What a morning… the blogosphere and news sites here in SA are abuzzing with the sudden resignation of the South African president Thabo Mbeki last night. Odd though, because it’s pretty much been on the cards for about 2 weeks. From the moment the court dismissed the charges against Zuma the newspapers were predicting that this would spell the end for Mbeki. By last week Friday we all knew that the ANC’s National Executive Committee was meeting to discuss the event and it was an open secret that they intended to use the meeting to decide not if but how to fire the President.
They had essentially three choices. The first option was to impeach Mbeki, this would require a two-thirds majority vote in parliament (and I suspect even now Mbeki might have been able to muster up enough supporters in there [or at least people who knew if he falls they go with him] to avoid them getting that). The second option would be cast a vote of no-confidence in Mbeki, this requires only a vote of 50%+1 to pass and I suspect both they and Mbeki knew they could do it. Either of these are pretty undignified ways to leave the office of the president though, and likely to do longterm damage to our economy, regional standing and international image (which, some would say, would require advanced mathematicians to invent an entire new type of complex negative numbers).
Bringing us to option 3: Simply asking him to resign.
Of course, that by itself wouldn’t have worked outright – except that he knew options one and two still existed and particularly option two wouldn’t be hard. So it was a simple case of: leave, or we kick you out.
All in all I was entirely unsurprised by the events.
Having said that, this is a great day for South Africa. Mbeki was one of the worst things to ever happen to our country, he had been in power too long and he allowed personal feelings and greed to influence his judgment on critical matters like Zimbabwe and the AIDS crisis. Getting him out of power now was a good thing.
Having said that, I don’t think Zuma is a better person, or even a better politician though. He may or may not be guilty of corruption and I think he was, but I think Mbeki was very corrupt himself so this is not a major change in the status quo. What does set Zuma appart is that he was not in power for a long time, he has never been president and in order to get back into power he had to adorn a “champion of the little guy” image. The simple reality is that he is likely to do a better job at this stage because he needs to distinguish himself from his predecessor and he cannot do that without some radical policy changes. His best bet would be to make these changes on exactly those points where Mbeki was the least popular such as the AIDS crisis.
I have always felt that all politicians are corrupt, only the amount varies and the best of them are still more corrupt than the worst average citizen. This is a bit of a generalisation but if you believe, like I do, that only a corrupt person could ever have any desire to hold power over others, in fact that the very desire to have power is corruption then it follows that nobody who isn’t already corrupt would even become a politician in the first place. Once power is attained, the corruption changes focus not nature.
So this being the case, it makes sense then that there are only two things which can help society to get the service they need from politicians. The first is an educated electorate who will fire them if they mess up too badly … well we’re pretty short of those worldwide. The second is enlightened self interest. Create a situation where it becomes in the politicians own best interest to do the right thing. Where doing the right thing becomes the best way to secure his own position.
That is the position we find ourselves in with Zuma now – his only option if he wants to become president and get two terms is to do good things where Mbeki did bad things, and that is good for the country. If we assume that he won’t make too many other mistakes (notice: “too many”, the idea that he may not make any is not even worthy of consideration) then this is a good day for South Africa.
Heritage day is this Wednesday, and this country should party. Much like in the classic movie we can say: “Mona Deary is dead ? We should celebrate !”, those of us who particularly suffered under Mbeki’s semi-tyrannical rule such as people suffering from HIV may even take it a step further, I suspect the treatment action campaign is busy singing “ding dong the witch is dead”.
