A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Mbeki’s early presidential actions illustrated the contrast between Mandela and Mbeki discernible from the speeches. As there was now no danger of a white counterrevolution, Mbeki emphasized implementation of the affirmative action policy to reduce the political, economic, and cultural power of the white minority. For instance, when Dr. Chris Stals stepped down as governor of the South African Reserve Bank in August 1999, Mbeki appointed as his successor the ANC economist Tito Mboweni.6 Mbeki also concentrated a great deal of power in his own hands. He appointed his old friend Essop Pahad, with the rank of cabinet minister, to his presidential office, which absorbed the office of the deputy president (whose significance was thereby greatly reduced) and which became responsible for coordinating the work of the ministries. Mbeki would dominate the cabinet and would make all major official decisions.7 The opposition alleged he was becoming a dictator, but he replied that centralization was essential for efficiency.8 Both at home and abroad, he frequently decried “global apartheid,”9 a phrase he used for the disparities between the small number of rich countries compared to the much larger number of poor states.10 Yet despite the elegant rhetoric, on a personal level many found him cerebral and remote. He also rapidly gained a reputation for intolerance, and it appeared that a chosen route for his consolidation of power was the thwarting of criticism.

  In February 2000, Parliament passed the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA), which took effect in March 2001.11 Its purpose was to “foster a culture of transparency and accountability in public and private bodies by giving effect to the right of access to information.” Under the act, any person could demand records from government bodies without giving a reason, and individuals and government agencies could obtain certain records in the possession of private organizations.12 The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), appointed by the government under the constitution, was to have administrative oversight. Despite a number of cases where applicants went to court to gain access to documents and the court ruled in their favor, in 2003, the Open Democracy Advice Centre found improper or inconsistent implementation of the act, partly due to a lack of funding for the SAHRC and partly because of poor record keeping on behalf of government departments.13

  Beyond PAIA, the government was not especially fond of free access to information. In 2000, it made a submission to the SAHRC in which it accused the media of being “ashamedly racist.”14 The SAHRC itself made a series of attacks on the press. Labeling journalists racist when they criticized the government, it intimidated them by issuing subpoenas to, among many others, the editor and staff of the Mail and Guardian, which had been a conspicuous critic of the white government in the apartheid era and continued to expose corruption in the new regime; whereupon Sheena Duncan, who had been a courageous leader of the antiapartheid Black Sash organization, resigned from the commission, declaring it was “violating the rights it was established to protect.”15

  The Judiciary

  Mbeki showed a distaste for judicial independence when decisions interfered with government policy making. The courts, increasingly reflecting the country’s racial demography, had a significant political role, especially in interpreting the constitution. As early as 1998, the Constitutional Court had addressed the government’s commitment to socioeconomic rights.16 Some lower courts also considered the matter. Mbeki expressed his displeasure with such activism in a July 2003 address to a judicial symposium, in which he clashed with Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson and indicated that he favored judicial deference to the executive and legislative branches.17

  The Opposition

  After the 1999 election, when Mbeki continued to include Buthelezi and two other IFP members in his cabinet, the ANC’s relations with the IFP mellowed; there was even talk of a merger between them. The ANC’s dealings with its tripartite alliance partners—the SACP and COSATU—were complicated. In response to the government’s economic policies, communist politicians left the SACP in droves to become staunch capitalists.18 The government’s relations with COSATU became increasingly strained, but COSATU continued to provide political support to the ANC on the basis of solidarity.19 Meanwhile, the PAC and other black organizations still offered no serious challenge to the ANC.

  There was a process of consolidation among the ANC’s adversaries. The National party had become the official opposition when it withdrew from the government in 1998 and, in a symbolic break with the past, rechristened itself the New National Party (NNP) that December.20 After being superseded as the official opposition in the 1999 elections by the Democratic Party (DP), which itself won less than 10 percent of the vote, the NNP, with diminishing support and just 28 seats in Parliament, gradually withered away. Many of its members switched to the DP, and in May 2000 its survivors formed an alliance with that party, which had moved to the right to become the political home of most Whites, as well as many Coloureds and Indians, but had scarcely any African support.21 In August, the DP, the NNP, and the Federal Alliance formed the Democratic Alliance.22 The NNP withdrew the next year, and, in an ironic end for the party of apartheid, it then made a pact with the ANC.23 In 2005, after years of declining popularity, it disbanded.24 Meanwhile, in 2003, Patricia de Lille, a former trade unionist and PAC member of Parliament, crossed the floor to found the Independent Democrats (ID), whose power base would be largely in the Northern and Western Cape.25

  Mbeki’s Second Term: The Polity

  By the time of Mbeki’s second presidential campaign, his supporters said Mbeki had grown into his role, seeming more at ease and even kissing babies on the campaign trail. He secured his second five-year term with a huge ANC victory at the polls.26 In his April 2004 inaugural address, he delighted in South Africa’s ten years of non-racial democracy.27 In his state of the nation speech the following February, he gave details of various programs he said would make South Africa “a winning nation” in “the renewal of Africa and the creation of a better world.”28 Political conflict would interfere with Mbeki’s goal.

