Did Thabo Mbeki lay the table for state capture?

After nearly a decade of silence, Thabo Mbeki came out publicly as a fierce critic of the Jacob Zuma government during the ANC leadership battle of 2017. “The ANC has been captured by a dominant faction which in fact is not ANC,” he said at a crisis meeting of veterans. “You wake up in the morning and you see a report — money that should have gone into the ANC has been stolen. That can’t be the ANC.”

But it was the ANC government, of course, that had plunged SA into its decade of darkness. In his recent statements, Mbeki has habitually split the party into good and bad. On one hand, there are loyal cadres who are legitimate members of the ANC; on the other, corrupt “counter-revolutionaries” who are impostors.

This is idealistic, in its insistence that the party’s only redemption is through a return to the values on which Mbeki had been suckled. It is also revisionist, in the way it invokes an idealised struggle history uncontaminated by abusive practices and waged by people with only noble intentions. And it writes a script for Mbeki’s own downfall in 2007.

The people who dispatched him were “not ANC”: they were counter-revolutionaries, careerists, criminals. Mbeki’s crusade for a clean ANC is certainly welcome. But was his party “captured” by corrupt outsiders who ejected him from power and destroyed his legacy? Or is the former president himself — despite his manifest achievements — an author of the misfortune that befell SA after his dismissal?

The system of patronage and party control entrenched in the Mbeki era morphed into the Zuma kleptocracy

In my updated edition of The Dream Deferred, I argue that even if Mbeki was not corrupt himself, he helped set the table for state capture.

He did this by promoting Zuma to be his deputy president, despite early evidence of incompetence and moral laxity; by implementing affirmative action policies ripe for abuse; by failing to stem corrupt practices, particularly where it related to funding the ANC; and by imposing “democratic centralist” control of the state through policies such as cadre deployment. This meant valuing party loyalty over technocratic efficiency.

Mbeki embarked on their “political capture” of the state — as Ivor Chipkin and his team call it in their book The Shadow state — and this opened the doors for the “institutional capture” that followed. Both projects professed lofty intentions: Mbeki’s to steer the state’s power towards the black majority; Zuma’s to repurpose state institutions in the name of “radical economic transformation”. But the system of patronage and party control entrenched in the Mbeki era morphed into the Zuma kleptocracy.

Zuma and his henchmen flaunted their power with brazen impunity. Mbeki, on the other hand, was concerned with form and propriety. But he would shape this to his own needs, or what he believed was in the interests of the party, or the people of SA.

When, for example, Mbeki wanted to overrule parliament on the appointment of the crusading anti-corruption judge Willem Heath to the arms deal investigation in 2001, he did so by citing a legal opinion — even though the advice he cited had actually stated the opposite.

This helped achieve his end: a sweetheart investigation that cleared the government of all wrongdoing in the arms deal, and a rubber stamp parliament.

It was a short step from here to parliament’s acceptance of the nonsense that Zuma’s swimming pool at Nkandla was actually a fire security measure.

The ANC’s toothless parliamentary caucus is the direct legacy of Mbeki’s presidency. Other watchdog institutions, such as the public protector, were filled with yes-men: It was only with the post-Mbeki appointment of Thuli Madonsela, by Kgalema Motlanthe in 2009, that this key statutory body began to do its job with any vigour.

FUNDING FOR THE ANC

At the core of Thabo Mbeki’s political project was “BEE”: using government resources and policies to leverage a new black middle class.

“The minute you have a system where people make money just by the connections they have, rather than the work that they do, the system is ripe for abuse,” Moeletsi Mbeki once said to me. “It’s a recipe for corruption.”

Affirmative action policies are not, per se, vehicles for corruption. And in a society with our history they are essential. Mbeki’s critics too often forget, when decrying the way BEE created a few millionaires but left everyone else in the dirt, about the hundreds of thousands of black people who entered the middle class as a consequence of his policies: the bank clerks and copywriters, the medics and accountants, an entire generation of educated young black South Africans.

But a primary problem with BEE, in SA, was the way it was used to fund the ruling party. This has its roots in the early 1990s, when returning exiles or released political prisoners were supported by people in the business world. Zuma was not alone in relying on sympathetic businessmen to facilitate his return to civilian life: If in his case it was Schabir Shaik, then Mandela had Douw Steyn — and Mbeki had Jürgen Kögl.

There has never been any evidence that either of the latter two relationships were corrupt in the way Zuma’s was with Shaik. During the 2007 leadership battle Zuma operatives did their utmost, unsuccessfully, to unearth evidence that Mbeki benefited personally from the arms deal.

Still, Mbeki was ANC president: if the party was benefiting from it — as the ANC parliamentarian Andrew Feinstein was told when instructed to back off from investigating it — Mbeki would have known. Once more, there is no evidence of this, and party funding remained outside the ambit of the law until the Political Party Funding Act of 2021.

But two other cases from the Mbeki era describe the contours of these relationships. In the “Oilgate” scandal, the state oil company irregularly paid R15m to a company belonging to the businessman Sandi Majali, most of which was paid on to the ANC to fight the 2004 campaign that got Mbeki elected for his second term.

