Dear Comrade Thabo Mbeki
History has no blank spaces; any attempt at managing it confirms a need to hide something.
Over the last few weeks coming into a month, I, out of respect for the African National Congress and its leadership throughout its 109-year, history has resisted the temptation to entertain the venomous personal attacks from among others Former President Mbeki, my elder, and even the Northern Cape Premier my junior Zamani Saul, among others. These have determined Ace Magashule is an open game.
The discipline and culture I know in the ANC permit robust engagement and honest reflection as a guiding principle of ANC cadreship. It is that very principle that saw me subjecting myself irrespective of my pain to consult elders. I did not have to do it; I equally could have preferred whom I wanted to meet and who not. One nevertheless met you among other equal leaders during the 30 days as suggested by President Ramaphosa.
First and foremost, let me be categorically clear I celebrate all leaders in the Movement. However, its culture dictates that we strive to engage within the afforded structures our differences regardless of ideological, organisational or personal. Secondly, I write to you as one no different to you who was nominated and elected into ANC office at a legitimate conference. I share this while evident for the objective ones yet often lost in translation when some seek to appropriate a specific agenda with conference elections outcomes. In this sense, I wrote to you as the serving Secretary-General as elected in the 54th Conference held at Nasrec. I also write to you as one who served as provincial chairperson for 25 years. Meaning I write to you as a recognised ANC leader, not a novice.
My writing to you is forced by the burden of my conscience that does not allow me any longer to be silent when there is a sponsored and neatly orchestrated campaign to vilify, annihilate my character and delegitimise my cadreship. While one can accept that less cultured ANC members and leaders may easily yield to the cheap temptation [as Comrade Zamani Saul attests] to drive this process of demonising my person and character, one does not expect that from seasoned mature, veterans of the Movement hence I am not writing to Saul because I understand his ambition and afford him his youthfulness. I write to you because you and I both serve in NOB offices.
Comrade Mbeki, you have in this season markedly distinguished yourself as the confirmed face of a campaign to denigrate insult and adjudicate on me. You do so in lecture sense as one who purportedly had apparent foresight and prophetic revelation long before others as you are pontificating in the glee of “I was right on Ace”.
Comrade Mbeki, you do this less from an honest, presidential or leader of the ANC vantage point but from a self-aggrandising superiority to all mindsets as the entitled meridian of nobility and sense. It appears you had decided to eke out relevance in this season of your third coming less in the stewardship of cognisance that appreciates the multilayers and complexities of challenges the Movement faces.
It is a given that in times of crisis, any 109-year-old organisation such as ours would lean on the accumulated wisdom, fitness and finesse of a conglomerate of its previous leaders and members. Therefore, it is natural that to these former leaders, we all should look to aid us in dealing with the various influences of this epoch in fairness, honesty, and objectivity guided by the ever-pervasive reality of pursuance of justice. Justice since Martin Luther King Jr told us long ago: “injustice anywhere remains a threat to justice everywhere”.
Comrade Mbeki, your political posture at a narrow-angle details one obsessed to continue your prism of an ANC that has yourself unfortunately as the maximum symbol of perfection and astute leadership. In a season when you equally claimed such leadership and disrespected the sitting leadership of your successor, the then SG Gwede Mantashe responded, permit me to paraphrase, Mbeki must stop pretending they left things in the ANC in order, we are still mopping up their mess. This notion of self-worship and lack of self-critique, usually associated with youthful bliss, unfortunately, details the sunset years of you as a leader who somehow is spoiled to assume you in uniqueness is entitled to be treated differently to all others for who you are.
Unfortunately, Comrade Mbeki, as solicited by you, compelled to remind you that history has no blank spaces and managing that history is the work of those who have something to hide. Regardless of how palatable to your taste buds, your truth, is not necessarily the historical or current truth and a fact. Your most recent ANC Eastern Cape address took the latitude to make me the centre of your speech in showing the antithesis of authentic ANC leadership. You gloated how you did not see me fit to be Premier of the Free-State province, notwithstanding my provincial chairperson leadership. You again afford yourself the right to label others in categorising some of us as careerists. Interesting enough, you do not see yourself in your known ambition from the days of exile as one who used the ANC to define your career goals. Again, this is your truth, just not the truth many of us know.
The first point of your view in which you employ the plural of “we” warrants unpacking. I wanted you to explain your we and own it as “I Mbeki”. Please do not hide behind us that you cannot give an identity. As bold as you purport to be, do not hide behind a collective when it is you. Meaning you should not hide behind the plural ‘we’, be categorically clear to say ‘I Thabo Mbeki’ was unwilling to make Magashule Premier and was ready to put anyone in that place less in the interest of the Province’s progress but vindictiveness of my self-interest.
