Former President Thabo Mbeki asserted that the country is under an externally organised and coordinated political destabilisation campaign.
RESPONDING to the current anti-immigrant crisis in South Africa, former President Thabo Mbeki is fundamentally wrong when he strongly asserted that the country is under an externally organised and coordinated political destabilisation campaign and that it was not a spontaneous eruption.
I completely disagree with Mbeki. Instead, the root causes of the unprecedented anti-immigrant crisis, while very complex, multifaceted and convoluted, are deeply systemic and structural.
It is not true that these huge and combustible protests, especially over the past few weeks, suggest that these are the results of an organised effort to isolate South Africa from the rest of the African continent.
I think Mbeki wants to deflect our attention from his role in our current neoliberal economic policies, especially when the Reconstruction & Development Plan office was shut down in March 1996 and just three months later, in June, the Growth, Employment & Redistribution and Strategy (Gear) was imposed by the ANC government, in which he, as deputy president, and former finance minister Trevor Manuel played the biggest roles.
