Thabo Mbeki
From AIDS Wiki
Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki (born 18 June 1942 in Queenstown, South Africa) is the President of the Republic of South Africa. He is the first major political figure to openly question the HIV/AIDS hypothesis and in 2000, he convened a Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel to determine the cause of AIDS-defining illnesses in South Africa.
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Life
Early years
Born and raised in what is now the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, Mbeki is the son of Govan Mbeki (1910 - 2001), a stalwart of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party. His parents were both teachers and activists in a rural area of ANC strength, and Mbeki describes himself as "born into the struggle"; a portrait of Karl Marx sat on the family mantlepiece, and a portrait of Mohandas Gandhi was on the wall.
Govan Mbeki had come to the rural Eastern Cape as a political activist after earning two university degrees; he urged his family to make the ANC their family, and of his children, Thabo Mbeki is the one who most clearly followed that instruction, joining the party at age 14 and devoting his life to it thereafter. [1][2] After leaving the Eastern Cape, he lived in Johannesburg, working with Walter Sisulu.
Exile and Return
After the arrest and imprisonment of Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and his father, and facing a similar fate, Thabo Mbeki left South Africa as one of a number of young ANC militants sent abroad to continue their education and their anti-apartheid activities. He ultimately spent 28 years in exile, only returning to his homeland after the release of Nelson Mandela.
Mbeki spent some of his exile in the United Kingdom, earning a Master of Economics degree from the University of Sussex and then working in the ANC's London office; he also received military training in what was then the Soviet Union and lived at different times in Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland and Nigeria.
While Thabo Mbeki was in exile, his brother Jama Mbeki was murdered by agents of the Lesotho government in 1982, and his son Kwanda was killed while trying to leave South Africa and join his father in exile. When Thabo Mbeki was reunited with his father, the elder Mbeki told a reporter, "You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade!"
Certainly, Thabo Mbeki devoted his life to the ANC, and as his years in exile continued, he rose to increasingly responsible roles. Mbeki was appointed head of the ANC's information department in 1984 and of its international department in 1989. While in these roles, he was close to Oliver Tambo, who served as a powerful mentor. In 1985, he was a member of a delegation that began meeting with representatives of the South African business community, and in 1989, he led the ANC delegation that conducted secret talks with the South African government. These talks led to the unbanning of the ANC and the release of political prisoners. He also participated in many of the other important discussions between the ANC and the government that eventually led to the democratization of South Africa. [3]
Role in African politics
In 1993, he was elected as the chairperson of the ANC, succeeding Tambo. He became a deputy president of South Africa in May 1994 on the attainment of universal suffrage, and sole deputy-president in June 1996. He succeeded Nelson Mandela as ANC president in December 1997 and as president of the Republic in June 1999 (inaugurated on 16 June); he was subsequently reelected for a second term in April 2004.
As President of the ANC and of the Republic, Mbeki has been a notably powerful figure in African politics, positioning South Africa as a regional powerbroker and also promoting the idea that African political conflicts should be solved by Africans. He headed the formation of both NEPAD and the African Union and has played influential roles in brokering peace deals in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has also tried to popularise the concept of an African Renaissance. He sees African dependence on aid and foreign intervention as a major barrier to the continent being taken seriously in the world of economics and politics, and he sees structures like NEPAD and the AU as part of a process in which Africa solves its own problems without relying on outside assistance.
Presidency
Political style
Mbeki has sometimes been characterized as remote and academic, although in his second campaign for Presidency in 2004, many observers described him as finally relaxing into a more traditional campaign mode, sometimes dancing at events and even kissing babies. Nonetheless, the fact that this was remarkable confirms the broader observation that Mbeki is a man who values the exercise of centralized policy over demonstrations of grassroots populism.
Mbeki's thinking can often be found in his weekly column in the ANC newsletter ANC Today [4], where he often produces long discourses on a variety of topics. He sometimes uses his column to deliver pointed invectives against political opponents, and at other times uses it to provide intellectual justifications for ANC policy. Although these columns are remarkable for their dense prose, they nonetheless often manage to make news. And although Mbeki does not generally make a point of befriending or courting reporters, his columns and news events have often yielded good results for his administration by ensuring that his message is a primary driving force of news coverage [5] Indeed, in initiating his columns, Mbeki stated his view that the bulk of South African media sources did not speak for or to the South African majority, and stated his intent to use ANC Today to speak directly to his constituents rather than through the media. [6]
Unlike many world leaders, Mbeki appears to be at ease with the Internet and willing to quote from it. For instance, in a column [7] discussing Hurricane Katrina, he cited Wikipedia, quoted at length a discussion of Katrina's lessons on American inequality from the Native American publication Indian Country Today [8], and then included excerpts from a David Brooks column in the New York Times in a discussion of why the events of Katrina illustrated the necessity for global development and redistribution of wealth.
