The star News Online
Thursday, December 14, 2006
President Thabo Mbeki has broken his silence about perceptions that he is cold, aloof, intolerant of criticism and, in short, "an angry black man".
As far as the president is concerned, he is nothing of the sort.
Addressing the annual conference of the SA Students Congress (Sasco) in Cape Town yesterday, Mbeki recounted how a journalist had once informed him that other people believed he was "very intolerant".
"You don't like to listen to other people's views and when anyone differs with you, you are very sharp and you get very angry and you say 'shut up'," the journalist apparently told him.
To laughter, Mbeki said he was also accused of "hardly smiling", "not having a sense of humour" and being the epitome of an "angry black man".
"I don't recognise me in that description," Mbeki said. "It's a very interesting picture."
Mbeki, who rarely agrees to being interviewed by local print journalists, also took a dig at the media, as well as dial-a-quote analysts often trotted out as current affairs experts, dismissing them as reactionary. He noted that the very journalists criticising him had admitted to never meeting him.
"But they know absolutely everything about you. Those are the experts and the analysts," he told the students.
"We are not, as members of Sasco, that kind of expert and analyst. We must become part of the progressive intelligentsia who are actually engaged in the process of rebuilding South Africa," Mbeki said.
He repeated that among |his complaints - which no one |was listening to - was the quality |of debate.
"You get debates in this country on many things, some of them not very important, but people debate them as though the sky is going to fall. If you listen to the radio, watch TV, read the newspapers, you find |a small circle of people who are always popping up.
"What are they called? Experts? Analysts? That's the word. It's a small group."
Mbeki said he would hear these analysts in the morning and again in the afternoon.
"Where are the others who are perfectly capable of analysing? It's not there and it's not right. We have to do something about that."