Thank goodness for Afrikaners…

The Thabo Mbeki Foundation last week released what it describes as a monograph that purports to explain why South Africa, after 32 years of ANC governance, finds itself in its present dismal plight.

By this account, the missteps and inadequacies of the party are not to blame, but the virtuous objectives of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) have been sabotaged by counterrevolutionary infiltrators.

This white-anting has allegedly been carried out by unnamed Afrikaners who, having suborned ANC cadres, seized control of the commanding heights of SA’s government and its technical and administrative institutions.

Their project is now supposedly approaching its culmination, with organisations such as AfriForum and Solidarity enlisting the US government in their campaign against the ANC.

By definition, a monograph is a tightly focused scholarly treatise, grounded in research and evidence. This paper has not a shred of academic rigour. Instead, it is a 123-page collage of clippings, lengthy quotations from which the writer draws questionable inferences and unsupported assertions.

This partisan polemic names no author, although media reports have attributed it to the former president, without any denial forthcoming.

It certainly has all the hallmarks of Mbeki’s prose – tendentious and pretentious. It also exudes the same patronising arrogance and unshakeable intellectual certainty that characterised his infamous pronouncements on HIV/Aids.

Nor is the theory being advanced new.

Agents at work

For almost two decades, Mbeki has been fuelled by the humiliation of his defeat in the 2007 contest for the ANC presidency at the hands of Jacob Zuma, a man he regarded as his intellectual inferior and whom he fatally underestimated. His subsequent “recall” as SA president in 2008 rubbed salt in the wound.

It is against this background that one must assess Mbeki’s new claim that these Afrikaner-directed agents had intended to unseat him at the ANC’s 2002 leadership conference but, judging the moment inopportune, postponed their intervention until 2007.

He then makes the explosive allegation that assassins were deployed to Polokwane, ready to murder the newly elected ANC leadership should the vote produce a result unfavourable to the Zuma faction.

Not a single name, intelligence or police record, or shred of corroborating testimony is offered to substantiate this extraordinary allegation of a planned political massacre. Nor does Mbeki explain who recruited, financed or commanded the supposed killers. And if such a catastrophe was narrowly averted, why were there no investigations, arrests, or prosecutions of the dangerous Afrikaner masterminds?

Eventually, Mbeki’s circular reasoning collapses into absurdity, a Lewis Carroll world of mirrors, of spy versus spy. Most obviously, if Zuma was the instrument of an Afrikaner counterrevolution, what are we to make of the man who displaced him in 2018? Was Cyril Ramaphosa the authentic revolutionary, coming to rescue the NDR from its saboteurs?

If the hero, the rescue has been a dismal failure. Alternatively, if one follows Mbeki’s logic to its conclusion, Ramaphosa, too, must be an agent of the Afrikaner counterrevolution.

This would mean that for almost two decades, the ANC has been governed by apartheid agents masquerading as liberation heroes. And the ANC, despite its famously vigilant revolutionary consciousness, has somehow failed to notice.

ANC the victim

Nevertheless, there is value in Mbeki’s essay. It spotlights, yet again, a behaviour pattern that is deeply embedded in the ANC: every failure is automatically proof that the ANC is the victim.

Thank goodness, says the ANC, for those diabolical Afrikaners…