On the ANC
AR: On that front, what is going to happen? Is the ANC going to divide again as it did at the end of Thabo Mbeki’s time?
MM: There won’t be a division.
AR: Or will there be an assured succession?
MM: No, there will be a succession. It’s a tradition of the ANC that the winner then brings in everybody and the issue is bring them in meaningfully and it’s an issue that is there in the DNA of the ANC. It’s not a new thing for it. There is a person who’s writing a biography of Pixley ka Isaka Seme. Do you know that his last years were spent in the thirties actively trying to destroy the ANC? So, and I was telling the biographer, please write it honestly. Show that people have views, they contribute, and they do things that can harm. But what got us right? What got us right was that the conditions arose for the question to be addressed. Others in the leadership, including the newborn Youth League decided to make the ANC a mass based organisation. Once we did that we created the condition for the views of the ordinary member of the ANC have a voice. Right now the ANC does not have tasks given to its branches that compel it to interact with the community. It spends its time watching what is the councillor doing and in danger of losing its organic link with the community and the people it has promised to serve.
So I believe it won’t split. I believe there are a lot of distractions in it. But I believe that addressing the question of the task of the branch and pursuing that line of a consensus, I don’t know whether President Zuma wavered or not on the question of the NDP, because that’s some alleged — that there was Ebrahim Patel and there was talk about, that there’s all these policies and pulls (in different directions). But I think that the job done by Trevor Manuel in putting the NDP together was a unique exercise but it was an exercise started by Zuma. So you see how mixed this thing is.
AR: But it’s gone in abeyance, the NDP.
MM: No, it’s now his front line of his speeches. It’s his front line now. That and infrastructure has become his front line campaigning. And interestingly, for whatever reason, political or otherwise that he had to bring in Cyril [Ramaphosa]. Cyril was the deputy chair of that Commission.
AR: The previous deputy presidents have, by and large, have been president . . .
MM: I think it’s a good thing that Cyril didn’t become president earlier. I think he could become a good president but sometimes too fast a movement can wreck the hell out of you. But I think he’s a fantastic negotiator, he’s got enormous . . . how shall I put it. He’s got an enormous capacity to stay focused at the same time on ten issues.
MM: I think Cyril will probably make a good president. I’m not ruling out that even when he becomes a president you’ll find some major cock-up take place. But the matter of succession will be resolved by the delegates from the branches attending a national conference of the ANC.
AR: The outside world knows Cyril Ramaphosa from way back when he was with you negotiating. And there is a danger that everyone outside South Africa assumes oh, he would be brilliant, but we don’t know how anyone will do, do we.
MM: We don’t know what happens. When power comes into your hands. In fact, in hospital when I thought I was dying, I came to a formulation in the state of semi-delirium because part of my job was to be interacting with you guys and your favourite assertion is that you speak truth to power. You were always whacking me all the time with that. So I added two qualifiers on my statement that I imagined in my delirium. To seek to speak truth to power is absolutely necessary but before you speak make sure it is the truth. Secondly, before you speak be also aware that once you have spoken you’ve exercised power. Only for the reason, how do we build a culture of taking responsibility. And you raised Nkandla. I’d say that is the biggest weakness, the Nkandla saga. He ought to take some clearly defined level of responsibility, even if it is for an act of omission.
But from the beginning, I once said to him, President, prepare yourself for repayment. This is before the report came out. And I said, if you have a problem I’m sure that in your present position it won’t be difficult to raise. He said, no, I did not ask for those security enhancements, I’m not paying. I understood his point of view. We know how stubborn each of us can be and we know each of us have got some blind spot in us. But how this thing pans out, it has gone pretty far down the parliamentary process but what is important is to create a culture of taking responsibility for our actions.
On second thoughts, I think my comment on President Zuma and Nkandla are inappropriate. Firstly, my job as his spokesman depended on confidentiality. My job ended only recently on 30 April 2015. Secondly, the matter of Nkandla is still with Parliament and possibly the courts. There is much contestation between the parties on this matter and I do not want my personal views arising from a confidential relationship to become a political football. I am a dedicated member of the ANC.
