South Africa’s ruling party called on President Thabo Mbeki to resign and it said he agreed to the request yesterday.
Mbeki has lost a power struggle against his rival, African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma, and has come under pressure to quit following a judge’s ruling last week that he was instrumental in Zuma being charged with corruption.
If other key Cabinet ministers decide to quit in solidarity with Mbeki, there could be turmoil in Africa’s economic and political powerhouse. All eyes were on Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, who shares the credit with Mbeki for South Africa’s sustained economic growth and investor-friendly policies over the past decade.
ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe said a high-level committee has “decided to recall the president of the republic before his term of office expires.”
Mantashe said that Mbeki accepted the news.
The president “did not display shock ... he welcomed the news and agreed that he is going to participate in the process and the formalities,” Mantashe said.
Parliament would meet in the near future to formalize Mbeki’s resignation, the party official said, adding that there was no decision on whether to hold early elections.
It was unclear whether Mbeki attended yesterday’s meeting. Several key government executives, including Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, have indicated they would follow him.
Mantashe said Zuma was meeting Cabinet ministers to persuade them to remain in government. He said the top priority at the moment was to focus on “ensuring the smooth running of the country.”
“We share the desire for stability and for a peaceful and prosperous South Africa,” Mantashe told a news conference.
Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela in 1999 and was due to stand down next year. If he is forced out of office, it will be a devastating humiliation to a man who devoted his life to the ANC and who is regarded as one of Africa’s most respected statesmen.
Mbeki, who has promoted what he calls Africa’s renaissance, has mediated conflicts ranging from Sudan to Ivory Coast to Congo.
After years of quiet diplomacy, for which he was widely criticized, he persuaded Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to share power with the opposition movement last week — although talks on the formation of a Cabinet have since deadlocked over disagreement about the control of key ministries.
Militant Zuma supporters headed by the ANC and Communist Youth Leagues want to force Mbeki out before his term ends. They are calling for the ANC — to which the 66-year-old Mbeki has belonged since he was 14 years old — to throw him out of the party as well as out of office.
Mbeki fired Zuma as his national deputy president in 2005, after Zuma’s financial adviser was convicted of trying to elicit a bribe to deflect investigations into a multibillion-dollar international arms deal.
The charges were withdrawn against Zuma, but the chief prosecutor announced in December he had enough evidence to bring new ones. This was within days of Zuma ousting Mbeki as ANC president.
In his ruling on Sept. 12, Judge Christopher Nicholson said it appeared Mbeki and his justice minister had colluded with prosecutors against Zuma as part of the “titanic power struggle” within the ANC.
Mbeki indignantly denied the accusations Friday.
“It impoverishes our society that some resort to the tactic of advancing allegations with no fact to support these,” the presidency said in a statement. “The question will have to be answered now — what kind of society are we building, informed by what value system and with what long-term effect to the political and overall moral health of the nation?”
South Africa emerged victorious from years of institutionalized racism in 1994 and entered an era of reconciliation embodied by anti-apartheid icon Mandela. Mbeki took over in 1999 and ushered in sustained economic growth averaging nearly 5 percent a year.
Mbeki was heralded by the international business community, but his aloofness alienated many people at home where millions remain on the margins of society. His foes accuse him of failing to fight crime and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS