'Unauthorised' Mbeki doccie screened

The “unauthorised” documentary about South African President Thabo Mbeki has finally been screened on the SABC, after more than a year of to-ing and fro-ing.

It is interesting, and does a very good job at recalling much detail that may have been forgotten or may not have been generally known to those who don’t count biographies among their mandatory daily reading.

It remembers, in former Sunday Times and current City Press editor Mathatha Tsedu’s words, the “Gucci revolutionary”. It sketches the same younger Mbeki whom I remember when I did sound for him at Wits University in (or about) 1991: charming, urbane, moderate, cool.

Made by Ben Cashdan, Redi Direko and Meril Rasmussen, the film starts on an interesting note: Nelson Mandela warns him, at his election as ANC (and therefore ultimately South Africa’s) president, that the temptation to “settle scores” and “marginalise” detractors will attend him who wins the power of office unopposed, as Mbeki did. The camera goes to Mbeki, who doesn’t laugh, but looks askance. Is he rolling his eyes? Why does this paternal lesson need to be delivered in public, from a stage?

It notes Mbeki’s selection of Jacob Zuma as deputy, because Zuma wouldn’t challenge him, nor be a natural successor. Yet he is, today: the ANC is spoken of in terms of the “Mbeki camp” and the “Zuma camp”.

This is why the implications of Mbeki’s silence on the Selebi/Pikoli affair is so troublesome. (A simple set of questions on the matter asked by Cyril Madlala is in the Business Day.) After all, it was Pikoli’s job to investigate charges of corruption against Zuma, and if Mbeki says that his every investigation is now subject to review, the spectre of political interference rises. Suspicions were aroused by an SABC story of an arrest warrant for Jackie Selebi, the police commissioner. It surprised me, for one, that the state-owned SABC would run something like this, but the phrasing of a report yesterday by Pikoli’s prosecuting department that “police chief Jackie Selebi has been investigated, but no decision has been made on prosecuting him” suggests no such warrant actually exists. If so, who fed the SABC the story? Is the trade-union movement right when it questions the integrity of state organs in the context of the presidential succession battle?

The film speculates about the 2001 “plot against the president” story, wondering why Mbeki considered it necessary to take the alleged plan to unseat him as seriously as he did. Is he paranoid? Is he Machiavellian, trying to deflect the ambitions of contenders for the position? People such as Cyril Ramaphosa, who impressed as chief negotiator in the pre-1994 years and was a Mandela favourite, but was too young (turning only 55 next month) to succeed as president in Mbeki’s place, and Tokyo Sexwale, who is known to be very close to Mandela?

One thing that’s curious is what the hoo-hah was all about. Why did the SABC refuse to screen it for more than a year? Okay, so Mbeki doesn’t always look as god-like as the ANC might want him to look, but hey, even Winston Churchill was known to keep a few character flaws in his liquor cabinet. The reason for shelving it first time around were that “producers made unauthorised changes on the day of transmission” (duh, the film is titled “unauthorised”), but the SABC also said that “the documentary was defamatory, editorially unbalanced and that it used archival material out of context” and “at the moment we are not ready to show it”.

Surely it couldn’t be the brief mention of allegations that Mbeki may have had something to do with the assassination of his late rival for the ANC presidency, Chris Hani? He answered that in the film, and everyone anyway accepts that Janus Waluz and Clive Derby-Lewis committed that particular murder. Why, if “unauthorised changes” could be made “on the day of transmission”, would it take a year to “add a few sentences”, in order not to “infer that we were trying to insinuate that Mbeki was involved in the Hani assassination”?

When SABC spokesman Kaizer Kganyago said that “an ‘approved version’ of the documentary will be shown by the SABC when it becomes available”, what exactly does this approval or authorisation entail? Has anything been cut? What exactly was so offensive that it had to be withheld from public screening for well over a year? Who approved it?

Who exactly authorised what about this unauthorised biography?

(Originally published on my own blog.)