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When I think back on my quite long career in the world of academia, in government, and in public service, there was one occasion where I had a major fall from grace, and it had to do with the reaction of the person who succeeded Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and how we dealt with his AIDS dissidents.
[Archival news clip]: I accordingly declare Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki duly elected as president of the Republic of South Africa.
Thabo Mbeki was one of two deputy presidents to Nelson Mandela during the transition phase. FW de Klerk was the other and then de Klerk resigned, and when Thabo Mbeki came into power as president, he had his misguided HIV policies, which had major human consequences. Mandela wanted to challenge him on that, but he was the former president.
Thabo Mbeki thought that Nelson Mandela was too nice to whites, and that what was necessary was to have a steelier hand in terms of [00:01:31] governance. He did not go along with Nelson Mandela’s approach to nation building and spoke about South Africa’s consisting of two nations. One rich and white, and the other poor and black. In saying that, he sowed the seeds of division. Thabo Mbeki was quite aloof as a personality. He really didn’t engage with individuals. He always wanted to be the smartest person in the room. He was unaccountable. He was the crown prince, quite autocratic in his style. You don’t cross him.
Thabo Mbeki’s an AIDS dissident and a spreader of misinformation. His stance on HIV/AIDS resulted in an estimated 350,000 people dying who shouldn’t have died and also a million children being orphaned. This is what happens when powerful leaders are not challenged when they should be challenged.
The political culture when he was president is that everybody wanted to please him and never challenged him on anything. [00:02:45] So, I saw that happening and I had written a letter to George Soros on behalf of the organization I ran, The Institute for Democracy, and I was applying for renewed funding. I wrote in that letter that it’s far more important to do this kind of work providing an exacting mechanism for political accountability because of the steely nature, I remember the words that I used, the steely nature of Thabo Mbeki.
So the letter was sent to the local director of the Open Society Foundation in South Africa and placed in the board pack for a board meeting. On that board sat Thabo Mbeki’s legal advisor, Mojanku Gumbi, and she took the letter out of the board pack and gave it to him. And he appeared, I think the next day in public at a major gathering in Johannesburg, and said, this is why I don’t like IDASA, and he mentioned my name as being somebody who’s using a false story in order to raise money, was the accusation.
I can [00:03:52] see why he would be alarmed by somebody writing something to George Soros about, but his reaction was the reaction of an autocrat. He could have picked up the phone and said, “what do you think you’re doing?” You know? His lawyer should not have released that document in the board pack. That should not be taken out, that’s a real violation. And George Soros reacted to that by essentially reconstituting that board because of that ethical betrayal.
The consequence for me and the organization IDASA was Thabo Mbeki completely shut off access to government for an organization that depended on access to government, and he also basically marginalized me and just killed me off politically. It was just awful. You become toxic because the president said you’re toxic. You should not be touched. Anybody associated with me is, uh, enemy. I had made this observation in private in a letter. It gets out, and then things just continue as usual. There should have been a stronger public debate about the governance style of leaders and that would take a bit more courage to do.
I have some really good, true friends who just stuck with me. There’s great comfort in that. And then there were people within the African National Congress who sided with me and the truth, but could not say so publicly, [00:05:22] came to see me privately. And I actually appreciated that.
I then left the Institute for Democracy and resigned because I could not serve the organization anymore. I went back to university to become the Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. So I had a job, but I had a career trajectory that collapsed, and I had to essentially reinvent myself and find another space, and that took a while. It was hard.
I was asked by the Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, who led the anti-apartheid movement out of Ireland, to serve as his head advisor in the education department and develop a program on values in education. It was a very brave and great thing he did. So I ran a committee, and we produced policy proposals for how to promote values of unity, of reconciliation, of truthfulness, of integrity, of the importance of national values that promotes growth and prosperity in the country. Worked very closely with some of the education [00:06:34] authorities in a program dealing with promoting those values. So I did that for a while. I could have done some things differently, but I don’t regret any of it.
I know now when you write an email, always imagine it’ll leak. Think about what you say and so be really careful. I wrote a letter, and I was naive, you know, referenced Thabo Mbeki, I don’t regret referencing him in that way, I think it’s true, but I would not put it in a letter.
There are times when you actually have to speak up publicly and it’s very important to assess whether doing so would make a difference, to actually stand up for principle or take the risk and take it on your chin. And sometimes it’s hard to judge when it matters, and that takes a certain [00:07:35] level of protection and bravery on people’s parts.
The next time I saw Thabo Mbeki was at Mandela’s funeral, and I actually went to talk to him. And, he was, you know, quite friendly, but in the end, he’s never been contrite about the HIV story. He still repeats to the day, repeats the misinformation. He’s incapable of actually saying “I was wrong”, essentially, which is a fault that a whole lot of politicians have. I’ve seen politicians actually admit that they were wrong. That certainly can happen, and it can increase credibility, but he’s simply incapable of saying that.
There were two really major weaknesses on Thabo’s part. One is HIV/AIDS and the second was his policies towards Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. Never stood up to Robert Mugabe and let him get away with murder. And so I made an enemy and it stayed that way.