The second case was of more direct benefit to the ANC, as it concerned a company set up by the party for the sole purpose of fundraising. Chancellor House made millions through its stake in Hitachi, which won a huge tender to supply boilers for the new Medupi and Kusile power stations. Both the SA public protector and the US Securities and Exchange Commission found improprieties in the arrangement. And in 2020, the public enterprises minister, Pravin Gordhan, said that South Africans were paying up to four times more for electricity than a decade previously, due not only to theft but to cost overruns at the two power stations. Eskom itself admitted that Hitachi’s boilers were deficient.

As the anti-corruption researcher Paul Holden put it, the ANC was “in the invidious position of attempting to manage the health of its bank balance while still serving the needs of the country”.

When you hold so strongly to the notion that you alone have the right to rule, you inevitably believe that the ends justify the means

Sent to resolve ANC infighting in the Free State in February, Thabo Mbeki said that the ANC was too big to fail: the country would collapse without it. This fervent belief in the manifest destiny of the ANC was articulated by Zuma, too, when he said the party would rule until the second coming.

When you hold so strongly to the notion that you alone have the right — or might — to rule, you inevitably believe that the ends justify the means.

For Mbeki, this might have been driven by noble intention, but it warped into kleptocracy as, under his watch and afterwards, a people’s upliftment became confused with personal gain.

THE PIKOLI AFFAIR

A key component of state capture is to be able to act with impunity: This is why the Zuma kleptocracy acted so swiftly to take control of the National Prosecuting Authority, the SA Revenue Service, and the security services.

There is no evidence that these services specifically shielded Mbeki and his inner circle. But the “spy tapes” that led to Mbeki’s recall lend weight to the allegation that he interfered in the prosecution of Zuma, and that he used public institutions — and judicial processes — to fight party political battles.

Perhaps the most revealing example of Mbeki’s attempts at “political capture” concern the 2007 battle he became involved in, between national director of public prosecutions Vusi Pikoli, and the national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi.

Pikoli discovered that Selebi — a close ally of the president — was taking kickbacks for protecting friends in the criminal underworld. But when Pikoli told Mbeki he was ready to issue a warrant for Selebi’s arrest, Mbeki objected.

There was a heated argument, and Mbeki asked Pikoli to resign. When Pikoli refused, Mbeki suspended him and appointed a commission of inquiry under Frene Ginwala to ascertain his fitness for office.

Pikoli testified that Mbeki had abused his power by instructing him to drop the case against Selebi. Mbeki countered that he had simply requested Pikoli to delay the arrest by a week, as the planned time frame would have exacerbated tensions between the police and the Scorpions, with the high risk of a shoot-out: this was a threat to national security.

The evidence supports Pikoli: Mbeki’s suspension letter, published by the former chief prosecutor in his memoir, mentions nothing at all about time frames, tensions and shoot-outs.

Rather, it cites another security risk: Pikoli’s decision to enter a plea bargain with gangsters when “the prosecution of such people would, in the government’s view, be in the public interest”.

Mbeki wrote to Pikoli that because he had allowed these gangsters to walk free, he himself had become a security threat: he thus had to be suspended from his duties.

Pikoli had ascertained that he did not have a case against Selebi without the evidence of gangsters who had confessed to their involvement in the murder of Brett Kebble.

If Pikoli had listened to Mbeki and dropped the plea bargain, Selebi would have walked free. Pikoli is thus entirely correct in his understanding that Mbeki wanted him to drop the case against Selebi rather than simply postpone the police commissioner’s arrest.

The president stormed off to his office, ‘clearly incredulous and angry’

The argument between Mbeki and Pikoli was so heated, writes Mbeki’s director-general Frank Chikane, who was present, that the president stormed off to his office, “clearly incredulous and angry”. This anger, insists Chikane, was not about Selebi: “It was about the fact that a criminal gang accused of heinous crimes would be let off the hook, simply to secure a charge against the national commissioner for a matter unrelated to the activities of the syndicate.”

But the anger must have been about Selebi, at least in relation to the gangsters who would go free. On one side: a comrade who had dedicated his life to the liberation struggle, who had fled the country in his youth, become a leader, served his country with honour.

On the other: white low-lifes, common gangsters, murderers. We must assume that Mbeki’s anger — so intense that he had to leave the room — was sparked by something other than reason. It was loyalty, it was passion, it was history; it was friendship, it was politics.

By the time Pikoli was cleared by Ginwala’s commission in early 2009, Mbeki himself had been forced out of office. Motlanthe ignored Ginwala’s recommendation that Pikoli should return to his job and appointed the far more biddable Mokotedi Mpshe.

Mpshe did what was required of him, and announced just before the April 2009 elections that Zuma would not be charged: the path to presidency for Zuma was now clear. The people promoted by Mpshe and his even more compliant successors would prove to be key cogs in the Zuma kleptocracy. There is no clearer example of how Mbeki’s actions as president helped lay the table for state capture.

But the Pikoli/Selebi affair also reveals the systemic contradictions that Mbeki struggled to resolve: between being, on one hand, the technocrat, an avatar of modernity and efficiency; and on the other, the paterfamilias, bound inextricably in the atavistic politics of family and struggle.

• Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred — Updated Edition is published by Jonathan Ball.