Otherwise, I think the reputation of President in Africa in Africa is not weak. I saw the body language between him and Obama and I saw it going wrong. Were you here when Obama visited?
AR: No.
MM: He outshone Obama at the press conference. So he can rise like that.
On Mandela, the leader
AR: From your description of Nelson Mandela, the moment that you were on Robben Island prison with him he had almost a headmasterly role it seems. Was it apparent that he had special leadership skills, or did that become more apparent as time went on?
MM: What I might say might be a bit contradictory. Firstly, let me start by saying that my view on leadership is that there is no gene that says this person will be a leader. I think leadership arises from the way you respond to the challenges you face, and looking at Mandela’s life, what makes you a leader is a very simple proposition. In life at all times you are faced with challenges, and those challenges necessitate that you make choices. In the struggle for social change those choices are not just an individual choice. Invariably when you begin to act on those choices, the results don’t come out the way you want it. And at that point confronted with unintended consequences, you will see the person who now wants to blame somebody, who now wants to know who did what wrong and is moaning about the situation. He is already out as a leader. You will see the leader who will take the consequences that have arisen as is. And then he will turn those consequences, that new environment, and say, what are the challenges here? How do we move forward here? And then he’d begin to discuss and raise the question of the way forward. He’s turned it back into a circle. Challenge, choice, consequence, challenge. But at the heart of it, he never avoids . . . he doesn’t shirk responsibility.
Mandela, when he went to prison in 1962, it was well before the document Operation Mayibuye had been drafted. He is brought to join them in that trial as accused number one. The other day I was speaking in Pretoria. George Bizos was in the audience, Ahmed Kathrada was in the audience too. I raised this matter and I said, are you aware that when Operation Mayibuye, that crazy scheme, was put forward Mandela was in prison and had no hand in it. Mandela didn’t spend time quarrelling with his colleague and about who and why such a plan was considered. It was part of the challenges they were facing and Mandela stood up and said, I’ll take responsibility, I will defend our positions. Rusty Bernstein, one of accused confirms this trait in Mandela.
What no one noticed was that behind the scenes arguments took place. Those arguments went on for years in one form or another.
What does that tell you about leadership? I can never forget that.
So, coming back to this leadership factor. Yes, Mandela had already carved a space in which, even in the treason trial, those qualities in him were being noticed. And I’ve asked Walter Sisulu what made him spot in Mandela a leader? And I said to him, what made you see the potential? And he said, what I saw in Mandela was not only a young man who was determined to fight for freedom, but I saw the determination with which he applied himself. If you go to the Mandela Foundation and look at his notes, you will see how he thinks and rethinks issues, and I’ve had the privilege of working on his autobiography and engaging in close discussions on the contents and his formulations. Security considerations did not allow for Mandela to keep with him what he had already written. Night after night he had to move on writing the next 10-15 pages.
AR: So, he can’t keep referring to what he’s already written, because it’s him with you and with Kathrada.
MM: But all that’s happening is that he and I began to bunk work on grounds of medical health. So, we would stay behind while the others went to work and we would spend the day in the quadrangle — he’s seated on a concrete brick and me on a stone — discussing what he had written, discussing the comments the comments of Sisulu and Kathrada, arguing about matters, and then he would say, yes, you can change this, yes, you can do that, no, that should remain as is. And he has to make it light hearted. It was so funny. He had one day told me about how when he became a lawyer it was very important that you should establish a particular relationship with any client that comes into your presence, and he said, that is around the big desk, that is why your chair must be higher, and that is why the client chairs were lower.
There was one rectangular concrete brick in the prison quadrangle where we were housed. If you stood it upright the person facing you had to look up the person sitting on the brick and Mandela always went and sat on that brick. And there was one rock much lower and that was my seat. One evening I said, this thing has got to stop. So, the next day I rushed out before he could get there and I sat on the concrete slab. Then he came. For the next two days we did no work except to argue about who should sit on the brick! It wasn’t an aggressive argument it was full of good humour.
AR: You referred to the Tutu theory — which I’ve heard him [Tutu] say in interviews with me and publicly — that awful as it was, that Robben Island helped to make Mandela . . . that he went in an angry youngish man and came out as this reconciliatory force. What of that theory?
