Mbeki incompetence

NY Times Editorial:

Crackpot and dangerous theories on AIDS. Extreme and widening levels of income inequality. Enabling Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and only belatedly trying to halt mob atrocities against desperate Zimbabwean and other African immigrants. This is the legacy of South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who has one more year in his second term.

It would be hard to imagine a more depressing contrast with the leadership of Nelson Mandela, Mr. Mbeki’s predecessor and one of the 20th century’s great heroes.

History will laud Mr. Mandela for leading his country, peacefully, from hateful apartheid to democratic majority rule, marvel at his commitment to honesty and healing and celebrate his promotion of South Africa as a diverse and tolerant “rainbow nation.”

If it remembers Mr. Mbeki at all, it will be for appointing a health minister who favored garlic and beet root as treatment for South Africa’s more than five million citizens infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and for his stubborn refusal to use South Africa’s economic and political clout to stop Zimbabwe’s horrors.

Instead, Mr. Mbeki declared that there was “no crisis,” even as Zimbabwe’s electoral count was being hijacked, opposition supporters terrorized and thousands of its citizens fleeing over the border to South Africa where they still have not found safety. The only explanation is his misplaced loyalty to Mr. Mugabe, who was once a hero for leading Zimbabwe to majority rule.

South Africa is the richest, most developed country south of the Sahara and the continent’s largest, most exemplary democracy. Africa badly needs its enlightened leadership. A decade ago, under Mr. Mandela, South Africa was swiftly emerging as the respected leader of a proud, postcolonial Africa.

Under Mr. Mbeki’s leadership, the fruits of the nation’s hard-fought victory over apartheid have gone mainly to officials and former officials of the ruling African National Congress, not to the millions of poor people in the townships who faced down the dogs, the bullets and the pass laws and still must live without adequate jobs, education, housing or health services.

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I have always though Mandela was overrated, but he was clearly better than his successor. Mbeki has been enabling and excusing Mugabe's tyranny in a inexcusable despotic genocide against his own people, the fruits of which are now inflaming xenophobic violence in Mbeki's country.

His probably successor, Jacob Zuma is also of questionable character, but he has at least recognized the poisonous Mugabe for who he is and has spoken out about the xenophobia unleashed by Mbecki's incompetence. Mbecki and Mugabe have accomplished the impossible. They have made colonialism look like the good old days.