SPEAK OUT

Politics
A man of two faces
Jan 20th 2005 | JOHANNESBURG
From The Economist print edition

Africa's recovery largely depends on South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki. But his influence abroad may be undermined by his intolerance at home

HE IS no "big man", but Thabo Mbeki is undoubtedly Africa's most powerful politician. Earnest, academic and remote, he lacks the charisma of his predecessor, Nelson Mandela. Yet, under him, the African National Congress (ANC) scooped a record 70% in last April's election, and his poll ratings are still high. He has another four years in office, presiding over Africa's richest and best-organised country.

Mr Mbeki is also determined to make Africa as a whole stable, democratic and less poor, and this is a good moment to try. He has the ear of world leaders. George Bush calls him America's "point man" in Africa, and seems inclined to channel more aid and help there. This week Britain's finance minister, Gordon Brown, toured the continent to promote Britain's Commission for Africa, a body set up last year to devise a plan for development. He wants annual aid from rich countries doubled to $100 billion and poor-country debt worth $80 billion to be written off, much of it to Africa's benefit: a scheme that meshes well with the UN's Millennium Development Goals.

If donors increase their help, however, who will ensure that African countries respond? Only Mr Mbeki (who himself is still unknown to many
Africans) stands much chance of influencing other leaders on the continent.
And yet he has extremely worryingly autocratic and reactionary instincts, which are clearly on display in the way he runs his own country. If they are a clue to his future leadership, then the hugely ambitious plans of the developed world can probably be consigned to the dustbin brimful with previous ideas to "Save Africa".

Abroad, Mr Mbeki is willing to use his weight to knock heads together in the name of peace. It is often a losing game, but at least he tries. So far in
2005 he has been to Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Gabon and Côte d'Ivoire for peace parleys and truce-signings. Last year he made 22 trips inside Africa.
If the continent is becoming less bloody, it is sometimes nothing to do with him (he played no part in the recent ending of conflicts in Angola, Senegal or Sierra Leone). But in other places-especially Congo-his efforts have made a difference.

Mr Mbeki can chalk up some personal successes. Last year, his spies foiled a coup plot against Equatorial Guinea. The year before, he helped organise the exit of Charles Taylor, a tyrant, from Liberia and helped reverse a coup in São Tome and Principe. He has hosted talks between warring parties in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire and elsewhere. Most successful (though it did not stop the actual killing on the ground) were some, held in a casino, for Congo's warmakers in 2002. Against the odds, they agreed to a power- sharing government. Mr Mbeki then coddled warlords who muttered of going back to the bush. He even sent a fleet of limousines to Kinshasa to soothe grumpy ministers who had no official cars.

Mr Mbeki feels it is his business to micro-manage peace efforts all over the place. South Africa has 1,300 peacekeepers in Burundi and 1,500 in Congo; the country is a fairly big troop contributor to the United Nations, but is running short of soldiers not infected with HIV/AIDS (a scourge in which Mr Mbeki, as it happens, does not believe). Around 200 other troops have been sent as observers to Ethiopia, Uganda and Sudan. The diplomatic corps is also spread thin, as embassies open all over the continent. When an African is sought to oversee peace talks, it is usually Mr Mbeki who leaps in his presidential jet, Inkwazi, to answer the call.

His interventions can be controversial. On a recent trip to Côte d'Ivoire, where a civil war is ready to re-ignite, a banner draped from a hotel cheerfully declared "Welcome to Thabo Mbeki, a genuine African hero".
Diplomats and locals were less laudatory. Some said that Mr Mbeki had only a loose grasp of details of the conflict. Others said he was naive, too quick to take rotten politicians and rebels at their word. But at least he helps to get them talking.

Perhaps as important, he pushes the reform of regional bodies. In 2002, with one or two others, he orchestrated the death of the hopeless old Organisation for African Unity and the birth of the African Union. The new AU is far from perfect, but at least it favours democracy and has set up (or
plans) potentially useful things, such as a standing African peacekeeping force, observer missions to conflict zones, a Security Council and a continental parliament.

The Southern African Development Community, a 13-country group, may yet become useful. Mr Mbeki leads efforts to give it some clout, especially in promoting democracy. He used it to nudge leaders in Zambia, Malawi, Namibia and Mozambique to quit office when their constitutions, or voters, said so. He has notably failed in Zimbabwe, which he likens to the intractable problems of Northern Ireland; though if Mr Mbeki stopped giving Robert Mugabe free electricity, Zimbabwe's appalling leader would surely not last long.

Redeeming the continent

His intimates say that Mr Mbeki has a fervour to do good in Africa. Why?
Not just because it is a worthy end in itself, but because he despises the idea of a hopeless black continent. According to Mark Gevisser, his biographer, Mr Mbeki's extreme prickliness about racism makes him long to "redeem" Africa in the world's eyes.

