so thabo mbeki isn't sure the HIV virus exists, thinks that Robert Mugabe may have a point, won't apologise for atrocities committed in ANC camps in exile and will jolly well have outlandish rumours about ANC rivals investigated by police intelligence. So what? Look who Italy just elected as prime minister.
Mbeki arrives for a state visit to Britain on 12th June with his reputation as South Africa's president badly frayed. After the saintly Mandela, the British and other Europeans wonder, was this the best South Africa could do?
It is hard to apologise for Mbeki. Bereft by choice of mature and experienced advisers, he seems to lurch from blunder to blunder, content to be comforted by the approving coos of sycophants and acolytes who stand to benefit most directly from his patronage.
A lonely man, he is uncomfortable in crowds, can't mix with his poverty-stricken electorate and doesn't have a core constituency. Instead, he has had to cobble one together from the black middle class, Afrikaner business, big (English) business, farmers and the like. Each is bound to him only by the hope that he can solve their particular problems.
In the process he has lost the affection of black intellectuals whose criticisms become louder each time he stumbles. His inability to extricate himself from the dissidents who persuaded him that the HIV virus may not cause Aids has also made him vulnerable to ferocious scepticism in the international media on almost everything he touches.
Talk of him not standing for a second term, or being successfully challenged, has become commonplace around South African dinner tables-black as well as white. Would Cyril Ramaphosa, former trade unionist, constitutional negotiator and most popular man on the ANC national executive, do a better job? Would defence minister Patrick Lekota? The list can seem endless.
But the detractors miss a vital point, one the British media might keep in mind as they cover his visit. It is that out of all the names that spill from the hat, none has anything like the vision of Mbeki. I know Ramaphosa reasonably well, he sits on the board of the company that publishes my newspaper and I would follow him anywhere. But Cyril merely has attitude. Mbeki has a plan.
I have never heard another member of the ANC, or the cabinet, make a speech articulating a worldview and South Africa's place in it. In his affable way Mandela makes the rest of the world comfortable with the new South Africa. But ministers and party bigwigs restrict themselves either through self- censorship or intellectual limitations to tiny parts of our new story-race, Aids, poverty, crime... one issue at a time.
Mbeki finds it almost impossible to confine himself in this way. Short appointments tend to go on for hours as he leaps from topic to topic. He is as interested in the capacity for SMS messaging on cellphones to bring down a president in Manila as he might be in the relative merits of modern local government versus traditional service allocation in the tribal territories.
Further, there is no one in the ANC quite so committed to the market economy and so at ease with the process of globalisation. Take Mbeki away and South Africa's new-found commitment to macro-economic stability and to opening itself to global competition would need to be rebuilt. This is not merely tactical-he is a believer.
He is thus not surprised (as many white businessmen are) that the inflation rate is now less than half what it was before Mandela's election. The national debt has shrunk, the rand, once expensively supported at unsustainable levels, has had its safety net removed and has become quite competitive.
Where this vision of stability and conformity becomes controversial is when it hits the Race Thing. Mbeki is gripped by the notion that it must be possible for a black African country to be a dynamic, modern industrial democracy. Given the country's history, it is not surprising that in pursuing this goal, he will have rubbed some whites up the wrong way. But even here he is on solid ground: unless South Africa quickly grows a stable and contented black middle class, it has no future.
Yet he is being undone in the doing. Fortune magazine ran a story a few years ago identifying bad implementation of strategy as the great destroyer of Fortune 500 bosses in the US. The same applies to Mbeki. From crime policy to his rural upliftment plan, Mbeki is betrayed by the inexperienced people he too often appoints.
But he is also trapped by them. A cabinet of black technocrats would be just fine, but the one he has been forced to assemble consists of party hacks, tribal leaders, trade unionists and communists who reflect the political compromises he lives with. He doesn't listen to them because he is so much cleverer than them. But he needs their fealty to survive. And his dependence makes it less likely that he will build the country he wants.
That's the pity of the presidency. What he needs are a few targeted successes. He must take small steps. Once, asked what his priorities were, he replied, "everything is a priority." That's not good enough. Could someone in London please remind him that politics is the art of the possible? He doesn't listen to many South Africans.
