JONNY STEINBERG: Thabo Mbeki’s new take on Zuma is naked paranoia

In what has often been a dull election season, with the big parties playing to type, one thing over the past two weeks has stood out: the fleeting presence of Thabo Mbeki in the ANC’s campaign. He has given one of the worst performances of his political career and it is worth pondering why.

Mbeki used his time on the campaign trail to defend his legacy. The country was doing pretty well before his party recalled him, he pointed out; since then, everything has gone south. One expected him to say that and so he might. But what comes as a surprise is his explanation. Dark conspiracies, he says, linked to the old regime, are what brought him down and Zuma up, and took the country nearly to ruin.

His first talk of conspiracy comes in explanation for the load-shedding that began under his watch. It is not true, he said, that his government ignored warnings that it must build new capacity. Rather, the crisis was “deliberately engineered within Eskom ... Station managers defied orders to replenish their coal stocks”.

Since Mbeki made that speech, I’ve spoken to two people who were, respectively, on Eskom’s executive and its board at the time. Neither has any memory of sabotage or insubordination.

In any event, Mbeki seems to have forgotten that he apologised at the time, blaming his government’s failure to plan on unexpected levels of economic growth. Even that was a lame excuse, for we know now that in 1999 outgoing Eskom CEO Allen Morgan warned Mbeki that SA’s electricity generation surplus would cease in 2007, a remarkably accurate prediction.

All politicians conceal and obfuscate. But Mbeki has usually done so with a modicum of panache. This clumsy fabrication is odd in a man who prides himself on his sophistication.

What comes next is even stranger. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but he suggests that Zuma was a “counter-revolutionary” agent placed in the presidency of a democratic SA to destroy its public institutions. The apartheid regime infiltrated many of its agents into the ANC, he explained, and we were never able to find out who they were. Years later, in 2002, shadowy forces began plotting to take over the ANC. In 2007, they succeeded.

Does he actually believe it? If he does not, he is being shockingly irresponsible, for he is feeding the creepiest feature of the organisation he claims to love: its taste for paranoia and its habitual substitution of conspiracy for reasoned analysis.

But perhaps he does think it’s true, and that tells an interesting story. A quarter of a century ago, when he was president, and evidence was placed before him that a plague was sweeping his nation, he refused to believe it. His biographer, Mark Gevisser, offered a moving explanation. To dedicate your life to fighting for freedom, Gevisser suggested, and to eventually win that fight, only to be told that a terrible illness is devastating your people, is too much to bear. And so you tell yourself it’s just not true.

Is the same thing happening here? Mbeki effectively led SA during the first 15 years of freedom. Under his watch, the ghastliest project in post-apartheid’s brief history was born within the ranks of his organisation; a project to rob the country blind and to destroy the institutions that might stand in the way.

Is the notion that all this was born in his party while he was its leader simply too much to bear? Did Zuma’s rise rekindle in him the sort of denial with which he confronted HIV/Aids?

If so, there nonetheless remains a big difference. His position on Aids was a shocking misjudgment, but his reasoning was sophisticated. His suspicion of the prejudices of scientists and the motivations of pharmaceutical companies was by no means off the wall.

His new take on Zuma is of a different order. It is naked paranoia without the dignified cover of intellectual adornment. There is something raw here, something embarrassing. If he really does believe what he said, he is a grieving man, suffering from the painful confusion that so often attends grief.

• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.