Economic policies
Mbeki and his allies within government have emphasized market-oriented approaches to South African economic policy. And even beyond the difficulties of inheriting the debts of apartheid, philosophically Mbeki appears to believe that economic growth is a precondition of economic redistribution. Additionally, he has emphasized avoidance of debt as a way of maintaining political and economic independence for the newly democratic state.
Mbeki has emphasized that any policy that would redistribute wealth at the expense of economic growth and deficit reduction would ultimately put the nation into a downward spiral of market shrinkage and debt accumulation. He has pointed to Zimbabwe's post-liberation direction as an example of the dangers of an overly redistributive approach. And although unemployment remains high and black poverty remains the rule rather than the exception, the economy overall has grown. Perhaps as a result, most South Africans remain loyal to the ANC and to Mbeki's government, and are willing to see economic transformation and redistribution of wealth as a long-term and gradual process.
Zimbabwe
Due to South Africa's proximity, strong trade links, and similar struggle credentials, South Africa is in a unique, and possibly solitary, position to influence politics in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe's economic slide since 2000 has been a matter of increasing concern to Britain (as the former colonial power) and other donors to that country, and high-ranking diplomatic visits to South Africa have repeatedly attempted to persuade Mbeki to take a harder line with his erstwhile comrade, Robert Mugabe over takeovers of private farms by groups of Mugabe-allied war veterans, freedom of the press, and independence of the judiciary.
To the West's concern, Mbeki has never publicly criticised Mugabe's policies – preferring 'quiet diplomacy' rather than 'megaphone diplomacy', his term for the West's increasingly shrill condemnation of Mugabe's rule.
- To quote Mbeki – The point really about all this from our perspective has been that the critical role we should play is to assist the Zimbabweans to find each other, really to agree among themselves about the political, economic, social, other solutions that their country needs. We could have stepped aside from that task and then shouted, and that would be the end of our contribution...They would shout back at us and that would be the end of the story. I'm actually the only head of government that I know anywhere in the world who has actually gone to Zimbabwe and spoken publicly very critically of the things that they are doing.
Role in AIDS dissent
Mbeki contacts Duesberg and Rasnick
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Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel
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Durban Declaration
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Stance against ARVs
In the current South African system, the Cabinet can override the President. Although its votes are private, it appeared to have done so in votes to declare as Cabinet policy that HIV is the cause of AIDS; and then, in August 2003, in a promise to formulate a national treatment plan that would include ARVs. However, the Health Ministry is still headed by Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who has served as health minister since June 1999, and has promoted nutritional approaches to AIDS while highlighting potential toxicities of antiretroviral drugs, leading critics to question whether the same leadership that opposed ARV treatment would effectively carry out the treatment plan. Indeed, implementation has been slow and activists still criticize Mbeki's AIDS policies.
The largest shift in his views apparently came after he assumed the Presidency. He described AIDS as a "disease of poverty", arguing that political attention should be directed to poverty generally rather than AIDS specifically. Speaking to a group of university students in 2001, he struck out against what he viewed as the racism underlying how many in the West characterized AIDS in Africa:
Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust. [9]
Whatever Mbeki's views of AIDS are now, ANC rules and his own commitment to the idea of party discipline mean that he can not publicly criticize the current government policy that HIV causes AIDS and that antiretrovirals should be provided.
See also
- Durban Declaration
- Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS
- Papers from the Presidential Panel on Validating HIV Antibody Testing in South Africa
External links
General
- Mbeki: ANC official page His party's collection of Mbeki documents, biography and portrait
- Google News on Mbeki Initiates news search for current items on Mbeki
- Thabo Mbeki at Wikipedia
Profiles
- "Thabo Mbeki - a man of two faces" The Economist magazine profiles Mbeki
- The Guardian Profile The Guardian (UK) profiles Mbeki
- AFP Profile Thabo Mbeki as seen by Agence France-Presse
HIV/AIDS
- Chapter 5 of Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS, covering the events in South Africa in 2000
- A mainstream doctor says "Mbeki’s comments on AIDS causation are less heretical than many would have us believe."
Credit
 | This page uses content from the Thabo_Mbeki article on Wikipedia, captured on 20 March 2006. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with the AIDS Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