Shall I remind you, Comrade Mbeki, to go back with us down memory lane? It aches me to remind you, when your name was mentioned to become Comrade Mandela’s deputy, how your biological father, the late stalwart Oom Govan Mbeki expressed grave concerns and reservations seeing you not fit to lead the ANC. So, if you felt me disqualified to lead, I am hardly the first between the two of us since your father saw you not fit for reasons he knew.
Comrade your entitlement to act and speak as if the epitome of the ANC leadership is not a new practice on your part. The earliest signs of this behaviour manifested as far back as 1987 with your engagements with apartheid political party leaders. There is no question that many in the ANC leadership rank expressed discomfort with these unilateral actions of someone who was not leading the ANC as president but arrogated a right to usurp the collective leadership then already. History has no blank spaces.
Comrade Mbeki you somehow never takes responsibility for anything that went wrong. You often act as the master reporter on an accident scene as if you are not actively part of the proverbial collision. If our people are still not owning land, it must be directly asked what your administration, with 2/3rds majority victory, did to address the land issue. Comrade no amount of philosophising and getting lost in technical jargon can obliterate the fact that history has no blank spaces.
My Comrade, you obviously and conveniently forget that you singularly was responsible for the notion of an ANC denialism on the existence of HIV and its linkages to AIDS. This denialism, better understood in the luxury of apparent elitist independent thinking, came at a high price, losing in excess of 300000 mostly black lives. Yet, you may Comrade, until today, have never apologised for this dastard act on your part of a crime against the black masses. A crime that amplified the advocating of beetroot as the answer to an HIV/AIDS pandemic. The philosopher-king as Nigerian scholar Adekeye Adebajo framed you in his seminal piece could not care less about the lives lost because it was more critical for you to win a scientific argument when you are no biological or virologist scientist. Ideally, you ought to have been sent to Hague (International Criminal Court) to account for those lives. I (Magashule) don’t have blood on my hands.
Comrade Mbeki, the apparent sane leader in the history of the ANC, will not own up to your litany of economic policy failures produced by your administration. The failed GEAR and ASGISA policies better understood in Nepad, that some colloquially referred to it as kneepads. As Sussex trained economist, you often will claim how great your era was when you do not admit to us the period in question was generally a globally favourable period for economic advancement. In case you forgot, at the same time, William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd president of the USA, became the first president to balance the economic books in the USA. This publicly known reality debunks the apparent myth of financial stability you oversaw and worshippers claim constitutes your success.
Perhaps more damning is that you my Comrade presided over economic growth that nowhere translated to any meaningful job creation. Therefore, the economic growth that preceded the 2008 crunch as the USA inspired history dictates remains a jobless growth epoch. Regardless of how you and your favourite crowds want to argue the opposite, your economic [an area of your trained expertise] leadership was directed by the subservience and compliance to IMF, and World Bank austerity measures dictate. The same has a central focus to appease the interest of the Old – West understood in white monopoly capital with wide interest exchange measures until multinationals such as Old Mutual could delist from the JSE to list on the London Stock exchange and billions leave the SA shores.
Comrade Mbeki history has no blank pages. Your later lament for Africa billions of illegal financial outflows does not stand separate from your role in cutting more than slack to your friends and white interest through your appropriated austerity measures.
Seeing and hearing you today as Mbeki batting in factionalism is not strange because you, as Bishop Ramalaine in a recent piece said, remains the undeniable father of ANC factionalism.
Shall we forget how with your complete knowledge in anticipation of a Polokwane defeat you formed a faction of COPE? The confusing mess of COPE that ended up in 4 years of court drama is directly linked to the fact that you never came to occupy your reserved seat, leaving the surrogate mothers to fight forever. Comrade you failed to condemn the breakaway because you could not since it had you as its raison d’etre.
Comrade Mbeki, you were instrumental as a role player in birthing the ANC’s factionalism and perpetually continuing with this, as your recent address shows. You continue as an almost 80-year-old with your factional politics, which threatens to define your true legacy as an ANC leader.
When you take your aim at me today, it is not exempted from your deep-seated bitterness towards one that you, in your claimed aristocratic mind, deemed an uneducated peasant, Jacob Zuma, the 13th president. Zuma twice elected as the ANC president irks you to this day.
I dare state here and now, for the record, you fight with me because you, in essence, are still fighting your defeat. It is Polokwane nostalgia that drives you.
