AMONG THE distinguished guests invited to attend the Caribbean Community Heads of Government meeting in Montego Bay is the leader of a country with which Jamaica has had strong emotional ties, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.
On a previous visit in 1997 Mr Mbeki had been newly appointed president of the African National Congress and at that time attended the swearing-in of Prime Minister Patterson to his historic third term of office.
We welcome President Mbeki to our shores and are confident that whatever final shape the Caribbean Common Market may take we can draw inspiration from his philosophy of governance.
From his earliest years Mr. Mbeki has been involved in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Trained as an economist in England and as a guerrilla fighter in Russia, he became a moving force in the African National Congress (ANC). When Nelson Mandela had the grace to step down as Prime Minister in his eighties, Mr. Mbeki, then 56, was the logical choice to succeed him. Indeed, Mr. Mandela himself declared that in the last years of his rule Mbeki was the "de facto Prime Minister".
What the South African leader refers to as an "African Renaissance", is his idee fixe, a vision being besmirched by the paranoid antics of President Mugabe in Zimbabwe. These two leaders share a Marxist background but while in the case of Mr. Mugabe, the dialectic has lost both thesis and synthesis and hardened into a shameful dictatorship, in the case of Mr. Mbeki it has gained wisdom with age and settled into a flexible pragmatism, which accepts the primacy of market forces in the economic development of his country.
We welcome Mr. Mbeki as the embodiment of Africa's bright future even as we repudiate Mr. Mugabe for destroying the future prospects of his tragic country. It is time, we think, for leaders like Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Patterson to put aside the cover of political correctness and, once and for all, condemn the evil of Mr. Mugabe's rule, a regime no less racist than the one in his country, which Mr. Mbeki struggled so hard to change.
Perhaps the summit of Caribbean leaders, marking their 30th anniversary in Montego Bay, would be an appropriate occasion for such a declaration.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
