Resolute Mbeki sees off his leftwing critics
President's attack takes fight out of 'disloyal' dissidents in battle for
the soul of the ANC
Rory Carroll in Stellenbosch Tuesday December 17, 2002 The Guardian
President Thabo Mbeki laid bare a resolve to rule South Africa for the next
seven years yesterday after rallying the African National Congress around
his leadership and cowing party critics who wanted to loosen his control.
Addressing the first day of the party conference, he made it evident that
he will crush potential challengers, and promised to accelerate the
transfer of economic resources to black people.
He was upstaged by the rapturous welcome given to his predecessor, Nelson
Mandela, but ANC officials said he had shown that he was dominating the
approach to the 2004 general election, when the ANC is expected to win
another five years in office.
An expectation that allies in the trade unions and Communist party will use
the five-day conference to "battle for the party's soul" by confronting the
leadership on its policies on unemployment, poverty and Aids faded
yesterday when they gave a guarded welcome to Mr Mbeki's speech, apparently
accepting that they are too marginal to resist.
Held every five years, the conference of 3,000 delegates has the task of
electing new leaders and debating government policy, but no significant
change to strategy or challenge to the leadership is expected this year,
despite the tension between the president and what he calls the "ultra-left".
A national strike and street rallies were called before the conference in
protest at economic policies which have balanced the budget and kept
inflation low but failed to check the deepening poverty and unemployment.
For its 51st conference the ANC chose Stellenbosch, an Afrikaner university
town in the Western Cape considered the intellectual cradle of the
apartheid policy which was swept away by the ANC victory in 1994 and its
return to office with nearly two-thirds of the vote five years later.
Mr Mbeki called his critics in the party disloyal, and accused them of
accepting foreign funds and "other forms of persuasion" to act as an
opposition. "We must continue to rely on our membership and the masses of
our people to defeat these careerists who naturally are the heroes and
heroines of those who are opposed to our movement," he said.
"A manifestation of this has been the persistent practice among some of our
people to bad-mouth our country as loudly and as often as they can."
Referring apparently to the Eastern Cape, where the ANC left has been
accused of mismanagement, he said people had used money to buy votes and
had corrupted party procedures to capture power.
He blamed civil servants and their unions for not implementing government
policies. "Our national conference will have to improve the internal
accountability of our leadership as a whole."
Mr Mbeki, 60, is not a dynamic speaker and was greeted with polite
applause, and towards the end of his two-hour speech the delegates sang and
danced when Mr Mandela, 84, entered the hall and moved slowly to join those
seated on the podium.
Visibly vexed, Mr Mbeki did not smile when he attempted what aides said was
a joke: "Hurry up and sit down Tata," he said. Tata, which can be loosely
translated as "uncle", expresses affection or derision depending on tone
and context.
Relations between the two men have grown sour in the past year since Mr
Mandela supported those prodding the government into distributing free and
cheap drugs to poor people with HIV. Mr Mbeki, who has questioned the link
between the virus and Aids, made two glancing references to the pandemic in
a list of diseases he linked to poverty.
He emphasised continuity with his popular predecessor by quoting repeatedly
from Mr Mandela's presidential address at the 1997 conference. But that
text is believed to have been written by Mr Mbeki, then deputy president.
Promising to continue the privatisation of state assets and other
market-friendly economic policies, he expressed hope for Africa's
"renaissance" and said an over-arching empowerment charter was needed to
give a bigger stake to black people.
"The bulk of our economy, including the land, remains predominantly
white-owned. Wealth, income, opportunity and skills continue to be
distributed according to racial patterns," he said.
He voiced hope of solving the "controversial issues" relating to President
Robert Mugabe, whose farm seizures have devastated the Zimbabwean economy.
"Like the leadership of the people of Zimbabwe," he said, "we are
interested that everything is done to address the challenge of ensuring a
better life for all the people of this sister country, both black and white."