His hopes for doing so are pinned on the New Partnership for Africa's Development, Nepad, launched in 2002. This sets out the conditions-respect for laws, good government, less corruption, and so on-necessary to attract private capital and aid to African economies starved of investment. Its content is mostly copied by Britain's Commission for Africa, but Nepad is Africa's half of the deal: Africans promise change in order to gain from the aid, trade and debt relief promoted by Britain.

But Nepad, or any successor plan for Africa's redemption, will work only if functioning states with reasonably good leaders (South Africa, Botswana, Senegal, Ghana, Mozambique) can be set apart from the awful ones (Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Sudan, to name but some). That means breaking a tradition, half a century old, of blind solidarity between African presidents, including Mr Mbeki's tolerance of Zimbabwe's appalling Robert Mugabe.

One potent idea in Nepad is "peer review". This encourages African experts to visit each others' countries to investigate what economic and political reforms are needed and to offer constructive advice. So far, though more than 20 countries have signed up for peer review, only the better-run have had a visit from the experts. Nepad, or its successor, now needs to put pressure on recalcitrant places to submit to similar reviews and to take action.

Zimbabwe is the most glaring test-case; but Mr Mbeki balks at it. He resents what he sees as outsiders' obsession with Zimbabwe's white minority (now thought to number only about 20,000), and distrusts the opposition MDC, which he suspects may be a stooge for white interests.
Instead, he tends to tell Zimbabweans to solve their own problems. This week, for the first time, came a change of tune: the secretary-general of South Africa's ANC, Kgalema Motlanthe, told Zimbabwe's government to stop restricting and intimidating the opposition. Without more pressure of this sort, Nepad's peer review will not count for much.

Elsewhere in Africa, Mr Mbeki tries to buy improvements. He chivvies investors to take risks in the continent, flying teams of tycoons with him to trouble spots such as Congo. South Africa makes up a third of sub-Saharan Africa's total GDP, and is also a big source of capital for the whole continent. The South African Reserve Bank estimates that South African firms invested $1.2 billion in the rest of Africa in 1996, which rose to $4 billion a year by 2001. Many of these now earn healthy profits in phones, construction, retailing and banking in other parts of the continent. Between
1994 and 2004, South African trade with the rest of Africa grew by more than 300%; between 1994 and 2003, exports to the rest of Africa rose from
8.6 billion rand a year to 38.8 billion ($5.1 billion).

Because of that economic weight, and because he has no rivals, Mr Mbeki is increasingly able to present himself as Africa's ambassador to the world.
That helps him lobby for a permanent seat for his country (and hence a voice for Africa) on the UN Security Council. It gives him weight when, with Brazil and India, he demands reforms to the global trading system to favour poorer countries. It justifies his regular place at meetings of G8 leaders, which he enjoys. But his growing influence on the world scene also makes his patent flaws all the more alarming.

Hail to the Chief

The face the president shows within South Africa is decidedly less benign.
Domestic critics feel that he is becoming so over-mighty, and so intolerant of criticism, that he may undermine the vibrant democracy that the ANC helped create.

They note that he has held power a long time. He became deputy-president under Mr Mandela in 1994 and was left to run much of domestic policy, especially economic affairs. Mr Mbeki and a team of friends-Trevor Manuel as finance minister, Tito Mboweni at the central bank-pushed through a set of tough economic reforms, known as GEAR (the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Plan), to cut the deficit, lower inflation, cut tariffs and bureaucracy and privatise some state firms.

These reforms left opponents reeling. Those who wanted to see a state- dominated economy were barged aside. Trade union demands for job protection were ignored. Ronald Suresh Roberts, an author close to Mr Mbeki, half-jokingly describes the economic reforms as "equivalent to what Pinochet did to the economy in Chile, but without a dictatorship; in fact, it was done while building a larger democratic mandate." Mr Gevisser suggests that the president's uncompromising style of leadership is "Leninist vanguardism": leaders who understood market economics imposed policy on the rest.

The new policy was slow to work, and the costs were high; the broad definition of the jobless rate is still roughly 40%, and half the population still lives below the poverty line. But the economy has now started to blossom. Growth is higher than its historical average, and has been sustained for the longest period since the middle of the last century. Now Mr Mbeki's advisers talk of halving unemployment by 2014 and of creating 400,000 net new jobs a year.

The battle to impose liberal economics was won, however, at a high political cost. Mr Mbeki clamped down on policy debate (including debate on how to fight AIDS, or of what to do about Zimbabwe) and he enormously increased the power of his office. Two issues now worry even members of the ANC and allies of Mr Mbeki: the bitter and unforgiving tone of the president himself, and how the structures of power have been usurped.

In the past six months Mr Mbeki has carried out a series of personal attacks on soft targets, mostly through the medium of a long weekly column which is posted on the ANC's website. He first lashed out at Tony Trahar, the boss of Anglo American, the biggest firm in South Africa, for saying that some political risk persists in the country. Then he snapped at a white journalist, a rape victim who has written about the terrible rates of sexual abuse in South Africa, saying that she was a racist and out to denigrate black men. (Commonly, Mr Mbeki accuses his opponent of racism if he is white, or of supporting a "white agenda" if he is black.)