MM: There’s a book edited by Parker-Hamilton titled, a “Mandela — The Authorised Portrait. I got involved in it and Kathrada and I eventually became consulting editors. By that time Tutu had written his foreword. I was not aware that he’d been approached and when I read the foreword I said to Kate Parker-Hamilton, I have a problem, and she said, but we can’t change it. I said, no, I am not asking you to change it. That’s the Arch’s view and, he’s entitled to it. I suggested that towards the end of the book we interview Kathrada. He has been with Mandela in every trial and in a very close working relationship. Let’s ask him the question how has prison changed him. To counter that argument . . . But I also countered it in a different way.
If you study the manifesto of Umkhonto we Sizwe, you will see that buried in it there is an embedded invitation to say, “let’s talk even at eleventh hour”. Every move that was made at a time when Mandela and Sisulu were in the leadership structures, on the defiance campaign to the arrest, no campaign was launched without making this point and inviting the regime to be part of the process. So, when we went for the armed struggle, we always left open that possibility and it was so far into those debates that we had in prison but that question was there already in 1968. You will see, in 1968, and I may be wrong on the date by year, there is a petition that was signed by a select group of people headed by Mandela demanding our release. He had drafted this petition and the only non-ANC people to sign it was Eddie Daniels of the African Resistance Movement (ARM). The other non-ANC members refused to sign. They argued that that petition amounted to begging the regime to release us!
What happened then is that Mandela is drafting, setting out his arguments and we’ve agreed we will do this. Helen Suzman comes on a visit. That’s our first visit from her. She asks Mandela: How’s things, how’s treatment. He says: there’s one question, we’re demanding our release. She dismisses it as unrealistic. So, they have a bit of an argument and Mandela begins by showing how, in the Boer War and post- Boer War, people were sentenced and later released. He cites all the cases including Robey Liebrandt, the Nazi supporter. Helen demolishes his argument with one statement. She said, yes, Mr. Mandela, those were failed revolutions, yours is still on. When that happened, and I listened to it, and I said, oh, our petition is gone. No, not with Mandela. Now he had to apply his mind to that question. How, in the petition, do I counteract that response? And he counteracted it by saying, if you are to say that we must remain here in prison, then your argument has changed, you are no longer saying that we’re guilty; you’re saying, whether guilty or not, we must die in jail.
But I’m alluding to such instances by way of showing how his leadership quality developed. He did not dismiss Helen Suzman and say, go to hell. He actually turned the thing around to say, she is passing me a message how the other side is thinking, and when you do that, you can interact even with your worst enemy. I remember General Steyn coming over. He was an extremely polite man, the overall head of prisons. He always came in a black suit with a hat, spotless white shirt. Very soft-spoken. We were in the yard and Mandela is raising our complaints and General Steyn turns around and says at some point, Mr Mandela, you are not in a five-star hotel, you are in a prison, and he said it quite firmly. I’m listening to this thing and I’m saying, oh, boy, that man is in trouble.
Mandela turns around and he says, General, you and I are at war. You’re on one side, I’m on the other side. In a war nobody can predict who’s going to win but one thing we know, that at the end of the day we will have to meet, even if it is for you to just accept my surrender. How that happens will be determined by how we treat each other. Steyn changed overnight. So, I come back to the leadership question. Circumstance. But how you respond, the choices you make and are you prepared to live with those consequences, critical all the time. And Mandela is not an overnight leader, it is through action — and you see it coming and that is where that element of discipline and persistence comes in.
AR: So this is an implicit counterpart to the Tutu point.
MM: To the Tutu point, we had already had the Freedom Charter. South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white together. We had had the last clause about peace and friendship. We had come to Umkhonto we Sizwe and we were saying, even at this late hour let’s talk and resolve our problems . . . I get arrested a year after Rivonia. Accused number one, Wilton Mkwayi, stands up in the dock . . . We’ll still only be conducting sabotage at that stage. Wilton stands up and he says, My Lord, I’m a professional agitator. The bombs that we have set are actually a letter of invitation calling the regime to meet with us.
