Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, wrote a revealing article in the Sunday Times last week under the heading, “We ignore the neglected, the poor and the reviled at our peril.” I don’t know if this was his heading but it came close to a quote in his article. It was a long article taking up four full columns.
He was dealing with problems of race, bigotry, neglect, exclusion and impoverishment. Apart from problems in South Africa, it dealt entirely with problems of black people in Britain and the USA. There was no mention of blacks suffering genocide in Sudan, systematic slaughter in Zimbabwe, five million deaths in recent wars in the Congo, and bloodshed and oppression elsewhere in black Africa causing incomparably greater suffering to black people than anything happening in the USA or England – which is why black people in Africa want to move to Britain and the USA, and black people in Britain and the USA do not want to move to Africa.
Mbeki seems not the slightest bit interested in their suffering. What makes his particular lack of interest all the more striking is that he has not only witnessed it at close hand, but has actually increased it, making black suffering far worse among the reviled and the neglected. (I shall give instances below).
The big question about “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) is this: does BLM care about black suffering or about white sin? The overwhelming answer is white sin. However much black people suffer, however many are killed, starved or raped, BLM could not give a damn unless white people are somehow involved.
No white people, no concern from BLM. Panicking white policemen killed 69 black Ndebele people at Sharpeville in 1960. Result: an international outcry. Robert Mugabe’s racist death squads systematically slaughtered at least 20,000 black people (probably at least 40,000) in campaign Gukurahundi from 1983 to 1987. Result: no outcry at all, including from the ANC in exile at the time. In his article, Mbeki does touch once or twice on black against black racism, but most of it is about white people’s part in black neglect and impoverishment.
He does make some telling observations, especially about a black policeman in the USA, but his tone throughout is lofty and patronising with never a single apology for his own appalling behaviour when in power, which caused not only neglect and poverty to ordinary black people but death on a huge scale.
Thabo Mbeki was officially South Africa’s president from 1999 to 2008 (when he was kicked out by the ANC) but he was really the de facto president from 1994. Nelson Mandela was just a titular president, although this is not in any way to belittle his importance. Mandela played an important part in the negotiations for democracy, but once in power he was more of a figurehead. But a vital figurehead, calming the people with his immense grace, ensuring a peaceful transition, making beautiful gestures.
Mandela had no ideas or interest in economics. Mbeki did. It was he who forged South Africa’s economic policies from 1994 to 2008, and this was by far his greatest achievement. Although constantly preaching revolution, Mbeki held back the ANC socialists (most of them) who wanted nationalisation and state control of everything. Because he allowed a degree of capitalism (not much, but some), South Africa enjoyed her highest economic growth (not wonderful but reasonable) since 1994 under his presidency, which probably explains his voting success. The ANC got 69.7% of the votes under him in 2004, and 40.2% under Ramaphosa in 2024, a fact Mbeki cannot resist alluding to in his article (perhaps it was the main point of his article).
Two terrible policies make Mbeki the worst president of democratic South Africa: his mad beliefs on HIV/AIDS and his complicity in helping Robert Mugabe to defy the democratic will of the people of Zimbabwe and to murder and starve them in their thousands. After some doubts, the key points about AIDS became known to science: AIDS was caused by the HIV virus, a standard lentivirus, whose origin was well understood. The virus attacked the CD4 cells in the human immune system, disabling it and allowing attack by a whole range of dangerous pathogens, such as TB. HIV was transmitted by bodily fluids such as blood and semen. AIDS without treatment was essentially 100% fatal. No vaccine was ever found, but excellent anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) were developed, which kept the virus under control and allowed patients a healthy life. Mbeki ranted and raged that it was all a Western plot to present black people as sex-mad apes and that the HIV virus could not cause a syndrome (which is exactly what it does). He would not allow ARVs. It is estimated that about 300,000 people, almost all black, died as a result. (Why AIDS kills more black women than white women is not known, but I have heard theories, which naturally I cannot comment on, that the immune systems in their respective vaginal fluids are different.) Mbeki cared so little about ordinary black people that he was willing to sacrifice them to his crazy racist theories.
Every South African president in the democratic era except Mandela seems to have been in awe of Robert Mugabe: Mbeki particularly. Mugabe acknowledged the loss of a democratic referendum in 2000, for which he never forgave the people of Zimbabwe, and then crooked every election since then, eagerly supported by ANC presidents. He seized the private farms and kicked out over 700,000 black farmworkers and their families into destitution and sometimes starvation. The ANC cheered him to the rafters, and he always received standing ovations when he attended ANC conferences in South Africa. As Zimbabwe plunged into penury and tyranny, Mbeki employed “quiet diplomacy” to placate Mugabe. This consisted of picking up a megaphone and bellowing how wonderful he was and how anyone who opposed him was a tool of Western imperialism. In 2005, Mugabe deployed Operation Murambatsvina (“Drive out the rubbish), which consisted of driving over half a million poor black people out of their shacks and camps. He thought poor black people were just trash, and Mbeki obviously agreed with him.
Mugabe lost the 2008 election by a landslide, and then deployed his fascist soldiers and police to murder, torture, and break the bones of those who had voted against him to make sure that he stayed in power. Mbeki gave his complete support to Mugabe in his brutal repression of the people of Zimbabwe: people horribly reviled and horribly impoverished. Now Mbeki preaches to Britain and the USA about their neglect and abuse of poor people.
The recent riots in England by white “right-wing thugs” against black immigrants takes up much of Mbeki’s Sunday Times article. Some of the points he makes are valid. The worst rioting happened after a young black man murdered three very young white girls. The “racist right-wing thugs” immediately assumed he was an illegal Moslem immigrant, when he was actually a non-Moslem, born in Britain to Rwandan parents who had immigrated legally. They rioters rampaged against coloured Moslems. The British police put them down hard, and there were about a thousand arrests. There were many injuries, but no fatalities were reported. No fatalities! Mbeki shows sympathy for the neglected white under-class responsible for the riots, “who feel excluded and abandoned” (which is true) and “which resonates strongly with our own reality”. By this he does not mean the millions of black Zimbabweans persecuted by Mugabe or the hundreds of thousands of black South Africans with AIDS that he personally excluded from treatment and abandoned, but, I suppose, black South Africans who did not vote for Ramaphosa this year.
In the USA, speaking about the hardships of black people, he makes the best point in the whole article, although he does not follow it through to its logical conclusion. He quotes a black policeman: “We’re an under-developed colony ruled by a class of administrators … Burglary increases … the value of my property goes down … my kids are badly educated … uncollected trash”. This is an accurate picture of many black slums in the USA’s inner cities. It wasn’t like this in the past. Before the 1960s, black family life was good, black children studied hard at school, crime levels were relatively low and there was pride in their communities. Then it disintegrated.
The blame seems to be social welfare, led mainly by a “class of administrators”, many of them white, who persuaded black people to feel sorry for themselves and to blame white people for all their misfortunes, rather than striving to better themselves. They led them along the path of single parenthood, of missing fathers. BLM is the latest manifestation of this “class of administrators”. The ideologues of the Democratic Party have done everything possible to encourage the disintegration of black communities. By far the greatest danger to decent black people in the inner cities is young black criminals, and the best way to deter them is to increase the police force, which is indeed what most black people want. But the Democratic administration ignores the large number of black people assaulted by black criminals and obsesses about the miniscule number of black people assaulted by white policemen. They want to “Defund the Police” and have done so in many cities, with disastrous consequences for black people.
In South Africa, the ANC has largely neglected most black people. Education is a prime awful example. The ANC, for political reasons such as humouring SADTU, has ruined state education for most black children, while the ANC leaders send their own children to exclusive private or semi-private schools. Its labour laws and bargaining councils have the effect of shutting poor black people out of the formal economy: the main reason for our appalling unemployment. The ANC leaders drive fancy cars and live in luxury, while most black people are forced to use horrible public transport and live in poverty. So why did so many black people vote for the ANC under Mbeki but not under Ramaphosa? Mbeki’s superior economic performance must be a factor. But I think a more important factor was simply growing disillusionment with the ANC’s failure to improve their lives.
The enchantment that people felt for the ANC lasted for a long time ̶ decades, but eventually wore off. This happened in most African countries following independence. But in many of them, such as Zimbabwe, the leaders just ended democracy and kept themselves in power. In South Africa, thank goodness, this didn’t happen, and the ANC graciously accepted its poor vote this year. I think Mbeki would have done the same if he had received a low vote in 2004. A pity that he doesn’t seem to mind at all when other African leaders end democracy and rule with tyranny.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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