During my time at the University of Cape Town that I was then asked to be part of the machinery for running the democratic elections in the western Cape, which really sort of whetted my appetite for playing a [00:09:10] much more political role in the country. I navigated a variety of worlds from the academic world to the nongovernmental world to the policymaking world, but never served in government and in Parliament itself. And the thing is that if you really want to make a difference, that’s the place to be. That’s where decisions are taken, resources are allocated.
I entered Parliament in 2009 and stayed until 2017. 8 years. I was a member of Parliament for the opposition party called the Democratic Alliance. It’s a sort of democratic centrist party. It’s not a social democratic or communist party obviously.
It represented larger minorities, so colored, Indian, and white South Africans, as well as black South Africans. I was chairman of that party between 2010 and 2016, for two years, so I was responsible for the party as chair, but the party’s led by its leader, at the time it was Helen Zille. I also served on the Trade and Industry [00:10:18] Committee, Science and Technology Committee, and Basic Education and Higher Education.
The most rewarding part of it is to serve your constituency, and I served the very poor community called Mitchell’s Plain was my base. It was really rewarding. A real difference can be made. I mean, there are limitations to government. There are limitations to Parliament, but it is the debating chamber of the country. In the end, politics is about decisions regarding the distribution of resources to the nation.
It was a Parliament that has been dominated by the African National Congress ever since the beginning, 1994, the party of Mandela, they had a permanent majority. When you have a permanent majority, you get smug, you get arrogant. When it comes down to a vote, you will always have your way. When I entered Parliament in 2009, the African National Congress got 62, I think, percent of the vote, clear majority. So being in opposition that’s effective, there had to be a different way of doing things because I thought opposition politics should be a bit more creative.
I’m trained as a sociologist. When you walk into Parliament as a sociologist, you sort of look around and think, this is about power, right? The currency is power. The currency is not knowledge. University, the currency is knowledge. This is not about that at all. This is about power. So that frames what you do and how you persuade colleagues to take a certain course of action that you think is the right one to do, and that has to be somewhat shielded from people’s political ambitions.
You know what’s really [00:11:58] fascinating is that once you get into Parliament, you realize that decisions are taken in committees. That’s where the action lies. It’s in committees where you can actually work with your colleagues. Compromises are made and you can make bonds and take decisions in the national interest without everybody looking at you, including your voters.
The president at the time was Jacob Zuma. And just historically, Jacob Zuma was in exile for a very long time and became head of intelligence for the ANC in exile. That was his job [00:12:37] and he’s trained in the Soviet Union. He’s the equivalent in terms of work experience of Vladimir Putin. And he ran all of the ANC’s training camps outside of South Africa in exile. So he had the dirt on everybody, the kompromat, and there were massive scandals in those camps. The one camp in Angola called Quattro, a history of people being accused falsely of being spies and executions happened. There was no rule of the law there at all. So that was the practice, and it brought the ANC into disrepute globally. And Mandela was furious.
When Jacob Zuma came back from exile, Mandela refused to see him. He wouldn’t see him. You must remember that there was a smuggling network in South Africa during the days of the fight against apartheid and Jacob Zuma was in charge of all of that, that whole network of smuggling people and smuggling guns in and out, criminal networks, quite corrupt. He kept that network.
Thabo Mbeki, when he became [00:13:42] president, appointed Jacob Zuma as deputy president in order to shut him up basically. Thabo Mbeki for all his smarts politically, he forgot that anybody who is deputy president has ambition to be president.
In the end, the fighting within African National Congress was so fierce that Thabo Mbeki was asked to step down as president. He was fired by his own party. In a South African political system you can do that because of the list system that we have. The party can recall one of its members and then lose the presidency, and that’s what happened. So as a result of it, Jacob Zuma becomes president. Not well educated, doesn’t have the knowledge base to deal with a modern society. He had no democratic viscera in him at all, didn’t understand the separation of powers at all, and weaponizes the state in his own self-interest to enrich himself and to make sure he stays out of prison.
He was accused of corruption in a major way, for taking bribes, for being on the payroll of the Gupta [00:14:47] Brothers. These were three Indian businessmen who came into the country and essentially bribe ministers and placed Jacob Zuma on their payroll, and they had disproportionate influence over the country’s political decision making. All he wanted to do was stay out of jail. And the way you do that is you go after the judiciary, pull the teeth of the National Prosecutorial Authority. Judicial appointments were manipulated. His own homestead in Kwazulu Natal, he used public money to build it into a castle of sorts. It was outrageous. And there was outrage in the country.
This was the man who was president, so I always said to my colleagues, we have a terrible job description. Our job description is to stop him from doing anything worse. How do you contain somebody like that? That was our job.
It was an environment that was deeply unhealthy and toxic, and so we went about the business of government, the business of Parliament, through its committees. And the health committee had to make special appropriations for HIV, for [00:16:05] example. I would visit the hospitals in the country, I would visit our laboratories. And it was during that time that we saw the news of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
[Archival news clip]: This is the deadliest outbreak of Ebola on record. The latest figures from the World Health Organization show more than 1,200 people have been infected in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
You watch in horror how something that was preventable in fact just spread because the countries there were so unprepared. I worked together with my colleagues to see whether South Africa was prepared to in fact deal with a possible Ebola outbreak, and we started working on preparedness for outbreaks of that pathogenic severity.
