Too Soon To Judge Zuma Vs Mbeki

Opinion & Analysis Posted to the web on: 03 April 2008

Too soon to judge Zuma vs Mbeki Xolela Mangcu

I READ with great interest the Rev Dr Barney Pityana’s address to the Law Society. As a man of the cloth, he is undoubtedly qualified to make moral comparisons between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. He thus argues that “to many of us, Jacob Zuma … remains a flawed character in his moral conduct”. But is it really reasonable to assume that Mbeki will be let in the gates of heaven, and Zuma turned back? There will be some who will make moral counterarguments , especially if there is any truth to allegations that Mbeki is being investigated for his role in the arms deal. Given such lingering questions, would it not be more prudent to suspend such moral comparisons until light is thrown on Mbeki’s role in the deal? But then, who am I to question the moral prerogative of a senior member of the clergy? My concern is with more earthly matters, such as methodology. If I was going to write a dissertation comparing Zuma and Mbeki, I can imagine my supervisor asking me how I proposed to deal with the problem of comparing someone who has had a decade of experience as a leader, and someone who still has to become a leader. The supervisor would not be entirely unreasonable. Analysing a past president would require a methodology based on what political scientists call “retrospective evaluation”. But analysing a future president would require prospective evaluation. Just to be clear, I would be the last person to argue against prospective evaluation — I wrote an entire chapter in my doctoral dissertation defending this method of analysis. You can certainly compare two individuals who have not been president using prospective evaluation. But what you cannot do is to give normative privilege to prospective evaluation over retrospective evaluation. His conjecture that the future under Zuma would be horrible could still turn out to be true, but science has not yet made it possible for us to say that with any certainty. If such scientific certainty were possible, the world would have long avoided dictators and disasters. THIS may come across as a mere quibble, but if it stands uncorrected it is the kind of logic that leads dictators to say things will get worse under their challengers. It also forces politicians and intellectuals to even embellish history. I confess that I laughed when I got to the point where Pityana describes Mbeki “as among the best heads of state this continent has ever known”. I took it to mean that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I also don’t recall anyone arguing against Mbeki as an intellectual per se — many of us were attracted to him by that. The problem is that, like many African leaders, he took legitimate intellectuals to be his sycophants. Critics were labelled coconuts, askaris, fishers of corrupt men and so on, in the process giving birth to a virulent strain of racialised nativism.

I am sure that as the head of a university, Pityana would have found that worrisome. Here we are sitting with unacceptably high levels of HIV/AIDS, unemployment, poverty, inequality and criminality — and an explosive arms deal presided over by the very same Mbeki. How this can be construed to be the best that Africa has to offer just boggles the mind. Either there is something fundamentally wrong with Africa and we should not compare ourselves with the rest of the world, or else Africa should feel really insulted by the assertion. I have often argued that neither Mbeki nor Zuma were ever the best that this country could offer. And now that Zuma has emerged as a lone contender, the emergence of another candidate could make prospective analysis of two or more candidates really interesting. This is the prospective analysis Americans are busy doing in choosing between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. There is really no point in trying to resurrect deeply flawed politicians rejected by their parties and standing to be condemned by history. Mangcu is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation and the author of To The Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa.