Mbeki should remember his words about ‘honour'

Share current article via Email Share current article via Facebook Share current article via Twitter Share current article via LinkedIn Story audio is generated using AI On March 26 1999, then deputy president Thabo Mbeki, poised to take over as president in less than 90 days, rose to speak in parliament as the legislators bade farewell to President Rolihlahla Mandela. Starting off in poetic isiXhosa, Mbeki sustained the theme with an interplay of English words, as only he, the supreme political intellectual, can do. The father of the nation, Tata, was taking leave of national duty. It was a speech in which Mbeki heaped praises on Madiba for not selling out on his morality when the pain of imprisonment made that a tantalising option. 'You have faced death and said, 'Do your worst!' You have inhabited the dark, dark dungeons of freedom denied …' Mbeki spoke of those who had died in the cause of freedom and whose names the nation still remembers and recites, and also of the shame of those comrades who, unlike Madiba, had sold out. 'You have looked at the faces of some of those who were your comrades, who turned their eyes away from you because somewhere in their mortal being there lingered the remnants of a sense of shame, always and for ever whispering softly — no to treachery.' Mbeki also spoke of compromises with the National Party in 1993. 'You have stood at the brink, when you had to appeal to the gods about whether to win a dishonourable peace or to lose the lives of your people, and decided that none among these would exchange their lives for an existence without honour.' The core of Mbeki's eulogy was recognising and honouring the sacrifices of Madiba and others who had given their all for the freedom we enjoy today. It was also to justify the compromises made at Codesa. Compromises that are playing out at two events taking place right now that cut to the heart of Mbeki's speech back then. The one is the Khampepe commission looking into why Mbeki's government and others thereafter failed dismally to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's findings calling for the prosecution of human rights abusers during the settler colonial era. The ANC took over government in 1994, but the murders committed by the National Party government have not been prioritised Mbeki found it honourable to join forces with Jacob Zuma to try to stop the commission, using the subterfuge that they only wanted the chair, retired judge Sisi Khampepe, to be removed. No-one is fooled. The reality is that Mbeki and Mandela and the other ANC leaders of the time had agreed with the National Party to not go all the way in exposing spies and prosecuting each other's killers and abusers. Mbeki seems to have forgotten what he said in 1999 about honour and remembering the heroes of our struggle for freedom who were killed or died in the 'dark, dark dungeons'. And this takes me to the second event, which is the reopened inquest into the brutal murder in detention of Bantu Biko in September 1977. The ANC took over government in 1994, but the murders committed by the National Party government have not been prioritised. The few inquests, including Biko's, have been because of families such as those of Chief Albert Luthuli, Ahmed Timol and Fort Calata using their own resources to press for the reopening. They did this against resistance from an ANC government. In the past week the nation witnessed the shameful and degrading treatment of the Biko family, who were made to grovel for legal aid to make the inquest worthwhile. That Legal Aid South Africa's rules could find Biko unworthy of funding while the same state funded his killers' lawyers is not just shameful and disgraceful, but stinks. It speaks of the self-hate that Biko warned us about and of the lackadaisical attitude towards black pain when Mbeki and Mandela and Zuma agreed to the sunset clauses that guaranteed apartheid enforcers peace and tranquillity. This was without a concomitant state undertaking to fund the victims and survivors. As a result of that omission, black victims and survivors have to wage a costly and painstaking Stalingrad battle towards truth, prosecution and closure for themselves and their relatives. Perhaps, as Mbeki prepares to go before the Khampepe commission to tell us why, he might want to go back and read his own eulogy to Madiba where he promised: 'We will not get lost.' He should then ask himself how he ended up being kicked out of the Constitutional Court this past week trying to stop this nation from hearing why there was political unwillingness, to put it mildly, to prosecute killers of our freedom fighters. I hope he can live with the answer.