Thabo Mbeki at breakfast, and the moral implosion of South Africa

Dateline Salisbury, Zimbabwe, 11th August 1981.

You were on holiday in newly independent Zimbabwe, whose capital city would soon be renamed from ‘Salisbury’ to Harare.

You had wandered through the clean, crisply laid out streets of the city centre, looking at the white shopkeepers and the black street crowds. Everywhere, there were pictures of a grim-faced Robert Mugabe, with the stark red necktie he favoured.

You sat now on a dusty hill on the outskirts of town with thousands of others. On a huge podium in front sat Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo and other dignitaries. A black sedan drove into the field, and out stepped Oliver Tambo, the leader of the African National Congress of South Africa. He was the embodiment of a Liberation War that was only partially concluded with the ‘liberation’ of Zimbabwe.

The occasion was the ceremonial opening of Heroes Acre, and the reburial of Herbert Chitepo, the first president of ZANU, who had been assassinated in Zambia in 1975. Two days earlier, Oliver Tambo had made a speech in Harare at the burial of a South African ANC activist Joe Gqabi, who was assassinated by agents of Apartheid, in Zimbabwe. The funeral expenses were underwritten by the people of Zimbabwe.

At a Youth Hostel, where you dossed down, you met Mike, a tall garrulous African American youth who was on his way to Johannesburg for an internship as part of his University degree programme in Chicago. You asked how he would get about in apartheid South Africa, with the restrictions on black people. He flashed an Identification Card that had been issued to him. It read ‘HONORARY WHITE’.
With your Nigerian pride, you were stunned that anyone would carry such a tag, and he saw it on your face.
‘It is what it is. I survive and get along in the world.’
The following morning, when you sought him, he was gone.

Dateline Cape Town 22nd May 2026

Former President Thabo Mbeki, wheezing with bronchitis, is addressing a breakfast meeting of his Foundation in Cape Town. He is talking about the xenophobic, primordial hate that has been stirred up in his countrymen and women, building up to a crescendo, with killings and maiming of African ‘illegal immigrants’, and deportations and destruction of their properties. So roused is the public that the government is taking cover and riding the wave. A lame-duck President is pulling the last tatters of the ANC’s moral authority around him while announcing that government agents would go into workplaces to dislodge ‘undocumented’ Africans and punish their employers, an official statement that would have made Madiba, Tambo and the old men of ANC turn in their graves.

There are legitimate problems in South Africa, he avers. Unemployment. Crime. But the finger of blame for high youth unemployment is being pointed in the wrong direction. The South African economy grew well until 2008. From 2009, it began a steep decline.

‘The people who caused that decline are laughing in a corner…’

He is referring to the carpetbaggers who grasped South Africa by the neck, with the imprimatur of the ANC, and rode it almost to death, profiting from its corruption and moral decay, while the people of the townships hungered and killed one another in their fetid, tinsel hovels.

Africa impoverished itself to fight for South African liberation, and died and suffered attacks, Thabo says. The understanding was that the development of the continent would be a collective Pan-African project after Liberation.

While he was on a presidential visit to Addis Ababa, his Foreign Minister had gone window shopping in a curio shop. The poor shopkeeper wrapped the most precious item in his shop and handed it to her as a gift.

During the struggle years, an ANC exile had killed the Tanzanian Prime Minister in a tragic car accident. The ANC was not kicked out. Nothing happened. African brotherhood went deep. It could not now be undone by stirring up the masses.

Dateline Lagos, 16.6.26

You are reflecting on several matters at random. The famous, possibly apocryphal, statement by PW Botha, that blacks have no brains to rule themselves, and will turn on themselves if you give them guns. The Afrikaners, who probably have a hand in what is going on now, cultivated the Zulus from the beginning to cause division among blacks. Mangosuthu Buthelezi once quipped that the ANC was ‘blowing up dustbins.’

Madiba made Buthelezi his Minister of Home Affairs, presumably to head off civil war. Perhaps the same logic explained the Presidency of Jacob Zuma, a character totally unsuited for leadership. The nation was already sliding down a slippery slope, to which an overrated Ramaphosa could only add his own infirmities.

Oh, there were historical mistakes, such as the strategic decision by the fathers of the ANC to create ‘in trust’ some black ‘artificial billionaires’, expecting that they would somehow help to lift the underclass. Cyril. Tokyo. A few others. It has not worked.

Jacob Zuma’s appropriation of ‘MK’, – Umkhonto we Sizwe – the symbol of the ANC’s liberation war, for his party’s agenda, like salt in the injuries of those who died in the bush.

You watch a video of a young man named Thabo Ngayo, national coordinator of ‘Operation Dudula’, the original xenophobic activists, explaining to an Ethiopian immigrant why he should give up his tiny spaza. Slow of speech, feeble of mind, with an IQ perhaps no more than 50 – a sorry emblem of South African Youth and possibilities.

Another vocal ‘activist’ asks to be told the name of any African who died to free South Africa. Really?

It is said that President Ramaphosa has sent out envoys to African capitals to parley with their leaders. What exactly these ‘Honorary White’ envoys will say in expiation is difficult to fathom.
African development – the next stage of the Pan-African journey, will proceed, with or more likely now, without South Africa. It is what it is.