Constitutional Hill

Madladla-Routledge

Your days are numbered, Mr President

Oct 14th, 2007
by Pierre De Vos.
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Journalists seem hardwired to exaggerate threats to press freedom and they are not averse to making themselves the hero of their own stories either. I was therefore rather sceptical when I first read the lead story in the Sunday Times this morning.

The story claims that its editor, Mondli Makanya, and its deputy managing editor, Jocelyn Maker, are going to be arrested because of the possession of the health records of Dr Beetroot, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. Inside the paper Justice Malala turns up the heat even further, arguing that President Mbeki is a liar and that he and his acolytes are raping South Africa.  

Aren’t they being a bit hysterical just because one two of their own are going to be arrested for breaking the law? Surely they do not think they are above the law like Jackie Selebi? And surely the clause in the National Health Act that prohibits the possession of a person’s health records is so overbroad and so vague that it will most probably be found to be unconstitutional if challenged.?

And yet in the present climate – what with Vusi Pikoli and Nozizwe Madladla-Routledge fired and Jackie Selebi sitting pretty – it is not so easy to dismiss the people at the Sunday Times as hysterical or paranoid. The fact that a very senior police inspector was apparently asked to investigate the Sunday Times while thousands of murders and rapes go unsolved seems at best like a scandalous misdirection of resources.

But if it is true – as the Sunday Times story suggests – that important people in Pretoria (Jackie Selebi?) placed pressure on the police to deal more swiftly with this matter, then a clear pattern seems to be emerging: cross the President or his allies and the state institutions will be used and abused relentlessly to cut you down to size. Suddenly all those paranoid allegations by Jacob Zuma supporters seems rather credible.

This is deeply troubling for at least two reasons.

First, if true it would conform that the President is prepared to do anything to get his way – even if that means using his influence with those cadres deployed by the ANC to positions in independent institutions to pursue his enemies. It suggests that our President is ruthless and that he does not respect the constitutional and legal boundaries that should exist between him and those in charge of other state institutions.

Secondly, it must make us wonder what happens if the President abuses his power in the way alleged? Where does that leave our constitutional democracy, our independent courts, our institutions that have to safeguard democracy. If the President gets away with the firing of Pikoli and the persecution of the Sunday Times, will people in future be brave enough to stand up to him? Will we have more Vusi Pikoli’s or will we all cower and cringe and say nothing?

This is where I am an optimist. Unlike Justice Malala, I do not see a society meekly going along while President Mbeki does a Vladimir Putin on us and steal our democracy from under our noses. There are powerful voices in the print and electronic media and powerful civil society organs that will resist any moves to take away our democracy.

There are of course the traditional bootlickers like Christine Quanta or Essop Pahad that would claim the earth is flat if the President says so, but by and large we are not a passive nation. Yes, when a issue is racialised we tend to hunker down with our own kind, but President Mbeki’s weird and paranoid behaviour crosses all boundaries and must be upsetting to all but the most sycophantic ANC supporters.

That is why we should watch out for the Mbeki arse-lickers in the next few days because surely they will try and racialise the criticism of Mbeki. But I do not think it will work – just as the attempt to racialise the Treatment Action Campaigns fight for ARV’s could not be racialised. Watch out Mbeki, South Africans are not stupid and they like democracy too much.

Surely, your days must be numbered, Mr President?

Want to sign this petition?

Aug 22nd, 2007
by Pierre De Vos.
No comments yet
If you feel aggrieved about the firing of Deputy Minister Nozizwe Madlala Routledge, you may want to sign this Internet petition. It won’t bring her back but it might make you feel better…

Mbeki: Sad prisoner of Western culture and values

Aug 17th, 2007
by Pierre De Vos.
6 comments

With a President like Thabo Mbeki there is bound never to be a dull moment in South African politics. (How boring it must be to live in the Netherlands or Sweden!). Our President’s most recent ANC Today letter is particularly shocking and salacious because it attacks fired Deputy Minister Madladla-Routledge and those who support her in the most apocalyptic of terms.