That was implicit but when the downturn came and exile now became the only place in which the movement will be revived, the sentiments swung and I think that there are two things in battle — you have to teach your combatants to hate the enemy for its policies and practices, but you also have to teach your combatants to respect the enemy for its power and prowess.
Yes, you hate in order to get them mobilised but in your mind you never underestimate the other side and that capacity. But it was not Mandela alone who had this attitude. You will see that he never made a move without consulting the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe and when I came out of prison, I was being sent to Zambia by him and Sisulu…..
I then worked with Tambo and I realised that these three guys had such a phenomenal faith in each other that the issue of rivalry was never there. Each one understood the other one’s strength. Together they made a formidable trio. Mandela and Walter would say, just make sure that OR is fully briefed. And if OR makes any changes, you make them. OR would come to me, what is the position in prison? What’s Mandela’s views? Until I opened the lines, I read the first communication where he is briefing Mandela about the set-up while Mandela is having talks, there wasn’t a secure means for them to communicate . . . They differed and, by the way, they differed at times when Mandela would be brutal, more brutal . . .
I’ve never seen him more brutal towards Sisulu in a meeting than towards anybody else. Having been separated for thirty years, when the three got together in 1990 they were on the same page!
AR: Your point that there was never rivalries is extraordinary, not least given the more recent splits and divisions in the ANC.
MM: Look at today. We’ve got phenomenal challenges. The ANC has the capacity to begin to meet those challenges but look at the meetings taking place. They are all dividing on who should be the next leader. It’s a total waste of energy… . . . When somebody asked me once, how do I look at prison, I said, what a bloody privilege.
Walter was a remarkable man. Walter had a standard four education. Very interested in Marxism, a communist. I would read a book and at work now recount it and as I am recounting, he’d be asking questions. By the time I finished explaining that book, I understood it in a way that I had never done when I first read it, because he had this ability to put the question that got to the heart of things. I would go to him and say to him, I just had a terrible argument with Madiba, don’t agree with him at all. He’d say, what happened, please recount the argument. He wouldn’t tell me I’m right or wrong but sometimes he would say, Mac, you know what, give him a bit of time. You’ll see, he’ll change.
On Mandela, the reconciler
MM:In 1976 he is still asking the question, which is the right way from here? What is going to bring success?
So, did prison make him a reconciler? . . . We must be very clear. And that is a feature that I think that people do not take into account in South Africa in particular, that the form in which oppression took place here was to deny us a history, was to treat us as inferior people and therefore needing to be civilised. It was so persistently driven into us that it affected our psychology terribly, and so if you touch Mandela’s pride then you are in grave trouble.
And it became possible because South Africa and its topography and climate going up to Kenya was amenable to white settlement, so that the social base for the maintenance of rule became settler community, the white community. Whereas if you look at west Africa, that’s where you had indirect rule. They used the traditional structures to rule. It’s actually the kings and the chiefs, they were the recruiters of the slaves. The social system depended on them as the facilitator. Here, the social system depended upon the minority white. So, I don’t know whether you get what I’m trying to say here.
AR: Well, I can tell you one thing it brings forward, the whole issue of exile and the difficulty of spending a life, or much of a life in exile and then coming back to your country.
MM: And then coming back and finding you’re often not at one with your own people. You’re raising for me a very interesting question, because while I’m been spokesman for Zuma I’ve had an opportunity to look closely him, and I’ve had to sometimes defend and explain things. Sometimes he and I would have a joke, and say, are you speaking there? Are you ad-libbing? He would laugh and say yes, I would in mock plea say, please, give me a break. And he’d laugh. But the point about it is that we are still grappling around the world for the quest of multicultural societies, and South Africa is one of the countries best placed to insist that the fundamental rules must be that diversity is a wealth, an asset, but a condition for it to be a wealth is that no religion, no culture, no language should present itself as superior to another. It should pay respect for example to the other languages as a phenomenal articulation of people’s feelings, and then when you do that you will see how the appreciation will come for your language and your culture and your traditions without superiority/inferiority complications. In South Africa there is a very large rural conservative African population. The African who has become detached and says, I believe in monogamy, you’re entitled to, but please tell me where is it written that the natural way of living is monogamy. We are imposing something. You are entitled to impose it, but you cannot make it superior.
