RICHARD CALLAND | Should former leaders intervene or step back from politics?

How should former presidents and prime ministers handle themselves? Should they stay involved in politics, or put up and shut up? This question has come into sharp relief again in recent days.

First, Thabo Mbeki re-entered the fray to tell the ANC to stay out of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala impeachment predicament. Appearing on the SABC, Mbeki said, “The president must conduct [himself] as a businessman, as he has said himself: ‘I’m a businessman. I breed cattle. I breed wildlife. I sell. I buy.’ It’s fine. That’s his business as a businessman. It has got nothing to do with the ANC.”

Perish the thought, but was Mbeki not being a tad disingenuous? Ramaphosa may be a “businessman”, but he’s also the president, and an impeachment process is ultimately a political process in which the ANC has a very considerable stake — after all, Ramaphosa is also the organisation’s president.

As ever with Mbeki, there is something else going on — just as there was last October when he claimed there were still apartheid-era spies holding senior leadership positions in the ANC, which was interpreted by ANC insiders as Mbeki seeking to resurface old allegations about former president Jacob Zuma.

Last week he was having a little dig at Ramaphosa’s “double life”. Perhaps there is a bit of envy or distaste at Ramaphosa’s wealth — mainly accrued, ironically, after Mbeki pushed his rival out into the political wilderness in the early 2000s.

Last week also saw former British prime minister Tony Blair make a deliberate intervention in the internal politics of the Labour Party as the contenders to succeed a beleaguered Keir Starmer jockey for position.

Blair’s almost 6,000-word “essay” really put the cat among the pigeons. Within 36 hours both main contenders for Starmer’s position — Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham — had scuttled to produce treatises in response to Blair’s, soon followed by Starmer’s own rejoinder.

Ramaphosa may be a ‘businessman’, but he’s also the president, and an impeachment process is ultimately a political process in which the ANC has a very considerable stake — after all, Ramaphosa is also the organisation’s president.

They would have been far better off ignoring Blair’s ode to nostalgia — a tendency he shares with Mbeki — as he sought to dust off political dilemmas from his own time at the helm of the Labour Party in the 1990s as well as, to be fair, some contemporary ones, such as how the UK should get closer to the EU without reopening the festering sores of the 2016 Brexit vote.

As always with Blair, he managed to make the banal sound profound. But any analysis of the state of the world that fails to mention either climate change or inequality should not be taken seriously — not to mention his ghastly and inexcusable entanglement with US President Donald Trump’s grotesque Gaza “peace” plan.

But back to the primary question. My mind is not entirely made up. On the one hand, there is a convention that former heads of government should not interfere with how future governments go about their business, which is often more honoured in the breach.

American presidents tend to be especially respectful of the principle, though Barack Obama spends a lot of time fending off people who are desperate for him to stand up to his feckless successor.

On the other hand, it seems a bit of a waste to push people with such deep experience of actually running government into premature and enforced retirement, with slippers (and pipe, in Mbeki’s case) pushed firmly onto feet (and into mouth).

Legacy foundations

Perhaps the most elegant compromise is to be found in the form of the kind of organisational legacies former leaders seek to establish. In this respect, the late US president Jimmy Carter’s centre is the gold standard — a genuine NGO with serious-minded projects. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is more of a grandiose consultancy.

Mbeki’s own foundation, and especially its cousin, the admirable think-tank the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra), which is brilliantly led by Mbeki’s former ideological consigliere, Joel Netshitenzhe, seems an even more appropriate vehicle for maintaining a leadership legacy than clumsy attempts to intervene personally in current affairs.

• Calland is a visiting associate professor at the Wits School of Governance and a partner in political economy advisory The Paternoster Group.