Towards the end of the long and slightly rambling letter, President Mbeki gets to the heart of his complaint, revealing more of himself, perhaps, than he might have intended. To my mind the letter tragically demonstrates President Mbeki’s great weakness which has clouded so much of the good work he has done.

He writes:

In the recent past the ANC, the government and our people as a whole have had to contend with elaborate and sophisticated disinformation campaigns intended to destabilise the ANC, the government, our democracy and country, not disconnected from similar anti-ANC campaigns during the apartheid years…

Whatever the endgame in this regard, we, and the overwhelming majority of our people, will have been painfully alerted to the fact that not everybody in our country and abroad, is happy that the ANC enjoys the confidence of the masses of our people. Equally, others are unhappy that, contrary to the predictions of the doomsayers about African countries, we have managed the transition from white minority rule to non-racial, democratic rule as well as we have, thus making the statement in practice that cannot be disproved with facts, that categorically, there exists no genetic fault that condemns Africa and Africans forever to be defined as a failed continent and civilisation.

Is it the case that to win the approval of the loudest voices in the world of the contemporary global communication system we must behave in a manner that is consistent with their stereotypes? Who will determine who our heroes and heroines will be?

In essence he is saying that there are many people and groups who wish to destroy the ANC because the ANC is disproving the racial stereotype that black people are not competent to govern. All those who criticize the government or point out its failures are therefore an enemy of the people because he or she is merely reinforcing racist stereotypes.

The tragedy of this line of reasoning is of course that President Mbeki seems to have been caught up in an endless and useless game in which all the power is handed back to the white, racists West. Because he is obsessed with the inherent racism of Western culture, he is for ever trying – sometimes it seems at any cost – to show those bastards that he and the ANC can govern just as well as any of those governments anywhere else in the world.

I agree with President Mbeki that there is an inherent racism in Western culture and politics (as well as an inherent homophobia and sexism), but I think it is useless, demeaning and counter-productive to base one’s whole world view and one’s actions as a leader on a crusade trying to show “them” that you are just as good as they are. This can never be successful because the Western cultural and political influence is all-pervasive and powerful.

In any case, why would we want to compare ourselves to Western governments when we have suffered 300 years of colonialism and apartheid and thus face numerous challenges – many of these not of the making of the ANC or President Mbeki?

Ironically, by hinting in a slightly paranoid and unhinged manner that the Dark Lord Sauron is out to get the ANC, the President seems to play into the hands of Western powers and the South African media whose stereotype of black leaders include the expectation that the leader would not face the often harsh political, economic and social realities in his or her country but would rather mutter on about Dark Forces and Shadows.

The fact that President Mbeki cannot see that Minister Manto Tshabalala Msimang has behaved exactly like the Western stereotype of an African leader – down to the garlic and olive oil, the “dizzy spells”, the buffoonish tirades – seems to suggest that President Mbeki is so infested with anger, hatred and shame that he has lost all ability to see a reality shared not only by Western elites, but by most South Africans too.

Thus, he cannot admit that many babies of black mothers have died needlessly because of problems with the health system. He cannot get himself to accept that HIV is mostly a sexually transmitted disease affecting poor Africans in South Africa. He cannot admit that his Health minister has failed to do her job in a scandalous and criminal manner. To admit that one black person in his cabinet is an incompetent fool, would be for him like permitting that all black people are incompetent fools. Thus he is trapped in a never ending cycle of denial and response – instead of doing what needs to be done regardless of what people in the West might think.

But there is also a contradiction at the heart of the letter which makes me wonder whether President Mbeki is as clever as people say. Maybe he uses the discourse of race in a tactical and Machiavellian manner to gain sympathy and to outwit and obliterate opponents? In his letter, President Mbeki states that he knows of no Minister or Deputy Minister with which he interact virtually everyday, who is not an independent thinker and a hard worker, who behaves like a sheep and a mindless sycophant. (He also does not know anyone who has ever died of AIDS related illnesses, but that is another story.) President Mbeki then states that:

Given my constitutional and political responsibilities, defined by our Constitution and statutes, I am quite ready to listen to any contrary view in this regard, regardless of its origin.