So, here we are, these are the type of problems we are facing, but these are underlying problems. You ask me about Mandela and I say, you demean his self-esteem and his community and he will go berserk. It never ceases to happen. That’s the only time I’ve seen that happen.
MM: So, we have the challenges of joblessness, we have the challenges of poverty, we have the challenge of growth without jobs, and we have the technological revolution, which is making change. I think we now accept that change is an everyday phenomenon. So, Africa is sitting at that point, and for me with all the bloody crap, we have the age group of our population — a high proportion of youth — if we can nurture this innovative spirit in them, it will put our continent on a higher road.
AR: On the issue of China and the West both cantering into Africa. How should the continent play its relationship with China?
MM: I think they should challenge each other publicly. Commit to develop, not just as a do-good exercise. Our own developed economies depend on dynamism in that economy. So, let’s run our projects but let’s put it openly on the table how we are doing it. Let’s see the benefits that our flowing and let them compete, and let’s define — beside the fact that you need certain things — let’s define clearly the goals we’re seeking, so that even the people in Africa feel they’re part of it. I think from the aggressive, hostile competition we should now move into this friendly competition.
AR: Friendly between the powers over Africa?
MM: And between business. Big business is facing a problem. The technological revolution has reached a point where I don’t care how big you are and whether you’ve existed for 100 years, some upstart can come up tomorrow and within five years wipe you off the map. So, you can’t afford to stand still, even as big business. So, that’s a wonderful world. So, that’s why I say, let’s encourage that type of competition, but let’s have a consensus besides your individual goals, what are your larger goals?
There are certain sets of larger goals we must all share. Around that point, when I talked about the scientific revolution and where it took us, it was based on us being above nature and using nature. We are now at this point where we have to accept and recognise that we are part of nature, not above or outside of it. So, it’s not a resource to be exploited for my benefit. And it’s not just a small question of conservation, but the challenge is there that to move forward now we can’t keep on behaving as if nature is something we can plunder. I think the world is exciting, and I think that to be involved in helping just the question to come up and people to begin to engage in finding the answers . . . the strand has been there. Where things go wrong is when they become encrusted.
AR: Hasn’t the ANC become encrusted?
MM: No, it has got a crop of members who are focused their careers with little regard to the interest of the people. In the United States, it is a society that has opposed immigrants and a wave comes in. It struggles to get in, it gets in. It upsets the existing way of thinking, but when it settles there the next wave from somewhere else comes along., It is this continual wave after wave that is not allowing you to settle down and now just rest. It’s part of the element that makes it innovative. So, I don’t know where we go.
Last night I was reading a bit to catch up on this migration issue. We quickly want to address a question with an answer. We’re not spending enough time to say, have we identified the problem correctly. You know your business. If you are get things wrong, you know you will be asking yourself, how did I get it wrong? And when you say, how did I get it wrong, your answer is going to be, I did not understand. That means to say, I did not identify the problem. That’s the simple basis of science to me, identifying the problem first. But don’t spend ten years identifying it. So, that’s where I am.
On Zuma
AR: Careerism. Let’s look at President Zuma’s government now. Internationally he does not have a very good reputation and at the heart of it is the spending . . . well, the most obvious example of this is the spending on Nkandla. How does that fit into all that you went into the struggle for?
MM: To a certain extent it was unjust to me. I had a lot of complaints (about Nkandla). But at that time I said to him, you know this is the funny thing, I am absolutely convinced of the rip-off in that chain, but I’m not even sure whether Zuma knows where’s what. I’ve never known him to worry about that part of it. So, yes, it’s a big blot.
MM: But you made the statement about his reputation. I’ve seen him operate in Africa. I saw him at a meeting in Equatorial Guinea I think when Gaddafi was still alive and being discussed. Every head of state had spoken in favour of Gaddafi. Zuma, he says, look, Gaddafi is bad news. We’ve been to Addis Ababa, he comes and puts a tent up there, while we are meeting heads of state, he’s summoning us one by one to go and meet him. Is this what we want? Let’s be clear. Not good news. But the issue is, how do we get him out? Every head of state spoke thereafter saying, President Zuma, please help. That’s one example. I’ve seen umpteen examples I could give you of the way they turn to him. He is by nature a person who tries to resolve problems through dialogue, but there are certain issues that bug us. I can’t tell you how it hurt me when George Bush came to South Africa and put his hands around President Mbeki shoulder and said, my man in Africa.