  Access to information remained difficult, and attacks on press freedom continued. Compliance with PAIA fell.29 The 2004 Law on Anti-Terrorism allowed the government to prevent reporting on the security forces, prisons, and mental institutions.30 In 2005, the Mail and Guardian began to receive gag orders compelling it to stop running stories on various corruption scandals. In 2006, Deputy President Zuma sued the Sunday Times political cartoonist and former antiapartheid activist Jonathan Shapiro, known by his pen name Zapiro, and several South African newspapers for millions for damage to reputation, a tactic he would use repeatedly in the years to come. Zuma objected to cartoons of himself with the moniker Showerhead, a reference to his testimony in his trial for rape of an HIV-positive family friend, testimony widely ridiculed in a South Africa devastated by AIDS, in which he claimed he had guarded against the disease by taking a shower after the encounter.31 Zuma eventually was acquitted.32 In 2007, the ANC sought to censor all Showerhead cartoons. The next year, Zuma called for damages for defamation over another Zapiro cartoon, known as “The Rape of Lady Justice.” It depicted Lady Justice being held down by ANC, ANCYL, SACP, and COSATU leaders as Zuma prepared to rape her.33

  Zuma’s problems did not lie just with the press. A bitter rivalry arose between Zuma and Mbeki. As deputy president, Zuma became embroiled in corruption scandals beginning in 2003. The director of public prosecutions charged Schabir Shaik, Zuma’s financial adviser who had bankrolled him since 1990, with corruption and fraud for buying influence in order to procure lucrative contracts, including arms sales, for companies in which he had a major interest.34 Shaik’s trial revealed that he had spent large sums on Zuma’s residence in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal. He had also solicited a bribe of R500,000 per annum in exchange for Zuma’s support for the giant defense contractor Thomson SC.35 A Durban High Court judgment against Shaik on June 2, 2005, asserted that the many payments to Zuma “can only have generated a sense of obligation in the recipient.”36 Twelve days later, amid ongoing media coverage,
Mbeki removed Zuma from the deputy presidency.37 Zuma then resigned from Parliament.

  Once the Shaik trial concluded, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) charged Zuma with corruption. For procedural reasons the court struck the case from the roll, but the outcome meant that Zuma could be recharged. In December 2007, the NPA’s investigative team known as the Scorpions indicted Zuma for racketeering, money laundering, corruption, and fraud.38 A sentence to a prison term of more than a year would have made Zuma ineligible to be elected president.

  After Zuma’s dismissal, the Mbeki-Zuma friction intensified. Mbeki said he would not seek to have the constitution amended in order to serve a third term but he hoped to continue to lead the ANC. This would have been contrary to ANC custom, begun with Mandela, that the president of the ANC was also the president or president-in-waiting of South Africa. Zuma, following precedent, expected to become ANC president at the ANC’s fifty-second national conference, held at Polok-wane in December 2007. There, the rift between Mbeki and Zuma supporters exposed the ANC factionalism between the neoliberal economic moderation of Mbeki and the populist, left-wing, pro-CPSA and pro-COSATU politics of Zuma. It also highlighted the split between the Xhosa represented by Mbeki and the Zulu represented by Zuma. In the end, Zuma carried the voting and became ANC president.39 The corruption charges he still faced, however, threatened to destroy his political career.

  On September 12, 2008, Pietermartizburg High Court judge Chris Nicholson found the charges unlawful on procedural grounds. He set off a whirlwind when he commented that he believed the recharging of Zuma, coming after Mbeki had lost to Zuma at Polokwane, had been politically motivated.40 Not only did the ruling open the way for Zuma to run for president in the 2009 election, it also prompted the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) to withdraw its support of Mbeki, effectively recalling him. Mbeki was incensed. He appealed unsuccessfully to the Constitutional Court.41 Mbeki announced, and Parliament accepted, his resignation, effective September 25.42 On January 12, 2009, too late to save Mbeki’s presidency, the Supreme Court of Appeal deputy judge president would find that Nicholson’s improper influence allegations “overstepped the limits of [the court’s] authority.”43

  Mbeki’s departure necessitated the appointment of an interim president until the next presidential elections, scheduled for April 2009. Those constitutionally eligible were the deputy president, the speaker of Parliament, or any member of Parliament chosen by that body.44 Zuma, on behalf of the ANC, suggested Member of Parliament (MP) Kgalema Motlanthe.45 The 59-year-old was a lifelong ANC member who had spent ten years on Robben Island. He had been elected ANC secretary general at the ANC’s Mafikeng conference in December 1997 and deputy president a decade later at Polokwane, where he defeated Mbeki’s candidate. Widely respected within the party, he had a low-key manner and no independent power base to threaten Zuma’s. In May 2008, Motlanthe had become an MP. Two months later, under pressure from the newly dominant Zuma faction, Mbeki added Motlanthe to his cabinet, a move widely viewed as an effort to ensure a smooth transition to a Zuma government. On September 25, Parliament duly elected Motlanthe the third president of postapartheid South Africa and its first Tswana leader.46 Thereafter, various high-ranking Mbeki stalwarts announced their resignations.