It was quite a personal thing. I watched Ebola burn through West Africa. Ebola’s preventable. And many of the people who died were frontline health nurses. Africa’s health system is a nurse-driven system. The nurses were the ones who were killed.
When you’re looking at preventable [00:17:18] diseases and they’re not prevented, the failure is not a science failure. The failure is not a medical failure, it’s a moral failure. That’s what just really blew my mind, right? If we can prevent people from dying, why are we not doing that? So it was a kind of a sense of feeling like I was not doing enough, and I need to do more, and that’s what really propelled me. And that’s how I got into the world of global health security.
And then became particularly focused on one area, which is to prevent accidents from happening, something called threat reduction. How do you keep dangerous pathogens in the lab, and they don’t escape? Do you know how many Ebola samples are unaccounted for in West Africa? We don’t know what happened to them. So you need proper inventory systems in place to protect people who work within labs, so that they’re safe and that your labs don’t leak and that the information in the labs doesn’t get out. You need to have containment strategies that work for keeping pathogens [00:18:24] inside labs, inside biobanks, in cabinets for transportation, how to get compliance with the biological weapons convention, and the governance of that and the financing of that. We saw during COVID-19 how important that actually is.
I entered parliament at the age of 56 and I left Parliament at the age of 64 to come to the U.S. I was recruited by Columbia University to help them set up a global health security program. I spent six years at Columbia and then came to Brown. I suppose part of my problem is I don’t know how to retire. It’s kind of a lifelong devotion to public service, right? There’s that, but I deeply believe in adult education. A commitment to lifelong learning and being able to listen to people when they give you good advice and not be stubborn about things. You learn things all the time.
I had never imagined that I would be involved in the science world of looking at biotechnology risks. It’s not easy to just reinvent yourself, but it is possible to recognize where your assets [00:19:38] are and how to use them in order to serve what in the end are moral pursuits. And I don’t want to sound too grandiose about that, but if we want to improve the lives of people, what do you do? If you want to advance health, what you do? If you want to prevent death, what you do?
Learning from one’s mistakes and listening to trusted voices at the right time matters. If I think about this one episode where it was during my second year of university study that we, in the middle of the academic year, decided to protest against the state of emergency and political repression in South Africa, we decided to walk off campus, our university campus. And I went back to my vacation job, which was a book warehouse in Cape Town, and I did some really interesting things in the book warehouse because it was full of the university books, including Plato’s Republic, which I wanted to read, but my job was to Xerox. It was a quite a menial job.
So I was in front of this Xerox machine, I was reading Plato [00:20:45] at the same time, and one of the editors of the firm walked past and sort of looked at me, and she said, “What are you reading?” I said, “I’m reading Plato’s Republic.” She had this real puzzled look on her face. And she said, “Why are you reading that?” I said, “Because it’s an interesting book to read.” So she said, “So what are you doing here?” I said, “I walked off campus” and in Afrikaans, she said to me, “Please go back to university. Please go back to university.” And I listened to her. I did. I went back the next year, and I put my head down because I wasn’t a very good student in my first and second year. Then I got the hang of things and that really just shifted my world. That’s quite a lesson. Watching somebody sacrifice their education, that’s what she was looking at. And she said, that’s a really bad thing you’re doing to yourself and it’s in your hands to change it. It’s about the qualities of the person giving advice and the real sense that they have your interest at heart, not theirs. That they’re giving you advice because they want to help you and support you, which is [00:21:49] not always the case, certainly not the case in politics.
The one great thing I learned in Parliament is: how do you get something done? Otherwise you just scream from the sidelines. The key thing on the political front is you can’t get anything done unless you get elected. You can have lots of debates on the inside, but you need to develop a united front, and you have to be elected, which means you have to win campaigns.
Leadership matters enormously. So the political world is a source of uncertainty and it’s a source of joy and grief depending on who you select. All of that points to the importance of people in democracies using their right to vote and to think not only of their own interests, but the interests of their neighbors, the [00:22:47] interests of the wider community, and the interests sometimes of the globe, and have some kind of balance there. And to be very, very, very careful in terms of who you elect. Make sure you elect people who are worthy of your vote. It is of the greatest importance that we increase the quality of the people we put into office because those people will affect our lives in a major way. Elect leaders that we can be proud of.
People sometimes ask me whether I’d run again and to tell you the truth, not for a big position, but perhaps something more local. [00:23:27]
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Listening to Shadows is a production of reelblue and Cocoon Audio. The series was created and written by Wilmot James and Jennifer Galvin. It was edited and executive produced by Jennifer Galvin and Bart Warshaw. Production Assistance from Bentley Holt, Alice Im, and Clara Baisinger-Rosen. Production Support from the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library. Illustrations by Rokia Whitehouse, Lydia Smithey, and Orla Maxwell. Music by bluedot sessions and sound design and mixing by Bart Warshaw. Special thanks to Jessie Graham and Jennifer Nuzzo, and to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. [00:24:27]