Would a second term for Mandela have been better for SA? Has Thabo Mbeki made a difference? Would SA have been different had Mandela decided to stand for a second term?
These questions surface every now and then but they have become more relevant in recent months given the spate of reviews of SA's first 10 years of democracy.
Public discourse suggests that SA would have been different (most would say better) had the Mbeki presidency not happened.
When commentators reflect on the differences between the Mandela and Mbeki terms, they lament the aloofness of Mbeki compared with the amiableness of Mandela. They also suggest that Mandela's presidency was marked by reconciliation, but Mbeki has abandoned that for empowerment and narrow African nationalism.
Mandela is seen as the reconciler and democrat; Mbeki is perceived as the ultimate technocrat, centralising power in an "imperial presidency".
But is this a fair description of the two presidencies? Perhaps the case is exaggerated. A review of the annual state of the nation addresses of both presidents, delivered at the opening of parliament , reveals that both have covered and reflected on the same issues and concerns.
Mandela did engage in reconciliation. His first presidential address in 1994 began with a poem from Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker stressing the compatibility of holding an Afrikaner and an African identity.
Moreover, throughout his administration, he undertook high-profile symbolic reconciliation initiatives to convince whites and other minority racial groups that they had a place in post-apartheid SA.
But this theme was also carried in Mbeki's addresses. In 2002, for instance, he approvingly quoted a study by the University of Stellenbosch, which validated his administration's delivery record. He praised this bastion of the Afrikaner establishment for the constructive role it was playing in the reconstruction of post-apartheid SA.
Similarly, his overtures to the New National Party to form an electoral alliance were partly inspired by the desire to provide Afrikaners with a stake in the post-apartheid political establishment.
Then, in his most recent address, he again quoted Jonker , but also commended journalist Rian Malan for his retrospective confession of the "swart gevaar" fears he held after the 1994 election, and how they have proved to be unjustified.
There has also been a high degree of consistency between the presidencies on the economic front. The shift to neoliberal economics, as reflected in the adoption of the growth, employment & redistribution strategy, occurred early in the Mandela presidency and was consistently defended by both presidents in their state of the nation addresses.
Even Mbeki's much-vaunted black empowerment thrust predates his presidency. Its roots are in the reconstruction & development programme that served as the ANC's electoral manifesto in the 1994 elections.
Furthermore, the tensions within the tripartite alliance caused by the ANC leadership's stringent approach to dealing with criticism from Cosatu and the SA Communist Party have spanned both presidencies. Indeed, it was Mandela who first publicly chastised the alliance partners for their criticism of government's macroeconomic policy and asked them to leave the movement should they be uncomfortable with its direction.
The overlap and consistency, in both positive and negative terms, between the two presidencies is significant. Nonetheless, a careful reading of the overtones of both presidents' speeches, conduct and behaviour also suggests differences. This has been reflected in the focuses and emphases of the two presidents.
Mandela undoubtedly stressed the reconciliation theme far more effectively than he did either the empowerment or redress ones. The result was that, midway through his term, concern emerged within the ANC and among large segments of the populace that too much was being done to appease the beneficiaries of apartheid and too little to address the concerns of the victims of racial oppression.
This concern reflected itself in the controversy accompanying the release in October 1998 of the first five volumes of the final report of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. A significant component of the ANC leadership rejected the report for what it saw as the equation of the crime of apartheid with some of the human rights abuses conducted in the course of the liberation struggle.
The philosophy and ethos of the Mbeki presidency is best captured in his "two nations" address in May 1998 on the occasion of the parliamentary debate on reconciliation and nation-building.
In a moving and even poetic treatise, Mbeki described two nations, one white and the other black. The former's citizens, he argued, exhibited the lifestyles of the developed world, and were "relatively prosperous with access to developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure". The latter's inhabitants were poor, marginalised and disempowered, typical of similar communities throughout the world. This dichotomy between privilege and disadvantage, which was racially defined, had to be overcome for SA to have an even chance at reconciliation and nation building.
Was SA on the path to bridging this divide? Mbeki said no, lamenting the fact that the beneficiaries of our past refused to underwrite the upliftment of the poor.
Comparing South Africans to the Germans, who poured enormous resources into their nation-building project, Mbeki made a passionate plea for greater magnanimity on the part of SA's privileged citizens. It was their generosity, he declared, that was required for a reconciliation project that has at its core the principle of social justice.
Without such justice, neither racial reconciliation nor nation-building would be possible in SA .
The irony is that Mbeki's own economic policy strategy undermines his desire for reconciliation with justice.
So the question remains: would SA have been different if Mandela had chosen to stay on as president? We doubt it, even though there would have been differences of emphasis and of foreign policy. However, in its essentials, SA would have been similar.
Inequality in society, poverty, racial tensions and stresses within the tripartite alliance would all, equally, have been the likely characteristics of a Mandela second term. Against that we would not have had Nepad, and we might not even have had the African Union.
On the plus side, however, we would have had far more energy and less obfuscation in the battle against HIV/Aids, and we would have had less tolerance of bad governance and abuses of human rights in Zimbabwe.
But for the average South African, life would have been the same. For the rich and the upper middle classes: pleasant if problematic. For the marginalised and unemployed: nasty, brutish and - alarmingly - on average, getting shorter.
- Habib and Southall are with the Human Sciences Research Council. Both, with John Daniel, are co-editors of The State of the Nation: South Africa 2004-2005 (HSRC Publishers 2004)
