A faint whiff of panic hung over the secret meeting of the government of national unity (GNU) at the weekend, but however precarious things might feel we can always reassure ourselves that, at the very least, Thabo Mbeki isn’t involved.
On Monday afternoon the GNU circulated a press release claiming that the meeting at the Cradle of Humankind had been productive, but with no party in SA likely to win a majority in an election for at least the next decade, and President Cyril Ramaphosa apparently keen to step away from power and return full time to reupholstering couches, the horse-trading must have been wild.
In fact, it’s probably best that the details remain secret given some of the scenarios that were likely to have been sketched out: installing Patricia De Lille as president, with her mouth jointly operated by a committee led by her former colleagues in the ANC and DA; hiring Paul Mashatile and his bodyguards to head up the police, given that their involvement seems to make all crimes instantly disappear.
Yes, some things are best left unheard, much like Mbeki, who spent the weekend delivering the latest instalment of his long-running master class in hypocrisy, whinging about this and that to an audience that had presumably either lost a bet or been sentenced to two hours of community service.
Of course, a professional hypocrite always tries to raise the bar and Mbeki has clearly been working on some fresh material, like his new assertion that SA’s presidents should be elected by popular vote rather than by political parties.
Apart from the obvious flaw in this idea ― that our next president would be the CEO of Hollywoodbets, with Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu as their deputy ― I must say this is peak Mbeki, an example of a man climbing a gilded ladder to retirement, making sure his pension is secure and then complaining that the ladder is unsafe and perhaps he should pull it up behind him.
Of course, a professional hypocrite always tries to raise the bar and Mbeki has clearly been working on some fresh material, like his new assertion that SA’s presidents should be elected by popular vote rather than by political parties.
Where Mbeki really hit his stride though was when he explained that the National Development Plan, adopted in 2012, wasn’t working, which he said “is the intelligentsia’s fault” because it “should have intervened” but didn’t.
I mean, it’s really a bit of a scandal, if you think about it. Once Mbeki had baked dysfunction and failure deep into the new bureaucracy of SA via cadre deployment, and once that baked-in failure was combined with the ruinous contempt of Jacob Zuma and the sophisticated, complex machine outlined in the NDP blueprint just wouldn’t start ― partly because the ANC had sold the spark plugs to the Guptas and partly because the rest of the parts had been ordered from Cadre Inc and were made of tin, chewing gum and sticky tape ― the experts the ANC constantly vilified should have stepped up and done something, and it’s quite shocking that they didn’t.
A good example of this, Mbeki explained, was how the theoretical National Health Insurance wasn’t being transformed into a workable plan because the “intellectual input” of healthcare professionals wasn’t being sought, again, presumably, by the notoriously Awol intelligentsia.
Granted, Mbeki condemned many of those healthcare professionals as racist agitators when they asked him why he was allowing people infected with HIV-Aids to die in their hundreds of thousands; and yes, OK, he branded them Eurocentric hacks in thrall to imperialist Western medicine when they questioned his prescription of garlic and beetroot; but why on earth would any scientist hesitate to talk to the ANC now?
Yes, the GNU is a fragile, fractious thing, but at least it and we are free of the self-serving hallucinations of Thabo Mbeki.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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