apartheid regime was quite a breeze. All I remember this former ‘student activist’ ever doing on campus was spending four straight hours in the games room playing pool, drinking copious amounts of beer and getting rejected by women. But then again maybe he dug trenches around campus in preparation for the revolution while we slept. Anything is possible.

But back to the thumb-twiddling Nero in the Union Buildings. Now, as far as I can tell there are two possible explanations for the president being as unpopular as he is.

1. The president has, during his tenure, been cunning, conniving bastard who managed to fool a lot of people but the jig is up now and the wool has been removed from the populace’s eyes.
2. People have always been on to him, let him get away with things and for some reason, have decided to call him on his errors now.

Can we rule out the obvious possibility that the president’s fall from grace is as a result of any change in his policies or modus operandi? I doubt that anybody could ever accuse Mbeki of being anything but consistent and tenaciously holding on to his positions. Fair enough? So, for the purposes of this exercise, let’s stick to the two possible reasons above. Can we further agree that it is unlikely that both these reasons could co-exist within the confines of one mind? If you think the president is an idiot you either always knew it all along or you recently discovered this.

Now here is where it gets interesting for me. My own recollection is that, at the peak of Mbeki’s popularity circa 2004, finding anyone with serious problems with his presidency was extremely rare. Almost as rare as the sound of the Pirates trophy cabinet opening. It showed in the near 70% landslide election victory. That ‘Alive with possibility’ TV ad gave many of us goose bumps. Our president casually straightening his cuff links made the hair on the back of our necks stand up. Admittedly, the usual suspects were unimpressed as was to be expected — Leon, Buthelezi, Holomisa, De Lille etc. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Agreeing with the president would make one a pretty unconventional opposition politician.

That’s my way of saying that, despite the proliferation of latter-day ‘I never thought too much of Mbeki’ prophets; it seems to me that most people who don’t think highly of the president now are people who used to think that Ultra-Mel emanates from his behind when he visits the crapper. So the obvious question is: what happened? You have to admit that the man has been as consistent as the Northern Star, right or wrong.

If my assumptions are correct, then it is quite odd that people would ‘punish’ him for doing exactly the same things that once made them love him. Or is it the old adage, best crystallised by the Jason Robard’s character in the movie, Inherit the wind? When confronted by his born-again friend about his stance on Darwinism, he tells his friend, ‘No my friend, I never left you. But by choosing not to move with the times, you left me‘. [Sic] I guess it is possible that everyone has turned on Mbeki for the consistency of his policies in the face of overwhelming new facts that have emerged since Polokwane. I’m personally not aware of this new information.

But I’m not convinced that South Africans have attained this level of sophistication overnight. I’m guessing that the answer lies elsewhere. This was no better captured for me than a quote I saw on a billboard on the M2 East last night; ‘When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change’ — Dr. Wayne Dwyer. It seems to me that people have, for whatever reason, changed the way that they look at the president. I’m personally not interested in whether this is a good thing or not. Politics does not interest me enough for me to give a damn either way.

I’m just fascinated by the phenomenon of a guy who is respected by a bunch of people being hated for doing exactly the same things. Of course I’m oversimplifying the matter quite a bit just to drive home my point. But my question is: is my simplistic assessment fair? Is Mbeki being shunned by people for doing exactly what he’s been doing all along? Is there a fair amount of historical revisionism taking place in the public domain? Has this president really been as horrible as everyone says he’s been all along? Or have we merely changed the way we look at him?

You know, the same way we now realise that the Nats won elections for 46 years without anybody voting for them. Not anyone alive today anyway.

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