uThabo

Thabo Mbeki possesses such knee-melting intellect that there are days I wish we could give him one term as President of Kenya (though he may yet rule us as the President of Africa). Yes he has his faults: alleged paranoia, alleged Napoleonic complex, ‘too’ intellectual... too much of an ideas man, always traveling around the world instead of addressing the needs of his country, too aloof and not a man of the people, doesn’t recognize that HIV causes AIDS…

Despite these allegations, I think he is one of the most attractive African presidents (the lure of silvering temples and an honest-to-goodness thinking brain beneath them) and quite Clinton-esque (the positive and negative attributes). He knows how to put together a good team to look after his country’s economy, and is masterful in his use of the race card (as a stiletto, club, sword of Damocles…), and in the use of his office through his weekly “letters from the president”, and through his speeches to address and upstage critics. You can count on him to constantly remind the oppressors that they denied him and others like him the chance at a normal life, denied him his son and other children that might have been, and forced him to give his life to the struggle for liberation (even as his party embraces and absorbs the ‘former’ oppressors).

My favorite of his speeches remains the one he gave 10 years ago at the adoption of the new South African constitution. Every time I read that speech, ‘I am an African,’ I am overcome by an indomitable hope for this continent... "However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!" He recently gave the 4^th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture at Wits University on July 29^th and I was fortunate enough to watch it on television and to download the text here because the newspaper reports (as usual) did not do it justice. I enjoyed the delicious irony of the content and spirit of his speech delivered against a backdrop of (a) an audience that had blinged all the way to the lecture theatre, (b) the way in which “the ordinary people” (campus community) were kept away (with physical barriers) from “the big people”, and (c) the transformation of the area outside the lecture theatre … best described as “pimp my piazza”.

He addressed the need for this country to repair its soul, and for the "haves" to care about the "have nots". Clearly a controversial call because we who are in the grip of capitalism (a system whose time has passed, but which continues to hold on with its last fingernails...) want to know why our "hard-won" wealth should be shared with those who snoozed and lost, while we schmoozed and won.

He addressed the issue of morality spot on when he said: "To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open the door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. Yet granted that I should love my neighbour as myself the questions which under modern conditions of large-scale economic organisation, remain for solutions like who precisely is my neighbour? And how exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?"

And he may as well have been speaking of Kenya, or any other African country when he remarked: "In these circumstances personal wealth and the public communication of the message that we are people of wealth, becomes at the same time the means by which we communicate the message that we are worthy citizens of our community...

the meaning of freedom has come to be defined not by the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their geographic location, the company we keep and what we do as part of that company...

It is perfectly obvious that many in our society, having absorbed the value system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that, for them personal success and fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth...

What this means is that many in our society have come to accept that what is socially correct is not the proverbial expression - "manners maketh the man" but the notion that each one of us is as excellent a human being as our demonstrated wealth suggests!"

I for one will be sorry when he steps down as President in 2009.