Presidency of Thabo Mbeki

The presidency of Thabo Mbeki began on 14 June 1999 when he, as leader of the African National Congress, was elected by the National Assembly and sworn into office following that year's national elections. Previously, in December 1997, the ANC's 50th National Conference elected Mbeki unopposed to succeed Nelson Mandela as ANC president. On some accounts, the election was not contested because the top leadership had prepared assiduously for the conference, lobbying and negotiating on Mbeki's behalf in the interest of unity and continuity. Mbeki was re-elected to office in the 2004 general election, but resigned from office after being recalled by the ANC National Executive. His resignation took effect 25 September 2008, and he was replaced as national president by Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri for 14 hours, who was then succeeded by Kgalema Motlanthe, who had been elected ANC deputy president at the Polokwane conference, for the remainder of Mbeki's term.

Economic policy
Mbeki had been highly involved in economic policy as deputy president, especially in spearheading the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme, which was introduced in 1996 and remained a cornerstone of Mbeki's administration after 1999. In comparison to the Reconstruction and Development Programme policy which had been the basis of the ANC's platform in 1994, GEAR placed less emphasis on developmental and redistributive imperatives, and subscribed to elements of the liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation at the centre of Washington Consensus-style reforms. It was therefore viewed by some as a "policy reversal" and embrace of neoliberalism, and thus as an abandonment of the ANC's socialist principles. Mbeki also emphasised communication between government, business, and labour, establishing four working groups – for big business, black business, trade unions, and commercial agriculture – under which ministers, senior officials, and Mbeki himself met regularly with business and union leaders to build trust and explore solutions to structural economic problems. Conservative groups such as the Cato Institute commended Mbeki's macroeconomic policies, which reduced the budget deficit and public debt and which according to them likely played a role in increasing economic growth. According to the Free Market Foundation, during the Mbeki presidency, average annualised quarter-on-quarter GDP growth was 4.2%, and average annual inflation was 5.7%. On the other hand, the shift alienated leftists, including inside in the ANC and its Tripartite Alliance. Zwelinzima Vavi of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) was an outspoken critic of Mbeki's "market-friendly" economic policies, claiming that Mbeki's "flirtation" with neoliberalism had been "absolutely disastrous" for development, and especially for the labour-intensive development required to address South Africa's high unemployment rate. The discord between Mbeki and the left was on public display by December 2002, when Mbeki attacked what he called divisive "ultra-leftists" in a speech to the ANC's 51st National Conference.

However, Mbeki clearly never subscribed to undiluted neoliberalism. He retained various social democratic programmes and principles, and generally endorsed a mixed economy in South Africa. One of the ANC's slogans in the campaign for his 2004 re-election was, "A people's contract for growth and development." He popularised the concept of a dual or two-track economy in South Africa, with severe underdevelopment in one segment of the population, and, for example in a 2003 newsletter, argued that high growth alone would only benefit the developed segment, without significant trickle-down benefits for the rest of the population. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, he explicitly advocated state support for the creation of a black capitalist class in South Africa. The government's black economic empowerment policy, which was expanded and consolidated under his administration, was criticised precisely for benefitting only a small black elite and thereby failing to address inequality.

Foreign policy
According to academic and diplomat Gerrit Olivier, during his presidency Mbeki "succeeded in placing Africa high on the global agenda." He was known for his Pan-Africanism, having emphasised related themes both in his famous "I am an African" speech in 1996 and in his first speech to Parliament as president in June 1999, when he foregrounded his trademark ideal of an "African renaissance." He advocated for greater solidarity among African countries and, in place of reliance on Western intervention and aid, for greater self-sufficiency for the African continent. Simultaneously, however, he argued for increased developmental aid to Africa. He called for Western leaders to address global apartheid and unequal development, most memorably in a speech to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in August 2002.

Africa
Although Mbeki also forged strategic individual relationships with key African leaders, especially the heads of state of Nigeria, Algeria, Mozambique, and Tanzania, perhaps his central foreign policy instrument was multilateral cooperation. Mbeki's government, and Mbeki personally, are frequently cited as the single most significant driving force behind the creation in 2001 of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which aims to develop a framework for accelerating economic development and cooperation in Africa. Olivier calls Mbeki the "seminal thinker" behind NEPAD and its "principal author and articulator." According to academic Chris Landsberg, NEPAD's central principle – "African leaders holding one another accountable in exchange for the recommitment of the industrialised world to Africa's development" – epitomised Mbeki's strategy in Africa. Mbeki was also involved in the dissolution of the Organisation of African Unity and its replacement by the African Union (AU), of which he became the inaugural chairperson in 2002, and his government spearheaded the introduction of the AU's African Peer Review Mechanism in 2003. He was twice chairperson of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), first from 1999 to 2000 and second, briefly, in 2008. Through these multilateral organisations and by contributing forces to various United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions, Mbeki and his government were involved in peacekeeping initiatives in African countries including Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi.

