Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  'Dar' was the place to study in Africa in the Sixties and Museveni made some vital political contacts. His generation of students included John Garang, the Sudanese rebel leader, and Paul Kagame, the vice-president and eminence grise of Rwanda after the genocide. Laurent Kabila also passed through Dar at the time, although he appears to have spent more time drinking and womanizing than planning for the future. Just as many of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet colleagues had studied together at Cambridge University, so years after his graduation Museveni worked with his old student friends to forge a cohesive central African bloc. But before that was possible he had to fight a long and gruelling battle to wrest control of Uganda from two of Africa's more egregious tyrants.

  When Idi Amin took power in 1971 in a coup, he was initially welcomed in the West. Milton Obote, whom he ousted, had a sinister record. Indeed MI6 and Mossad are believed to have connived in Amin's takeover; a highly regarded former NCO in the King's African Rifles and Uganda's heavyweight boxing champion, he had often declared his devotion to the queen and empire. But he soon fell out of favour in the West as he expelled the prosperous Asian middle class, and his death squads slaughtered tens of thousands of rival tribesmen and suspected opponents. African leaders remained supportive long after the horrors of his regime were exposed: the Conqueror of the British Empire, as he styled himself, was appointed head of the OAU in 1975 when his reign of terror was at its height. But he finally outraged even his African neighbours and was over thrown in 1979 by a force of Ugandan rebels, including the young Museveni, backed by Tanzanian soldiers who pillaged their way to Kampala.

  In a depressing postscript Obote had hardly been restored to power in his devastated capital before he set about trumping Amin's atrocities. Returning to the bush with, as legend has it, just twenty-seven men, Museveni forged one of Africa's most renowned guerrilla armies and led them to victory five years later. Shortly after he took power, a British diplomat met him outside Kampala and was startled to find the battle-hardened guerrilla was a studious, quick-witted man. 'His eye for detail was remarkable,' the diplomat recalled. 'He had just taken over the country and he was going through a report on an alleged incident of racism by a British officer charged with training the Ugandan army, point by point, without missing a thing.' Museveni's style impressed the West beyond the dawn of the millennium, but misgivings grew.

  Museveni is a firm believer in the argument that Africa is not ready for multi-party democracy. But he has not used this as a pretext for a single-party state. Instead he set up a 'no party' state, divesting authority to a network of village revolutionary councils which were formed during his long fight in the bush. He bases his vision on the parable about 'sowing the mustard seed' in St Matthew's gospel. According to the parable, 'The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.'

  Museveni argues that before the 'mustard seed' of democracy and freedom can be sown, Uganda first has to be cleared of 'the rocks and weeds' of the corrupt former system. He fends off the inevitable criticism that this is a guise for dictatorship by attesting the grievous record of African political parties polarizing down tribal lines, and by arguing that Uganda is still pre-industrial, and hence needs a peasant-based system.

  'Western democracies criticise our system of government but we ignore them,' he wrote in his autobiography Sowing the Mustard Seed. 'Their opinion is not our concern. I consider it arrogant that the whole world must be managed in the same way. The substance of democracy is essentially the same - governance by the population, but the forms must be different, depending on the situations.'3

  His is a striking vision, independent, self-assured and rational.

  What is more, it is not just talk. The economy grew between 5 and 10 per cent annually between 1990 and 2000. Kampala bounced back from the grim days of the Eighties. By the late Nineties it was one of the more efficient capitals north of the Limpopo, a testimony to massive investment by Washington, where Museveni is regarded as America's most important regional ally. He won further credit by inviting back the Asians whom Amin had expelled. Businessmen applaud his no-non sense calls for Africans to take responsibility for their own destiny, and also his belief in privatization, which he once called 'fantastic, a magic solution to the problem of inefficiency'.

