Mbeki ventured into new territory even stranger than his well-known skepticism about the link between HIV and AIDS. Now he suggested that the CIA, international drug companies and other forces are conspiring to ruin him because of his independent view on AIDS and his critique of the world economic order. According to the report by the Johannesburg-based Mail and Guardian, Mbeki said his advisers were finding out who was spreading the word that he is “deranged.”
After a week of silence, the government denied key aspects of the report. Well-informed sources told NEWSWEEK it had been “entirely accurate.” But whatever the president’s precise words to his party stalwarts were, the sad fact remains: Mbeki’s credibility problem now goes beyond AIDS, the pandemic that currently infects more people in South Africa than in any other country in the world. The AIDS crisis has become the occasion for Mbeki to reveal himself in ways that appall not just foreigners but many South Africans. “His position has given us a lens through which we can examine him,” says one local political analyst. “The ANC used to rally around their leaders, but now [that] is very difficult. It is something we can blame ourselves for–he created the myth of the quiet intellectual.”
Mbeki came into office with a reputation as a hands-on manager, but his handling of the AIDS crisis now makes him look like a man obsessed with conspiracy theories. What other politician would insist on personally investigating the basis of AIDS science? He has proved thin-skinned. Relations with the official opposition have degenerated into name-calling; after one bitter exchange, Mbeki broadly attacked his opponent as “the white politician.” And Mbeki can’t abide dissent from within. Parliamentary hearings on AIDS policy last month would have been comical if the stakes weren’t so high. No top government official would declare flatly that HIV causes AIDS. Afterward, the administration tried to settle the debate by declaring Mbeki’s statement to Parliament the last word on the subject: government policy, the president said, is based on the “thesis” that HIV causes AIDS. The ANC’s national executive committee declared that the president was the target of a “massive propaganda onslaught.”
Despite such official displays of support, dissent is growing. The president of the private Medical Research Council, Malegapuru Makgoba, warned that South Africa risked going down in history as having collaborated in “the greatest genocide of our time.” Half the country’s teenagers are expected to contract the virus. He said South Africa’s “political and scientific choices” are critical–a clear reference to Mbeki’s skepticism on AIDS, which has led him to withhold public funding for retroviral HIV treatment. Former president Nelson Mandela called for unequivocal endorsement of the accepted view on HIV and AIDS. “The ANC must find a way to get Mbeki to resign,” declared one leading demographer, Dr. Robert Shell. The leader of the nation’s largest labor federation, COSATU, last month called the debate over AIDS “confusing.” “It can undermine the message that all South Africans must take precautions,” said COSATU president Willie Madisha. Public-health clinics report that some people are refusing to practice safe sex, citing Mbeki’s views.
The danger for Mbeki is that, having shown weakness on a critical health issue, he has opened himself to attack in other areas. “He has a degree in economics, so people have been willing to give credibility to his economic views, but he is not a doctor,” says one black academician. When the rand slipped to a historic low last week, commentators seized on remarks by Vice President Jacob Zuma that had seemed to endorse the renegade land-reform program of President Robert Mugabe in neighboring Zimbabwe. Zuma’s office quickly put out a correction. The complaints of black labor unions go well beyond AIDS policy. They bitterly resent Mbeki’s belt-tightening economic program, intended to make the economy more attractive to foreign capital. The unions were critical to the antiapartheid struggle, but an eventual break with the ANC seems likely.
Mbeki’s talk of shadowy enemies in America may play well with some such core supporters. But it calls his judgment into question. Clearly this won’t reassure those he is campaigning to convert. In tandem with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, he has challenged the West to open up international financial institutions to leaders of the developing world. They argue that spreading the benefits of globalization more equally will require massive transfers of capital–not just traditional aid. “We must show the will to end poverty and underdevelopment,” Mbeki told the U.N. Millennium Summit in New York last month. Paranoia hardly advances such a lofty goal.
