Mampara of the week

Thabo Mbeki: Executive Flying-blanch

The view from behind the smoked windows of his speeding car or the porthole of his flying bedroom has long been different to that held by ordinary people, but all we can think after the antics of the past week is that President Thabo Mbeki really is from another planet.

HIV/Aids, rampant rape, child murders, unemployment, kleptomanic Health ministers and bent police chiefs don’t exist where he comes from. “Virus? What virus?” he said, even as a loyal adviser died rather than take the antiretrovirals publicly derided by his boss.

The many meetings at which the chief prosecutor tried to tell him that the top cop was a crook, and his tacky talks with European arms merchants, were too mundane to burden his memory.

Of course, the race for the party presidency was beneath the dignity of our otherworldly leader, too.

But when he flies to Harare to be humiliated again by sulky Bob; when we see him on television stroking the hand of the last mad dictator and smiling into the cameras: “Crisis, what crisis?”; when he calls an election marred by broken heads, shattered limbs and bleeding faces “normal”; when he takes our common national pride to New York to chair the UN Security Council and forgets to mention Zimbabwe as an African challenge; when he tells the world’s press he can’t imagine where they got the idea he had ever denied the Zimbabwean crisis; when he makes us fools together on the world stage, then, at last, we must reluctantly conclude that the President of South Africa is a Mampara. - The Sunday Times