  Moreover he cannot be bothered with looking for the old scapegoats. He startled South African MPs in parliament in Cape Town when he told them that blaming colonialism is 'like a drunken man blaming someone who steals his hat'. On the same visit to South Africa he reinforced his reputation as his own man when he castigated the 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' habits of African leaders. In June 1997, in an interview with the Johannesburg Sunday Independent, he described the OAU as a 'trade union of criminals' and laughed when asked about his record in toppling tyrants. 'Fighting black dictators is not a recommended activity in Africa. You are supposed to accept black dictators because they hide under the cloak of sovereignty. So if anyone fights them he must do it clandestinely as much as possible.'

  But Museveni is no stooge. He believed in working with the West but on his own terms, and he does not hesitate to make clear when he feels their prescriptions are wrong. He has tackled Aids in the same direct fashion. In the mid-Nineties as Aids claimed tens of thousands of lives a year in Africa, most African leaders were too embarrassed to acknowledge it, but not Museveni. In the Eighties Uganda was the worst hit country in the world. While Museveni had no compunction in calling it a

  'white man's' disease, he broke the 'taboo' and instituted an education programme that has led to the only recorded decline in African infection rates.

  I hitched a lift one evening from Kampala to the Rwandan border and, struck by the Aids awareness roadside billboards encouraging abstinence, fidelity and condoms, sat up through the night talking to my driver. Accustomed to a social conservatism that straddles every strata of African society, I was astonished by his frankness. He discussed his and his family's sexual habits with an ease that eludes many in the West. When I commented on his candour he replied simply: 'I have lost a brother and three of my closest friends.'

  The West hoped that Rawlings' Ghana and Museveni's Uganda offered a blueprint for other post-Big Man states: economic reform administered by a stable if authoritarian government - in short, the elusive enlightened dictator. East Africa in the late Eighties and early Nineties had a flowering of such leaders, for whom democracy and human rights were less important than self-sufficiency, economic reform and peace.

  'There are some seeds of a new Africa,' Museveni said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in March 1998, shortly before Mr. Clinton's visit. 'The changes aren't everywhere and I would not want to call Uganda a model. But certainly there are some issues that are relevant to the whole of black Africa which we are addressing, and one of those is the most efficient way of producing wealth.'4

  But his regime raised the age-old dilemma of autocracy - when does the freedom to buy a banana in peace cease to justify the lack of the right to elect a leader?

  *

  His achievements were impressive only in the context of the chaos and anarchy that prevailed elsewhere in the 8os and 90s. Uganda's economic growth rate, while one of Africa's success stories, started from a tiny base. Notwithstanding his triumphs on the battle field, Uganda is beset by the ravages of three rebel guerrilla armies backed by Museveni's old enemies in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. His answer was to meet force with force, leading to atrocities which even his staunchest international backers found hard to excuse. In the 2000s as more and more states in Africa achieved stability and recorded high economic growth so his lessons seemed less relevant.

  He over-reached himself when he fostered a rebellion against his old protégé, Kabila, in the Democratic Republic of Congo before he had lined up the rest of
the region on his side. His hubris plunged central Africa into further chaos and shattered his dream of forging a central African commercial bloc from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, while better than Mobutu's Zaire and Abacha's Nigeria, Museveni's Uganda is far from pure. His brother, Major-General Salim Saleh, one of Uganda's wealthiest businessmen, had to resign from his post as a senior government advisor after admitting his role in an illegal deal to buy secretly 49 per cent of the country's largest bank. The scandal followed the drafting of a confidential World Bank report that exposed high-level graft of public and donor funds.

  Museveni, the archetypal 'new' African leader, does not wear a leopard-skin hat. But, as history has proven so many times, the theory of an enlightened dictator is hard to sustain.

  The striking exception to the rest of Africa - or so the world fervently hoped – was to be South Africa under Thabo Mbeki who was president from 1999 until 2008. He was groomed for high office almost from birth. His father, Govan Mbeki, was one of the ANC frontrunners of Mandela's generation. Indeed he clashed with the 'Old Man' on policy many times on Robben Island. Nearly ten years after his release I travelled to the Mbeki Township home in Port Elizabeth seeking insights into the mind of Mandela's heir apparent.

