What is Thabo Mbeki up to?

The 17-page missive from former president Thabo Mbeki to Deputy President Paul Mashatile is extraordinary in a number of ways.

And that is why it deserves more than a cursory glance at this fluid state in our national politics. In some ways, Mbeki looks like Shakespeare’s King Lear, raging against the storm and, as his own lonely madness descends, wanting the world to change dramatically. Mbeki’s raging was on a number of fronts.

‘Attack’

He attacked his party for stopping investigations into the Phala Phala scandal and, thereby, allowing Cyril Ramaphosa to escape scrutiny.

He ranted on about the fact that the ANC’s branches should not have voted for Ramaphosa at the Nasrec elective conference last year.

When it came to Eskom, he fulminated about “counterrevolutionaries” who were destroying the entity and that the ANC should not have rejected a call for a parliamentary inquiry into what happened there.

READ MORE: ANC renewal: Mbeki’s call – a sense of ‘urgency’

Eskom looting

But, he wasn’t finished. He went on to portray former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter – who accused ANC higher-ups of being involved in the looting of the company – as being a right-wing anti-communist who should never have been entrusted with the task of trying to save our electricity supply system.

Mbeki conveniently forgets, of course, that weapons grade looting began on his watch, with the bloated arms deal and that, by holding off for so long on the building of new power stations when he was president, he started Eskom’s slide.

But there is a more important question about what Mbeki is up to. He clearly still believes he is the conscience of the ANC and can influence matters.

Did the fact his letter was addressed to Mashatile, rather than Ramaphosa, indicate that he, Mbeki, might be trying to move towards ousting Ramaphosa? It will be interesting to see how the ANC responds…

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