One of the criticisms of Zuma, legitimate as it may be in some instances, is in other instances a wrong generalisation, because in that search for a common ground South Africa needs a very, very broad consensus.
AR: Which criticism are you talking about there?
MM: The criticism that he’s indecisive. That he pussyfoots. Yes, I think he makes decisions, and that’s very clear when we look at his history. When he asked me to work for him, we discussed it on and off until November 2008. I said to him in the end, I’m not accepting any position in cabinet or in parliament. I said to him, I am not a politician. We started to toy around with all sorts of thing every time we met and I said to him in one of the discussions, I said to him, President, with all of the problems there is one flaw Heads of State fall for. The moment a President enters his second term, the fashion is everyone asks the question, what is your legacy going to be? So, you start spending your time thinking about your legacy. Do me a favour President Zuma, do not allow anyone to raise the question about what legacy, don’t. The judgment of your legacy will be made after you are gone from your post. But we are living in this funny kind of world. Coming back to our Africa growth thing — as I said I didn’t want to mention it. What are the rich Africans spending their money on? What do they do? We are into conspicuous living, that’s all. That’s the big preoccupation, and I think you can condemn us for that but it was what many countries have been through and they still do it.
AR: And they still do it.
MM: And they still do it. They think that if they can wear a Breitling watch, if this watch is worth half a million, fantastic. Is it giving me improved time? Bugger all.
AR What we are to make of Jacob Zuma? There was Mandela who was put on the pedestal as a god, as a prince among politicians. You then had Thabo Mbeki. You now have a very different man, Jacob Zuma. The ANC has an extraordinary record stretching back decades of utter commitment to a cause, and now you have been working for a government under which careerism, corruption have increased. The president while personably very likeable and with an honourable revolutionary track record has been involved in deeply controversial relationships. There’s the Gupta saga, there’s other stuff.
MM: We came with nothing. Some went to their friends, others went to people who were relying on us to help them, but that’s an answer in the form of a debate. My answer is slightly different. All over the world at the moment, the easiest answer when a country is facing a problem is to say, lack of leadership
Obama — lack of leadership. Cameron — poor of leadership. It is almost as if the only leader who is not criticised for lack of leadership is Putin.
There are major issues that have cropped up and they need to be addressed, but I am fearful of how we’re talking about addressing them. I was given the privilege by Stephen Grootes to interview him as a way of introduce his book. He invited me as a fun thing to interview him. The exercise hurt Stephen. He made the statement that our constitution is a constitution, which is based on protection of the minority. I said, are you serious?
And I didn’t tell it to him there, because if that is the constitution, it is going to be overthrown. Ours is a constitutional democracy. It has also very conscious checks and boundaries, but the other day, Deputy Chief Justice Moseneke, turns round and says that the preferable way of appointing people should be by committees. We should not leave such a power exclusively to the President. OK. What’s happened recently? There’s an appointment to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). The law stipulates the process for this, a committee headed by the Chief Justice, with member of the Public Protector, member of the Human Rights Commission and a member of the Gender Commission serving in it. They process everything, they come across a candidate, who is presently Zuma’s adviser. They send their recommendation to the Portfolio Committee of Parliament. The issue of the candidate being one of President Zuma’s advisers had been discussed at the committee of the Chief Justice. The opposition would have none of it in the portfolio committee. They are defeated and then the National Assembly approves the selected candidate. So, what do you want? Do you want a committee system, do you want the President to choose? There’s no system that’s right. A democracy has another element to it, and that is that it is also a culture. We need to walk on that road.
So, now comes the most controversial one. Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng in a public address says, “I want near (that is the word he used according to the media reports), near absolute power for the Judiciary, I want near absolute power for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and I want near absolute power for the Public Protector”. What do you mean by, near absolute power? Such a path would destroy the democratic foundations of our system. I have expressed my view about the distribution of power in our Constitutional Democracy and I will therefore leave the matter at that.
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