Global South
Outside Africa, Mbeki was the chairperson of the Non-Aligned Movement between 1999 and 2003 and the chairperson of the Group of 77 + China in 2006. He also pursued South-South solidarity in a coalition with India and Brazil under the IBSA Dialogue Forum, which was launched in June 2003 and held its first summit in September 2006. The IBSA countries together pressed for changes in the agricultural subsidy regimes of developed countries at the 2003 World Trade Organisation conference, and also pressed for reforms at the UN which would allow developing countries a stronger role. Indeed, Mbeki had called for reform at the UN as early as 1999 and 2000. In 2007, following a prolonged diplomatic campaign, South Africa secured a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for a two-year term. Controversially, in February 2007, South Africa followed Russia and China in voting against a draft resolution calling for an end to political detentions and military attacks against ethnic minorities in Myanmar. Mbeki later told the media that the resolution exceeded the Security Council's mandate, and that its tabling had been illegal in terms of international law.

Quiet diplomacy in Zimbabwe
Mbeki's presidency coincided with an escalating political and economic crisis in South Africa's neighbour, Zimbabwe, under president Mugabe of ZANU-PF. Problems included land invasions under the "fast-track" land reform programme, political violence and state-sponsored human rights violations, and hyperinflation. With SADC's endorsement, Mbeki frequently acted as a mediator between ZANU-PF and the Zimbabwean opposition. However, controversially, his policy towards the Mugabe regime was one of non-confrontational "quiet diplomacy" and "constructive engagement": he refused to condemn Mugabe and instead attempted to persuade him to accept gradual political reforms. He was firmly opposed to forcible or manufactured regime change in Zimbabwe, and also opposed the use of sanctions. The Economist posited an "Mbeki doctrine" holding that South Africa "cannot impose its will on others, but it can help to deal with instability in African countries by offering its resources and its leadership to bring rival groups together, and to keep things calm until an election is safely held." Mbeki said in 2004:

"...the critical role we should play is to assist the Zimbabweans to find each other, really to agree among themselves about the political, economic, social, other solutions that their country needs. We could have stepped aside from that task and then shouted, and that would be the end of our contribution... They would shout back at us and that would be the end of the story. I'm actually the only head of government that I know anywhere in the world who has actually gone to Zimbabwe and spoken publicly very critically of the things that they are doing."

The motives behind Mbeki's Zimbabwe policy have been interpreted in various ways: for example, some suggest that he was attempting to maintain economic stability in Zimbabwe and therefore to protect South African economic interests, while others cite his attachment to ideals of African solidarity and opposition to what he perceived as quasi-imperial Western interference in Africa. In any case, Mbeki's policy on Zimbabwe attracted widespread criticism both domestically and internationally. Some also questioned Mbeki's neutrality in his role as mediator. After a South African observer mission endorsed the result of the Zimbabwean presidential election of 2002, in which Mugabe was re-elected, Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai accused Mbeki of being a "dishonest broker" and his government of becoming "part of the Zimbabwe problem because its actions are worsening the crisis." Commentators later said that Mbeki's soft stance on Mugabe during this period permanently damaged relations between South Africa and the Zimbabwean opposition. A South African government observer mission also endorsed the result of the Zimbabwean parliamentary elections of 2005, apparently leading Tsvangirai's party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), to effectively sever relations with Mbeki's administration.

Power-sharing negotiations
Following another contested election in Zimbabwe – after which Mbeki controversially denied that there was a "crisis" in Zimbabwe – the MDC and ZANU-PF entered into negotiations towards the formation of a power-sharing government, with talks beginning in July 2008. Mbeki mediated the negotiations and brokered the resulting power-sharing agreement, signed on 15 September 2008, which retained Mugabe as president but diluted his executive power across posts to be held by opposition leaders.

Policy and treatment
According to political scientist Jeffrey Herbst, Mbeki's HIV/AIDS policies were "bizarre at best, severely negligent at worst." In 2000, amid a burgeoning HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa, Mbeki's government launched the HIV/AIDS/STD Strategic Plan for South Africa, 2000–2005, a "multi-sectoral" plan which was criticised by HIV/AIDS activists for lacking concrete timeframes and failing to commit to antiretroviral treatment programmes. Indeed, according to economist Nicoli Nattrass, resistance to the roll-out of antiretroviral drugs for prevention and treatment became central to the HIV/AIDS policy of Mbeki's government in subsequent years. A national mother-to-child transmission prevention programme was not introduced until 2002, when it was mandated by the Constitutional Court in response to a successful legal challenge by the Treatment Action Campaign. Similarly, chronic highly active antiretroviral therapy for AIDS-sick people was not introduced in the public healthcare system until late 2003, reportedly at the insistence of some members of Mbeki's cabinet. According to Nattrass, better access to antiretroviral drugs in South Africa could have prevented about 171,000 HIV infections and 343,000 deaths between 1999 and 2007. In November 2008, a Harvard University study estimated that more than 330,000 people died between 2000 and 2005 due to insufficient antiretroviral programmes under Mbeki's government.

