Dueling differences - image and substance
Thursday, December 20, 2007
It's not well known, but the President that journalists have dismissed this week as a terminally weakened lame duck was once prone to visit journalists at 3.30 a.m. – well, this journalist, anyway – in hope of a fun time.
It was the late 1980s in the steamy base-in-exile of several African countries' liberation movements, the Zambian capital city, Lusaka. And Thabo Mbeki (pictured left), now a free South Africa’s second President, was then the African National Congress’s Director of Information. He showed up at my hotel’s front desk, waking me up with the determination that he and I should have a roaring night on the town.
Nowadays he enjoys (or maybe "endures" is a better word) a much more prickly relationship with the press. Since his lifelong political home, that same ANC, this week voted him out of the party’s leadership - though he retains the country’s presidency until term limits end his rule in 18 months' time - reporters have been eagerly dispatching him early to history’s dustbin. They’ve piled in on him summarily, repeating the widespread criticism that he has been a distant leader, shutting out many good potential contributors from his political decision-making - not least those who inhabit the important left-wing and trade union base of his movement.
He’s been replaced in the party’s favor, of course, by the florid personage of Jacob Zuma (right), and the press is excited. Zuma has successfully courted the left, most obviously with ready populist rhetoric but little in the way of reforming policies or programs. His popular strength lies in his other differences from Mbeki. He’s gregarious in a way that Mbeki can’t be (the national President is more comfortable in small groups of like-minded people, even while – as when he demanded nighthawk companionship with me – he can be a dedicated pleasure-seeker.)
Zuma for his part is pointedly low-rent in many of his tastes and in his behavior (even while, in caricature as a post-liberation leader, favoring bespoke suits – as well as some gorgeous traditional Zulu dress when its called for). His predilections took him to being charged with rape (legally acquitted, but forever labeled an ignorant lout and worse, with his braggadocio and his idiotic claims that showering was enough protection from HIV/AIDS.)
Appearing in a criminal trial may not have been what he wanted, but he undoubtedly seeks out crowds and enjoys being the center of attention. He drinks up public adulation with a queasy-making relish. Mbeki on the other hand, while being clubby in an old-fashioned way, is always a tad uncomfortable in the limelight.
Mbeki's aloofness and separateness set in seriously once he achieved the topmost office – with disastrous results for South Africa’s appalling HIV/AIDS problem. He would spend nights alone surfing the web with a scotch in hand, and there found the weird and wacky theories (some of them supposedly traditionally-based tribal medicine) that captured his unchecked, idiosyncratic imagination, and were largely responsible for his government’s unforgiveable delay (for at least five years) before implementing a serious program of affordable antiretroviral medication.
The veteran anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu told me in an interview (to be broadcast next month on the Voices of our World radio program): “We had some very weird points of view held at the top. And for a very long time, you know, we were mourning the deaths of many people who shouldn't really have died, had the roll-out of retroviral drugs happened much, much earlier.”
So in sum, South Africa’s people and press have ended up being presented with an unappetizing contest: the supreme arrogance of isolation versus the supreme arrogance of crowd-pleasing.
**A PODCAST BASED ON THIS COLUMN CAN BE HEARD HERE - via Robin Hood Radio **
IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE TO PAINT THE FIGHT SIMPLY AS AN EGG-HEAD versus a street-smart fighter. My own recollections of Mbeki during his rise through the ANC to be Nelson Mandela’s right-hand man, and then his heir, certainly include his deeply developed capacity for slicing rivals right in their political jugular.
Sometimes his efforts to appear disarmingly modest were just plain laughable. I interviewed him in a Thames TV studio in London on a day well before Mandela’s release from prison, on which all the ANC’s public efforts were then being concentrated, and I turned to matters of his personal ambition, as the widely touted crown prince ...
DT: What role do you see for yourself in the future of South Africa?
Mbeki: Oh David! We are ordinary foot soldiers, aren’t we?
DT: I may indeed be an ordinary foot-soldier, Mr Mbeki, but I think you are destined have a much fuller role than that.
Mbeki: Ah, I’m sure all members of the ANC would say to that question that we’ll do whatever the movement says we must do. I don’t think there’s any particular role that’s cut out or reserved for anyone.
The exchange was simply too coy to be broadcast.
Don’t be surprised if in the remaining stretch of Mbeki’s national presidency, he manages, with the low cunning he’s perfectly capable of, to encourage sizeable obstacles in Zuma’s path, as this week's winner tries to move on from party leader to being Mbeki’s successor in the top government position.
Zuma’s rape case may be over, but another scandal, involving a huge bribe paid out by one of the country’s richest businessmen, is making its way pursued by the National Prosecuting Authority through the legal system, which (for all the much-lauded separation of powers in the New South Africa) cannot fail to be influenced, however subtly and cleverly, by a sitting President.
Be prepared also, as a part of the maneuvers, for South Africa’s media to start giving a lot more attention to, for instance, the hero-worshipped former freedom-fighter, Tokyo Sexwale – who left the area of government to become a powerful tycoon. He may well resume his former guarded but often collaborative partnership with Mbeki, and present himself as a better choice for running the country, certainly in the eyes of international business, than a rabble-rousing leftist, as Zuma can all-too-readily be portrayed.
DURING NOVEMBER I WAS PREDICTING IN THE MEDIA BEAT, though I was hardly the only one, that the WGA writers’ strike was going to be a long haul. Well now, after forty days and forty nights of the stoppage, things are definitely dug in deep.
In a room recently with Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, during an investors' conference, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that if his company’s stance carries weight with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers - as I’m assured it very substantially does - the struggle will end up lasting much, much longer than anyone on the union side has bargained for.
It doesn’t help that considerably less than ten percent of NBC Universal’s bottom-line profits now come from prime time network TV. The bulk comes from movies (where Universal has had a good year) and from cable … which is pretty well impervious to any strike effects, for at least a year.
So it comes as no surprise that it should be NBC that's first in taking the somewhat brazen step of bringing back its previously shut-down nightly talk shows, Tonight with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, dispensing with their writing staffs in the process.