Yet, if the rest of the letter is saying anything, it is saying that those who criticise the ANC are racists pigs, enemies of the movement and the people, that they are out to destroy the ANC and thus are not worth taking seriously – no matter to what extent their views might be reflecting what the President would call “objective reality”. It seems then, that the President is not really prepared to listen unless what is said is acceptable to him – everything else is part of the Dark Lord Sauron’s plot to entrench racism and oppression.

This is very handy, of course, because one never has to admit to any mistakes, never have to say you are sorry and never have to be wrong. On the other hand, if President Mbeki is cynically using race here, it is a brilliant and devious move. After all, if we agree with the President it would mean that we have to accept that opponents of the ANC and of the President (opponents of any race and any party) are evil enemies of the state who can never level valid criticism against the ANC government or the President.

Finally he fires someone….

Aug 14th, 2007
by Pierre De Vos.
2 comments
I have missed the drama of the firing of the Deputy Health Minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, because of a trip to Senegal, where (I imagine) the services provided at Frere Hospital (even before they shipped in more equipment to please the Minister) would have been regarded as quite good or even excellent.

It is therefore tempting to agree with Business Day editor, David Bruce, that the firing is not that a big a deal. If the Deputy Minister lived in Senegal she would have been hysterical all the time shouting “national emergency” every time she left her air-conditioned office or tried to eat the local food. Besides, article 93 of the Constitution allows the President to appoint and fire Deputy Ministers and if he thinks she was not a team player or that she made the Minister look too stupid and heartless, he would be well within his rights to fire her.

However, the firing must be seen in the light of the President’s infamous “bikini” ANC Today letter in which he claimed that the newspaper had lied about the conditions at Frere Hospital in order to hurt the ANC. As I wrote on this Blog, the letter revealed that our President lives in a bubble and is in deep denial about the problems faced by his government.

The firing therefore acts as a stark but scary reminder of why the President is so oblivious to the South African reality as lived and suffered by real people with flesh and blood who cry and bleed and die. In his letter firing Madlala-Routledge, the President said that the Constitution requires Ministers or Deputy Ministers to be team-players, but he seems to think this means that they must always toe the official line and must never be critical of the collective wisdom of the cabinet.

No wonder the President acts in ways that can appear cold and heartless and out of touch with real people and their problems. Obviously those around him are too scared and intimidated by him to tell him the unvarnished truth. I can well imagine that he would use the kind of obfuscating bullying tactics on full display in some of the weekly letters to shut up any advisers or ministers who do not reflect the “objective truth” as ordained by our President.

And now we know that those who are not intimidated, are the only one’s who run the risk of being fired. So if you are stupid or lazy (or both), you can keep your job as long as you never question the wisdom of the Chief – even when that wisdom has nothing to do what is actually happening and how people are really experiencing the world.

President Mbeki has many admirable attributes. He is intellectually gifted, often thoughtful, respectful of the Rule of Law and the Constitution, and a stickler for rules. But he seems to me to have a fatal flaw in that he has a messiah complex and thinks he alone knows what is happening and how to deal with things in the best way. Because he sees all facts as ideological, all facts can be re-interpreted from his ideological point of view. This means that those “facts” that do not fit his understanding of “objective reality” can easily be rejected as the inventions of those who are out to destroy the ANC.

This leads our President up blind alleys and into dead-ends.

Thus, President Mbeki decided that a “virus cannot cause a syndrome” and blasted anyone who disagreed with him (ask Tony Leon or Zackie Achmat), thus setting in motion a dynamic which have probably led to the avoidable HIV infection of hundreds of thousands of South Africans and the premature death of just as many who never got access to anti-retroviral drugs.

He fires the Deputy Minister for showing compassion and understanding of the health crisis faced by many ordinary South Africans, yet continues to support a Minister who by all accounts is a nasty, selfish and vindictive individual with a drinking problem. Is it just me who thinks that he will be judged quite harshly by history because of this – despite his many fantastic qualities which otherwise would have made him a hero for many of us.