You see me as the extension of your prime enemy Jacob G Zuma and cannot stomach that I show regard for the president Zuma. Your anger and bitterness saw you willing through your foundation to sit with FW de Klerk, whose hands drip with our peoples’ blood, to discuss the post-Zuma years. I am afraid you are a bitter and angry soul, one robbing himself from finding solace or redemption because you, unfortunately, cannot self-introspect with the hope of apologising, an essential reality of life.
Shall we forget how annoyed you were with everyone that you knew are more popular than you? You demonised popularity, not from an honest but an envious place. It is that same annoyance mixed with your characteristic arrogance, even jealousy, that saw your shameful act of inflicting the first public gender-based violence on our mother, the late Comrade Winnie Mandela, at Orlando stadium. You did this because you could not handle that she was so well received despite a late arrival which you interpreted as upstaging you. In front of the world media, your smallness was shown when you disrespected a woman our mother. This act separated you from becoming the first ANC president to assault a female leader in full view of a present public. History Sir, has no blank spaces. The tears of South African women was your down fall.
Shall we forget when now-retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu critiqued the ANC under your leadership how you took the liberty to insult him labelling him a charlatan because you, Comrade Mbeki, have always placed yourself first before others, even the Movement? Juxtapose your response to that of your successor who, despite being attacked by Archbishop Tutu, responded and said, ” In my culture, I cannot disrespect my elders.’
Comrade, you today pontificate on corruption when your administration is notoriously still responsible for the Armsdeal that our children will pay for the rest of their lives. In typical Mbeki fashion, you had always sought to exonerate yourself and very comfortable that others take the fall when you were the one who altered and signed South Africa in democracy into its first corruption deal.
Comrade Mbeki, your leadership, produced your favourite wealthy people today, including your wife, all helped by the proximity to your presidency and political office, yet you arrogate a right to adjudicate on me when the case against me details oversight as advanced dereliction. Of all the things mentioned, where would you have fitted had you been charged with oversight on the crime of HIV/AIDS and the arms deal, to cite a few. Imagine if Cde Winnie had open a criminal case of assault against you. Palestine is bleeding and you are quiet, perennially trapped in exaggerated self importance.
The hypocrisy in your articulations on me is laid bare that you lack the wherewithal to address an Eastern Cape province in leadership where crimes and corruption exist. You know that Eastern Cape is a breeding ground for corruption. They don’t only steal money, there is a growing trend of academic credentials theft, especially at Fort Hare University. You decided to keep quiet on that because of your natural factional alignment, because your Trojan horse must get a 2nd term through the Eastern Cape. Corruption cases that involves senior politicians in that Province are suppressed by the law enforcement agencies, and many that were reported because they involve their spouses. You see nothing wrong in that because you are blinded by factionalism and hatred. State organs are used for political reasons, you know that. I don’t know how a man of your intellectual calibre responds well and protect a corrupt plagiarist. Are you that desperate for political platforms, such that you reward and attend a call by an academic thief?
Your apparent sane wisdom does not ask for justice in the manipulated step-aside of a faction. You, my dear Comrade, are absent in logic and morality to red-card that some are treated differently to others when the entire NOB, to varying degrees, has grave allegations levelled against them as individuals. Why are you so quiet on the sealed documents by our judiciary, especially on the allegations that the Nasrec conference was bought? Is it because it’s your faction that is implicated there?
You lost consciousness as a veteran to ask why many in the NEC are afforded to adjudicate when they no less implicated. Sir, your prism of morality in this regard is highly suspect because it is laced with self-interest in the hope of dealing with old enemies. We may only speculate on your recent activities because it fits neatly into the factional agenda for which you have become the mascot.
You, therefore, know exactly what you are doing when you today dance to the beat of your factionalism drum. It is your authentic sound and preferred music. But, I shall remind you again that history has no blank spaces.
We, the matured and forgiving Cdes protected you from accounting on the formation of COPE (which your mother was a member of), HIV/AIDS denialism, Arms deal and assaulting women (Cde Winnie), of which all of them were treasonous. Imagine if we had asked you to step aside on all the above counts? I regret that we allowed you to escape those.
For the record, my choice to open a legal case against my suspension is in upholding the principle of the SA constitution as sacrosanct in its fundamental aim not to discriminate against some in favour of others. How you, as a self-appointed custodian of the constitution and morality cannot appreciate that is befuddling.
We haven’t forgotten you. At the right time I will tell South Africans how you persuaded me for a 3rd term towards Polokwane, when you sent two of your confidante, one of them is an ambassador today and the other is a retired Minister. Also, I will have to reveal how you wanted to use us against the then Premier of Free State (Mr Lekota), when you wanted to remove him from Free State.
Comradely Yours
E.S. Magashule