Even after these programmes were introduced, Mbeki's appointee as Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, continued to advocate publicly for unproven alternative treatments in place of antiretrovirals, leading to continual calls by civil society for her dismissal. In late 2006, the cabinet transferred responsibility for AIDS policy from Tshabalala-Msimang to Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who subsequently spearheaded a new draft National Strategic Plan on HIV/AIDS.

Association with denialism
While president, Mbeki was also criticised for his public messaging on HIV/AIDS. He was viewed as sympathetic to or influenced by the views of a small minority of scientists who challenged the scientific consensus that HIV caused AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs were the most effective means of treatment. In an April 2000 letter to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the heads of state of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France, Mbeki pointed to differences in how the AIDS epidemic had manifested in Africa and in the West, and committed to "the search for specific and targeted responses to the specifically African incidence of HIV-AIDS." He also defended scientists who had challenged the scientific consensus on AIDS:

"Not long ago, in our own country, people were killed, tortured, imprisoned and prohibited from being quoted in private and in public because the established authority believed that their views were dangerous and discredited. We are now being asked to do precisely the same thing that the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed did, because, it is said, there exists a scientific view that is supported by the majority, against which dissent is prohibited... People who otherwise would fight very hard to defend the critically important rights of freedom of thought and speech occupy, with regard to the HIV-AIDS issue, the frontline in the campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism..."

The letter was leaked to The Washington Post and caused controversy. During the same period, Mbeki convened a panel to investigate the cause of AIDS, staffed by researchers who believed that AIDS was caused by malnutrition and parasites as well as by orthodox researchers. In July 2000, opening the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, he proposed that the "disturbing phenomenon of the collapse of immune systems among millions of our people" was the result of various factors, especially poverty, and that "we could not blame everything on a single virus." It was characteristic of Mbeki's stance on HIV/AIDS to draw attention to socioeconomic differences between the West and Africa, emphasising the importance of poverty in poor health outcomes in Africa, and to insist that African countries should not be asked blindly to accept Western scientific theories and policy models. Commentators speculate that his stance was motivated by suspicion of the West and was a response to what he perceived as racist stereotypes of the continent and its people. For example, in October 2001, in a speech at the University of Fort Hare, he said of the West: "Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust."

Mbeki announced in October 2000 that he would withdraw from the public debate on HIV/AIDS science, and in 2002 his cabinet staunchly affirmed that HIV causes AIDS. However, critics claimed that he continued to influence – and impede – HIV/AIDS policy, a charge which Mbeki denied. AIDS activist Zackie Achmat said in 2002 that "Mbeki epitomizes leadership in denial and his stand has fuelled government inaction." Gevisser writes that in 2007 Mbeki continued to defend his position on HIV/AIDS, and directed Gevisser to a controversial and anonymous ANC discussion document titled Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot & Mouth and Statistics: HIV/Aids and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African. The Gevisser biography also says that, while Mbeki never explicitly denied the link between HIV and AIDS, he is a "profound sceptic" – as Mbeki himself wrote in 2016, in a newsletter cautioning "great care and caution" in the use of antiretrovirals, he had not denied that HIV caused AIDS but that "a virus [could] cause a syndrome." He is generally referred to as an HIV/AIDS "dissident" rather than an outright denialist, although Nattrass questions the value of that distinction.

FIFA World Cup bid
As president, Mbeki spearheaded South Africa's successful bid to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Commentators, and Mbeki himself, frequently linked the bid to his vision for an African renaissance. In 2015, amid an American investigation into corruption at FIFA, soccer administrator Chuck Blazer testified that, between 2004 and 2011, he and other FIFA executives had received bribes in connection with South Africa's bid. Mbeki denied any knowledge of the bribes.

Electricity crisis
In late 2007, Mbeki's government announced that the public power utility, Eskom, would introduce electricity rationing or rolling blackouts, commonly known in South Africa as loadshedding. In subsequent months, Mbeki publicly apologised, acknowledging that the government had failed to heed Eskom's warnings, offered regularly for several consecutive years, that infrastructure investments were required to avoid energy shortages – in his words, "Eskom was right and government was wrong." However, some analysts suggested that insufficient investment was not the hindrance to electricity supply, and that other policy decisions by government and at Eskom, including the implementation of black economic empowerment criteria in coal procurement contracts, had contributed to the crisis. In his last State of the Nation address in February 2008, Mbeki repeated the apology and devoted nearly three pages of his speech to government's plans for addressing the energy crisis.