  Mbeki senior, then in his early eighties, was too wily a politician to discuss his son, but his quick mind, and the shelves brimming with political histories and philosophy, left little doubt that Thabo was raised in a rigorous intellectual environment.

  Thabo Mbeki was steeped in politics from his earliest years. Attending his first rally aged ten and joining the party four years later he was sent into exile in 1963, shortly before the authorities effectively closed down the ANC. Twenty-seven years were to pass before his return in 1990, exposing him to the realities of world economics and politics. One of his contemporaries at Sussex University, where he studied economics in the Sixties, recalled to me how even then, in the darkest days of the anti-apartheid struggle, he was known on the campus as a future leader of South Africa. She also recalled how his charisma made him one of the most sought-after consorts, a quality which stood him in good stead later when he was charged with wooing white business.

  After representing the ANC all over Africa in the early Seventies he was appointed political secretary to Oliver Tambo, the party leader, in 1975 and soon showed signs of his master's political pragmatism. He discreetly distanced himself from the Communist Party, the ANC's ally, several years before the Berlin Wall came down, although he was careful never to make a formal renunciation of the party line. In the late Eighties he became the ANC's unofficial foreign minister, a position to which his easy-going manner, conservative dress sense and suave charm made him ideally suited. He was the obvious choice to head ANC delegations at secret talks with the Afrikaner establishment and, still more sensitively, with apartheid intelligence officers.

  On his return to South Africa after 1990 his omnipresent pipe and his penchant for suits entrenched his reputation among whites as the kindly face of the ANC. He was called in to mollify the white right wing and came up with a skilful face saving formula to allow them a forum to debate the possibility of a white homeland. Visitors invariably came away from one on-one meetings impressed by the sharpness of his mind and his grasp of South Africa's problems. Mbeki has a reflective demeanour, which endeared him to the foreign leaders and financiers whose support he and South Africa needed. He was an expert conciliator. He was also an economic moderate. His most important intervention was to steer the ANC away from its traditional statist policies, presiding over the formation of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution macro-economic strategy, which backed privatisation, balanced budgets and broadly an orthodox macro economic approach. As I left his residence at Pretoria after an interview, Julian Ogilvie Thompson, the chairman of Anglo American, the mining conglomerate that dominated South Africa's economy, was arriving for one of Mbeki's regular kitchen meetings with top financiers.

  As soon as he was confirmed as Mandela's deputy, doubts started to emerge about his leadership qualities, particularly among whites. Partly this was because his vision of the future was starker than Mandela's. While Mandela called for reconciliation, Mbeki's rallying cry was transformation. He had fallen from grace among the white chattering classes, he told me in an interview in 1996, because he dared to air unmentionables.

  'The creation of a non-racial society is a painful process. I say - very foolishly - things that I shouldn't. I say, "Look at the press - should we not be involved in its deracialization?" Then a debate begins about what is wrong and what is right and people form opinions, and so your nice deputy president ceases to be a nice deputy president. When we begin to grapple with the real issues, when you pass beyond the Gloriai Hallelujahi What a lovely thing we've done then the problems begin. You cannot have reconciliation without transformation.'5

  As he assumed more of the day-to-day responsibilities for running the state, however, so more diverse misgivings emerged. When he stood in for Mandela at a South Africa v. Brazil football match in Soweto he was ten minutes late. It was the biggest game in months and the ground was packed. But the opening ceremony and the kick-off were delayed until Mbeki arrived, prompting angry mutters from the mainly black crowd: Mandela would never have made such an elementary mistake. It was a trivial incident, more to do with style than substance, but it strengthened the perception that Mbeki was more at home in a cabal than on a podium and that he had a disdain for the popular touches that voters liked.. This lack was to undermine him in the later stages of his presidency when his former ally turned rival, the populist Jacob Zuma, challenged him for and then won the ANC leadership, partly through his crowd-pleasing rhetoric and ways.

