Stumbling toward Pretoria - President Nelson Mandela's cabinet is failing

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by R.W. Johnson

Granted, transforming an entire society is not easy. But some of the ANC parliamentarians seem particularly ill suited for the job - not least the tempestuous Winnie Mandela.

President Mandela's government of national unity has now been in power in South Africa for nearly five months. Seldom, if ever, has a government taken power amid such euphoria. Yet already the relationship between the government and the press is under considerable strain. Part of the reason is simply that the ANC, so used to owning -not just occupying - the moral high ground, has come to feel it is a sort of protected species, so that any criticism, however mild, comes as a rude shock.

But there is more to it than that. Stung by press comment that the new government had achieved little in its first hundred days, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, addressing the Cape Town Press Club, suggested that the. problem lay with the press. It had, he said, been "perfectly correct for the press to criticize the previous government" - the word "correct" is worth lingering over - but such behavior was now inappropriate. Instead of its "tendency to look for crises and to look for faults arid mistakes, it should ask what its role was in building a democracy." Mr. Mbeki, it turned out, had been particularly incensed by an article that had accused him of laziness and unexplained absences from important meetings.

A week later he was far outdone by the most powerful regional premier, Tokyo Sexwale, who had come under fire for having hired B of his cronies at double the normal rates for jobs that were not advertised and - it seems to happen all the time - for not turning up at meetings he's scheduled to address. Mr. Sexwale heads the government of the PWV (Pretoria-Withwatersrand-Vereeniging) area, which contains a quarter of the country's population and generates 60 per cent of its wealth. He is a leading contender for the eventual succession to President Mandela, along with Mr. Mbeki and the ANC party boss, Cyril Ramaphosa. (The French have clearly decided Mr. Sexwale is the man most likely: President Mitterrand, on his recent visit, bestowed the Legion of Honor upon him.) But Mr. Sexwale, like not a few other new ANC men of power, has a somewhat chiefly manner - which led one newspaper editor to refer to him as His Regional Highness. Sexwale furiously told the PWV legislature that "some people are trying to use the concept of press freedom to hide behind [sic] slander, character assassination, an attempt to undermine government [with] innuendoes, fabrications." "Counter-revolutionaries," he claimed, were using the guise of press freedom to try to prevent the country's reconstruction. It would not be allowed, nor would such language as that in the offending article be permitted in the legislature.

Such outbursts are interesting partly because the ANC elite has, since the election, been sheltered beneath the umbrella provided by President Mandela's overwhelming popularity. In mid August Mandela was given a 60 per cent approval rating by whites (up from 38 per cent last November), 69 per cent by Indians, 70 per cent by Coloureds, and 92 per cent by blacks. Mandela's entire lack of bitterness, his evident generosity and good will, and his grave, dignified bearing have made him a national totem, an icon quite beyond criticism. Even the conservative Citizen warns solemnly that he is being overburdened and that the man is too precious to the country for any risks to be taken.

The Indispensable Man

For it has now dawned on many whites that Mandela is pretty well indispensable. Although the radicals in the ANC caucus chafe bitterly against his willingness to strike coalition compromises with the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party, Mandela simply enjoys too much love and admiration from the ANC faithful for open criticism of him to be possible within the ANC. But he also enjoys the warm regard of both the IFP leader, Chief Buthelezi, and the NP leader, F. W. de Klerk. Even Conrad Viljoen, the leader of the white Right, has warm words for Mr. Mandela. Which is why Mandela is indispensable. After the bitter struggles the country has been through, it longs for peace and reconciliation, and he can deliver them like no one else.

The trouble is that no country can really be governed - let alone guided through a process of transformation - simply by having a dear old man with a shining moral character as president. There is, quite unmistakably, a lack of grip in the way the government is being run. The fact is that Mandela, aged 76, having trouble with his eyes and perhaps with his health more generally, has no experience of administration and really can't be expected to learn how to run a cabinet now.

Quite visibly, the cabinet does not work. Thus Omar Dullah, the Minister of Justice, bitterly attacked the U.S. over its hostility to Cuba (a passionate cause for the ANC and even more for the South African Communist Party), but the Foreign Ministry, conscious of President Clinton's warm support for the Mandela government, observed a glacial silence until Dullah declared that actually he had never made the offending speech. Similarly, Joe Modise, the Minister of Defense, made a bitter attack on Israel, announced the purchase of corvettes for the navy, and tried to censor a newspaper, all without cabinet consent. The Ministry of Administration ceded control of vital water resources to the provinces without consulting the Ministry of Water Affairs, which had to fight furiously to snatch control back.