There followed an odd outburst this month against Winston Churchill, in which Mr Mbeki called for a "cold war" against whites who, like Churchill, think bad things about black-run Africa. At other times, AIDS campaigners who lobby for useful drugs for patients are accused of being stooges of foreign drug companies. Mr Mbeki has now stopped espousing his dreadful view that AIDS is not caused by a virus, but still shows little enthusiasm for the anti-AIDS measures that almost everyone believes are needed.

The archbishop complains

The biggest row, however, came in November, when Archbishop Desmond Tutu dared point out that a culture of "sycophantic, obsequious conformity" is emerging under Mr Mbeki. An "unthinking, uncritical, kow- towing party line-toeing", he said, "is fatal to a vibrant democracy." If
yes-
men surround a leader, who will tell him that his policies on AIDS, Zimbabwe and pro-black business are useless or dangerous?

The archbishop has a gift for riling pompous leaders. He upset apartheid's white rulers, Mr Mugabe (who called him an "embittered little bishop") and now Mr Mbeki. Sadly, Mr Mbeki chose to ally himself with the Zimbabwean tyrant against the genial and democratic clergyman. He snapped at Mr Tutu that he was not a member of the ANC, and should therefore keep quiet. "Those who present themselves as the greatest defenders of the poor", he added, "should also demonstrate decent respect for the truth, rather than indecent resort to empty rhetoric."

The editor of the Sunday Times newspaper in Johannesburg, Mondli Makhanya, sees a case of presidential paranoia. "His is a feared pen, full of anger and invective...Mbeki's writings betray a person who believes he is powerless. They are laments of weakness and victimhood. Of conspiracy and fear. They betray a mind that is permanently on a war footing." Mr Mbeki's allies retort that the president, known as "Chief" to close advisers, is only having fun and provoking debate. Do not assess the Chief by these incidents alone, they say. But since Mr Mbeki rarely talks to journalists, there are few other public pronouncements to judge him by.

Others note a long history of intolerance. During his exile from South Africa, he sidelined rivals by having them sent to distant posts. He had Max Sisulu, a rival economist, packed off to represent the ANC in eastern Europe. Back in South Africa he barged aside his main rival for leadership, Cyril Ramaphosa (the man Mr Mandela wanted to succeed him). When control of the ANC was formally handed to Mr Mbeki in 1997, Mr Mandela gave a prescient warning: "The leader must keep the forces together, but you can't do that unless you allow dissent."

Mr Mbeki holds grudges. He previously clashed with Mr Tutu for recording abuses by the ANC during the struggle against apartheid. He attacks a mysterious cabal of rich whites who, he suspects, "set the agenda"
of debate. He famously despises the leader of the opposition, Tony Leon, refusing to respond to him or even to acknowledge him.

The president has also used party and state structures to bolster his own power. William Gumede, whose new book, "Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC", details Mr Mbeki's fierce desire for party discipline and centralised, presidential control, claims that the space for debate is rapidly narrowing, both within and beyond the ANC.

The state broadcasting company is docile and uncritical of the government.
Journalists, judges and others are told to "work together to build the nation", rather than carping at the government or uncovering corruption.
Many opposition politicians are co-opted. The old party of apartheid, the New National Party, slipped into the arms of the ANC last year. Its opportunistic leader, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, justified his move by saying that the future of South Africa will be decided "within the ANC, and not outside."

But internal party reforms have weakened the ANC and strengthened the leader. Local branches and national policy conferences, which have influenced policy and leadership for much of the party's 93 years, have lost much of their power. Mr Mbeki now appoints all nine provincial governors, and directly controls the chief posts of the civil service. He also has his own spies at his disposal, alongside the intelligence network of the state.

Most alarmingly, he uses organs of the state against party rivals. In 2001 he told the police to investigate three men-Mr Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Matthews Phosa-for plotting to "overthrow" him. It was a ludicrous accusation, but it pushed the three men out of politics. Mr Gumede worries that all this threatens the young democracy. "We are going to get a false consensus, with nothing aired in public, which is a real danger," he says.

Moeletsi Mbeki, a businessman and the president's brother, is blunter. He sees a "stubborn and self-righteous" president drifting away from the ANC tradition of multi-racial social democracy. Mr Mbeki is creating a narrow "capitalist, black-consciousness party" obsessed with promoting the interests of one racial group. He even interprets Mr Mbeki's tacit support of Mr Mugabe as solidarity with a fellow black leader.

That may be putting it too strongly, but it is a warning to heed. When Mr Mbeki pushes for reform and development abroad, he speaks as the leader of Africa's most successful democracy. And tolerance for debate, dissent and opposition is vital if domestic-and foreign-success is to be sustained.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
All rights reserved.