  Mbeki's golden-boy image was tarnished more seriously by his controversial attitude towards the press. The white liberal newspapers which had targeted apartheid were subject to a regular sniping from the new black intellectual elite attached to his office. The ANC's resentment that the press was still dominated by white journalists was understandable. But calls for a 'patriotic' media had disturbing echoes of more autocratic states.

  When Mbeki rebuked the press for covering only 17 per cent of Mandela's five-hour closing speech as ANC president he was opening himself to ridicule. His complaint had added piquancy given that the speech, which was heavily critical of white attitudes, was widely believed to have been drafted by Mbeki's office, furthering the impression that despite his long years in exile he did not truly value a free press.

  His aides countered that he was the victim of a white anti ANC campaign. He contended it is one of the drawbacks of succeeding an international idol that whatever you do will be seen as a let-down. But the most direct attack on Mbeki could not be shrugged off by his office as 'racism' as it came from none other than Bishop Tutu, South Africa's favourite son after Mandela. Incensed because Mbeki rejected criticisms of the ANC in the Truth Commission's final report, the bishop warned the ANC against becoming the country's 'new oppressors'. The report condemned the ANC for the bombing of civilian targets, the execution and torture of dissidents and suspected informers and the 'necklace' killing of blacks who opposed its tactics against apartheid. The report made clear that the ANC's abuses were a sideshow compared to the crimes committed by the white security forces, and a clear distinction was drawn between the 'legitimate' struggle against white rule and the 'injustice' of apartheid. But in a significant lapse of judgement Mbeki rejected the criticism and tried to get the report blocked by a court injunction. Tutu did not need to consider his response. 'Our struggle was against tin gods, or who thought themselves to be little gods,' he said. 'We didn't struggle to remove them in order to replace them with others of a different complexion.' Part of the rationale for Mbeki's more controversial pronouncements was to secure his position among the ANC's rank and file; it was important that he proved he was not the patsy of the whites. But he does have an autocratic streak. His diplomatic veneer masked steel forged in the years of clandestine exile po
litics. One by one in the mid-Nineties potential rivals or challengers to his position as heir apparent fell by the wayside. An acquaintance from his years in Britain recalled that his friends at Sussex University used to joke that one day they would be lost in Africa and they would have the choice of going before 'Chief Wanga Banga' or Thabo Mbeki- and, so the joke went, they would all opt for the chief.

  His early moves in office, following his election in May 1999, were for the most part hailed for their good sense. He swiftly made clear he would not be dictated to by the trade unions. Indeed his handling of the economy was broadly endorsed by the business community. History will give him high marks for going against the wishes of the Left and the unions and backing an orthodox macroeconomic strategy. But despite his clear views his government made little inroad into the pressing domestic dilemma of unemployment. Also he had two other great failings: tackling AIDS, and the crisis across the border in Zimbabwe. His approach to the former met despair and outrage from international medical associations as he championed a campaign effectively to block the provision of antiretroviral drugs for the hundreds of thousands of people with AIDS. This was overturned only at the very end of his presidency. He was also reluctant to use South Africa’s regional influence on Robert Mugabe.

  11 - Comrade Bob

  Robert Mugabe - Playing the Colonial Card

  Like most 'Big Men', Robert Gabriel Mugabe has little time for the prying concerns of the Western press. But unlike many of his peers, the Zimbabwean President is a fiery debater. Indeed he rather fancies himself as a latter-day sophist putting down ignorant questioners. And while his press office exists purely to thwart would-be interviewers, on the road there is always the chance that he will take the bait of an upturned microphone to air his disdain for the Fourth Estate. It was in the hope of just such an encounter that I followed him in April 1995 to a rally on the eve of the third parliamentary election since independence from Rhodesia.