2008 xenophobic attacks
In May 2008, a series of riots took place in a number of South African townships, mainly in Gauteng province, when South African residents violently attacked migrants from other African countries. At least 62 people were killed, several hundred injured, and many thousand displaced. To contain the violence, Mbeki deployed the army to affected areas – the first such deployment to a civilian area since the end of apartheid. In a televised address towards the end of the saga, Mbeki called the attacks "an absolute disgrace," saying, "Never since the birth of our democracy have we witnessed such callousness."

Some commentators argued that Mbeki's government had failed to acknowledge or sufficiently to address growing xenophobia in South Africa in the years preceding the attacks. Indeed, the AU's African Peer Review Mechanism had reported in 2006 that xenophobia was an urgent concern in South Africa. These criticisms were often linked to criticisms of Mbeki's policy in Zimbabwe, because a large proportion of South Africa's growing foreign-born population were Zimbabwean refugees. Moreover, when Mbeki argued that the attacks had other motives, both economic and "criminal," some critics accused him of "xenophobia denialism" and of refusing to acknowledge the genuine xenophobic sentiment in parts of the population.

Polokwane conference
In June 2005, Mbeki removed Zuma from his post as national deputy president, after Zuma's associate Schabir Shaik was convicted of making corrupt payments to Zuma in relation to the 1999 Arms Deal. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) charged Zuma with corruption later that year. However, Zuma remained deputy president of the ANC, and in subsequent years, the rivalry between Zuma and Mbeki and their allies intensified, with Zuma supporters frequently alleging that the charges against Zuma were politically motivated.

By 2007, Zuma had emerged as an apparent contender in the ANC's next presidential elections, to be held at the party's 52nd National Conference in Polokwane, Limpopo. By April of that year, it was also clear that Mbeki intended to stand for a third term as ANC president. Mbeki's term as national president would expire in 2009, and he had said in 2006 that he had no intention of having the Constitution changed to permit him a third term in office, saying, "By the end of 2009, I will have been in a senior position in government for 15 years. I think that's too long." However, the ANC lacked internal term limits, and some suspected that he intended to continue to exert substantial influence over the government through the ANC presidency.

Zuma drew substantial support from the left wing of the party, especially through the ANC Youth League and the ANC's partners in the Tripartite Alliance, the South African Communist Party and COSATU, with whom Mbeki's relationship was extremely poor. At the elective conference, on 18 December, Mbeki lost the presidential election to Zuma, gaining less than 40% of the vote. According to ANC tradition, as ANC president Zuma would become the party's presidential candidate in the 2009 general election, and therefore, given the ANC's substantial electoral majority, was overwhelmingly likely to succeed Mbeki as national president in 2009.

High court finding and appeal
On 12 September 2008, Pietermaritzburg High Court judge Chris Nicholson set aside the corruption charges against Zuma. He found that the charges were unlawful on the procedural grounds that the NPA had not given Zuma adequate opportunity to make representations. Nicholson also lent his support to allegations that Zuma's charges had been politically motivated, saying that he was "not convinced that [Zuma] was incorrect when he averred political meddling in his prosecution" and that the case seemed to be part of "some great political contest or game." Mbeki later applied to the Constitutional Court to appeal the judgement, calling Nicholson's findings about political interference "vexatious, scandalous and prejudicial." The NPA also appealed, and in January 2009 the Supreme Court of Appeal found in its favour and overturned Nicholson's ruling. Partially redeeming Mbeki, the appellate court said that Nicholson's allegations of political interference had been irrelevant to Nicholson's decision and had apparently derived from Nicholson's "own conspiracy theory."

Resignation
However, shortly after Nicholson delivered his judgement and months before the appeal was heard, the Zuma-aligned ANC National Executive Committee, as elected at the Polokwane conference, "recalled" Mbeki, asking him to resign as national president. The National Executive Committee is a party political body and therefore lacked the constitutional authority to remove Mbeki directly, but the ANC-controlled Parliament could have effected his removal had he not acquiesced voluntarily. On 20 September 2008, a spokesman announced that Mbeki would resign. In court papers filed later that week, Mbeki said that it was Nicholson's findings which had "led to my being recalled by my political party, the ANC – a request I have acceded to as a committed and loyal member of the ANC for the past 52 years."

In the aftermath of his announcement, at least 11 cabinet ministers and three deputy ministers – including Deputy President Mlambo-Ngcuka and Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel – announced that they would also resign. Mbeki's resignation took effect on 25 September, and he was replaced as national president by Kgalema Motlanthe, who had been elected ANC deputy president at the Polokwane conference.