  The Judiciary

  The Mbeki-Zuma affair highlighted the prominence of the judiciary in South African life. In Mbeki’s second term, the judiciary continued to refine its stance on socioeconomic rights. In 2004 and 2005, the Constitutional Court was at odds with the government.47 Then, in 2008, after a three-year hiatus, the court issued five rulings on socioeconomic rights in cases concerning access to water, electricity, adequate housing, and basic sanitation.48 While the court extended the meaning of socioeconomic rights by expanding the list of entitlements, it limited its involvement in policy making by deferentially adopting a weak reasonableness standard for judging government behavior.

  For their part, Mbeki, in a retreat from his 2003 attack, and the ANC affirmed the value of judicial independence both in the ANC’s 2005 Statement of the National Executive Committee49 and in Mbeki’s address at the ceremony to mark Chaskalson’s retirement and the installation of Chief Justice Pius Langa that June.50 Despite the high-minded language at that event, scandal was bringing the judiciary into disrepute, a dangerous development threatening the democratic order. Particularly notable was a polarizing episode involving Cape judge John Hlophe. In 2005 and 2006, there were four allegations of misconduct by Hlophe, including financial impropriety and racism, which the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) referred for investigation.51

  In October 2007, in a divided vote, the JSC concluded, largely on the basis of technicalities,52 that there was not enough evidence for a public inquiry to be held.53 The decision caused a brawl. Johann Kriegler, the former head of the Independent Electoral Commission at the time of South Africa’s first nonracial elections and later a Constitutional and Appeals Court judge, attacked Hlophe in the Sunday Times,54 as did nine senior members of the Cape Bar Council in the Cape Times, asserting that Hlophe was “unfit for the Bench” and calling upon him to resign.55 A number of University of Cape Town law professors were in accord.56 Conversely, the Black Lawyers’ Association’s judicial committee chairman Dumisa Ntsebeza assailed Kriegler’s “unsolicited attack” on Hlophe, and, derivatively, on the JSC.57

  The next year, Hlophe was at the center of a controversy about judicial and prosecutorial independence. At the end of May, the Constitutional Court filed a complaint against Hlophe, with the JSC alleging he had tried to influence improperly “one or more cases,” including the Zuma corruption case.58 The ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe called the Constitutional Court’s behavior “counterrevolution-ary.” Subsequently, the Johannesburg High Court decided that the Constitutional Court had violated Hlophe’s rights by filing its complaint publicly.59 The judges’ and jurists’ travails did not enhance South Africa’s image abroad, the very image Mbeki so assiduously tried to cultivate.

  Mbeki’s Foreign Policy

  Just as domestically Mbeki’s lofty pronouncements clashed with the reality of a not easily transformed South Africa, so too did the complexities of international affairs compromise Mbeki’s vision of “build[ing] a global movement of human solidarity.”60 Mbeki devoted much time and energy to foreign affairs—critics said too much, in light of the domestic situation. He was so often away that the media sometimes referred to him as the president who most frequently visited South Africa. In 2004 alone, he made twenty-two African trips. He championed democracy and the rule of law, but, with his experience in dealing with members of the National party in the apartheid era, he preferred quiet diplomacy to public denunciation of African despots. Via his travels, he gained recognition as an effective spokesman not only for South Africa but also for all of sub-Saharan Africa and for developing countries everywhere, as he campaigned for debt relief, foreign investment, poverty reduction, and reform of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.N. Security Council. He kept the country at the forefront of global issues when South Africa hosted the World Conference against Racism and the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

  Mbeki worked hard to create rapport with African governments, notably the new civilian government of Nigeria; he helped Mozambique cope with a catastrophic flood; he established cordial relations with Western leaders, especially President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair; and, building on Mandela’s 1998 recognition of China at the expense of the country’s apartheid-era ally Taiwan, he signed a controversial trade agreement with the Chinese president Jiang Zemin.61 He also joined in a continent-wide effort led by intellectuals to give substance to the idea of an African Renaissance.62 In 2002, he was a major figure in establishing the African Union (AU), which replaced the moribund Organization of African Unity, and in the creation of the union’s Constitutive Act, replete with multiple human rights provisions.63 Later, in a politically astute move much like New York’s offer to host the
United Nations after World War II, South Africa became the permanent home of the AU’s legislature, the Pan African Parliament.64 Mbeki also was instrumental in establishing the AU’s development initiative, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), replete with an African Peer Review Mechanism.65 In cooperation with the United Nations, the government sent peacekeeping missions to Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mbeki became a key figure in peace talks in those countries as well as in Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire. Indeed, Mbeki, with his talk of an African Renaissance and years of diplomatic experience, frequently called for African political disputes to be resolved by African players and for Africa to end its reliance on foreign aid and the political toadying by African governments that accompanied it.