Foreshadowing a Mistake?

The Eastern Cape African National Congress, the largest single provincial voting bloc for the party, has passed a resolution calling for Thabo Mbeki to run for a third term as head of the party. While this is technically different from embracing a third term as South Africa's president, it sets in motion the potential for Mbeki to follow in the footsteps of so many African leaders in the last half century.

In February of this year I wrote about this possibility. I was wary then:

This is a colossally, monumentally, stupidly bad idea. To be fair to Mbeki and the ANC, this is not an idea that comes from them, but I do hope this is not Mbeki's way of floating a trial balloon. If it is, I hope that it bursts instantly. One of post-colonial Africa's curses has been Big Man Syndrome, whereby leaders, almost always from the independence era, believe that they are indispensible and thus refuse to yield power or else engage in chicanery and heavy-handedness to change or manipulate the Constitution and thus make their naked grab for power "legal" in the narrowest sense.

In 1940 a Republican slogan was "Washington wouldn't, Grant couldn't, Roosevelt shouldn't" in opposing a third term for FDR. Whatever the merits of re-opening the discussion of the two-term limit in American presidency -- and, speaking as a historian, I am an ardent supporter of all of FDR's terms -- given the circumstances in Sub-Saharan Africa, let us get a new slogan going: "Mandela wouldn't, Mbeki shouldn't."

I am even more wary now.

(This issue also emerged in the comments of another, longer entry on South African politics from this past June.)

I should note that Mbeki has continued to disavow any interest in a third term as head of state, which would in any case require a constitutional amendment. But this prospect helps elucidate why even those of us who support the ANC have always been wary of the ANC capturing 2/3 of the votes in parliament, which would allow them, if no one broke ranks, to change the constitution unilaterally if they so chose. The liberation movement has worked too hard to become the governing party only to see things go the way of oligarchy and presidencies for life. That prospect is a long way off, but the EC's recent decision at least points the way toward an inglorious future.

The fact that this motion comes from the Eastern Cape is significant as well. During the resistance struggle the eastern Cape region (it was not then its own province) provided the backdrop for some of the most intense moments of struggle. The region's leadership set much of the agenda for "making South Africa ungovernable" in the 1980s. Steve Biko and Matthew Goniwe are just two of the martyrs who emerged from the region as the result of their willingness to confront the apartheid state. The eastern Cape has a sacred place in the history of the fight against oppression. Let us hope that the same region does not prove to be the point of origination for folly in the next stage of South Africa's development.