British press maul Mbeki

2008-09-22 14:14

London - British newspapers branded South Africa's outgoing President Thabo Mbeki a failure Monday for disastrous policies on Aids and Zimbabwe, while voicing caution over his possible successor.

Mbeki, who announced his departure on Sunday under pressure from his ruling ANC party, won some plaudits for the manner of his exit, though newspapers were concerned about how South Africa would fare under a Jacob Zuma presidency.

Mbeki, 66, succeeded Nelson Mandela as president in June 1999. His term was due to expire in mid-2009, and he has been largely seen as a lame duck president since losing the ANC leadership to Zuma in December.

"What Mr Mandela fashioned... Mr Mbeki has at least preserved," The Times said in its editorial.

"Any leader would have been overshadowed by the mantle of Mr Mandela. Mr Mbeki, however, has tarnished his political inheritance and weakened South Africa's moral authority."

Mbeki had "failed" South Africa's blacks and "the greatest domestic indictments are mass unemployment and poverty," said the daily.

He had also failed South Africa, the paper continued.

Isolated, friendless figure

Mbeki had "outraged international opinion" with his seeming "collusion with the tyranny" of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, and his "preposterous pseudo-scientific denial that HIV causes AIDS", which has wreaked "terrible consequences" on the public, The Times said.

The Guardian branded Mbeki a "failed hero" whose downfall was "of his own making".

"It is an astonishing and not altogether explicable fact that a man who entered office so highly regarded on the national and international stage leaves it such an isolated and friendless figure," the daily said.

He came to be regarded as "intolerant" and even if history took a benign view of his Aids policy as "an aberration", it was nonetheless "closely bound to his obsession with race".

"Aids and his policy of propping up the dying Mugabe regime will go down as the two great stains on his period of office.

Mbeki had "run out of road, and thankfully acknowledged that fact" by resigning.

The ANC named its deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe as head of state on Monday.

But should ANC president Zuma take over as president next year, "it is not clear what sort of leader he will be. There are real reasons to worry," the Guardian said.

"If one autocrat replaces another, South Africans will be the losers from a power struggle in which they have not been consulted."

The Financial Times said it was "a measure of how far and how fast Mbeki's star has fallen that few in South Africa will mourn his departure from office".

The business daily gave him credit for presiding over the country's longest uninterrupted period of growth since World War II and nurturing the growth of a black middle class.

But the paper blasted ANC corruption scandals and Mbeki's "disastrous policies" on Aids and Zimbabwe.

"His legacy is a country that is more prosperous but arguably more racially and economically polarised than when he took over," the FT said.

The ANC "should be commended for showing signs of democratic health - a rare sentiment in a former African liberation movement", the paper added. But there were "many reasons for misgivings about what comes next," it said.

- AFP