Former president Thabo Mbeki has offered only coded criticism of his successor, former president Jacob Zuma, saying that under the latter’s nearly decade-long presidential tenure SA experienced power cuts and state institutions being hollowed out.
Mbeki did not make direct reference to Zuma, who has defected and now leads the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, when he addressed an ANC campaign event on Tuesday commemorating 30 years of democracy. He, however, said his ousting as head of the ANC at the party’s national elective conference in 2007, ushered in a dramatic deterioration of governance and a reversal of democratic gains of the first 15 years of the country’s democracy.
Mbeki said the governing party’s Polokwane conference, where Zuma was elected as the ANC president which was followed by Mbeki’s recall as the head of state in 2008, weakened the ANC paving the way for “counterrevolution” to set in.
In an apparent swipe at Zuma’s presidential tenure, he said: “One of the important decisions taken by the counterrevolution was that to achieve its objective of defeating the ANC, (it had) to ensure that it fails in its task properly to govern our country.
“How do we explain this puzzle? The only logical way to explain this is that, as challenging as this might be even to comprehend, here we are dealing with a wolf in sheep’s skin,” Mbeki said referring to to the commission of inquiry by retired judge Robert Nugent into Sars and the Zondo commission on state capture’s report.
“Accordingly, in terms of this logic, the involvement of such a ‘wolf’, so to speak, in the effort to destroy Sars would not be surprising, as it would represent the discharge of its responsibilities as part of the counterrevolution. Time will tell whether this logical deduction is in fact correct,” Mbeki said.
Mbeki went on: “President [Cyril] Ramaphosa acted on the recommendation of the Nugent commission to remove the then head of Sars, Mr Tom Moyane. He appointed a new head of Sars, Mr Edward Kieswetter, under whose leadership the service has largely recovered the competences it had lost under Moyane.”
On the long-standing issue of load-shedding and state-owned power utility Eskom, Mbeki said that there was a false narrative that the pre-2007 government ignored warnings from experts that if no immediate steps were taken to build new generation capacity, the country would suffer serious load-shedding from 2007.
He said the load-shedding experienced by the country during 2007 and 2008, which he had at the time apologised for, was “completely unnecessary, and had been deliberately engineered from within Eskom, and had absolutely nothing to do with any failures by the government.
“Simply, the Eskom station managers had defied instructions to replenish their coal stocks until they literally ran out of coal at many of the power stations. This was a deliberate attempt to compromise the supply of electricity,” he said.
Despite also being critical of the government, Mbeki said he was confident that the ANC would be remain the most dominant political party after the May 29 elections.
“I believe that one of the important lessons we must learn from this first 30 years of democracy in our country is that any political party given the responsibility to govern in any sphere of government, must practically be held accountable in terms of such good governance principles and policies as the ANC has listed in its election manifesto,” he said.
He called for an inclusive national dialogue that would be hosted after the elections to seek solutions to the country’s most pressing challenges.
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