Mbeki Urges ANC to Seek More Changes

Dressed in a green and black African National Congress T-shirt, President Thabo Mbeki addressed 5,000 party faithful Monday, opening a five-day conference to determine the movement’s leadership and policies through 2007.

In a two-hour speech, Mbeki came across as conciliatory and managerial, touting the achievements of South Africa’s preeminent political machine and outlining future challenges.

Mbeki said the location of the conference at the University of Stellenbosch -- the intellectual center of the previous, white supremacist regime -- sent a powerful message eight years after the ANC came to power.

“That message says that the people of South Africa have made the common determination that our country belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” he said. “It says that the people of South Africa, black and white ... refuse to be enslaved by the divisions and antagonisms of the past.”

Much of Mbeki’s speech focused on the need for the ANC to address the lingering racial inequities of apartheid and the deepening class divisions since it ended.

“The bulk of our economy, including the land, remains predominantly white-owned,” he said. “Wealth, income, opportunity and skills continue to be distributed according to racial patterns. Accordingly, the overwhelming majority of the poor and the unemployed, even on a per capita basis, are black people.”

Mbeki said that state industries like South Africa’s telecommunications, energy and transport sectors need to attract foreign investment to free up resources for social and infrastructure development. He said instituting sweeping affirmative action policies would diversify corporate ranks.

The president also said that recent terrorist acts by white extremists in South Africa showed the desperation of the nation’s far-right factions and proved that “the forces of extreme racism have no possibility to capture state power or to play a decisive role in our national life.”

Mbeki denounced corruption within the ranks of the ANC as his deputy president and onetime rival for leadership, Jacob Zuma, looked on. Zuma is under investigation for allegedly taking bribes from the French arms manufacturer Thomson-CSF.

Absent from Mbeki’s speech was any major mention of South Africa’s raging HIV epidemic. One out of every 10 South Africans has the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, and although the highest court has affirmed a constitutional right to antiviral treatment, Mbeki’s administration hasn’t formulated a plan to provide infected people with the appropriate drugs. AIDS was mentioned only once in his address, when Mbeki pointed out that more black people than white people have the disease.

For most of his speech, Mbeki stuck close to his script, breaking off briefly only once -- when former President Nelson Mandela walked in through a side door and set off a round of singing in Xhosa and Tswana: “Nelson Mandela, there’s no one like you.”