Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - August 12, 2007

It is hard to imagine anything at this point in his presidency that could more brutally prove his commitment to the politics of his inner circle above service to the people.

He smothered a small ray of hope because, as he told her in a letter, she was not a team player. We can only assume it was because she defied the Cabinet code of obeisance.

Mbeki's Cabinet offers sheltered employment to loyalists, regardless of health or ability. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang's known weakness for drink was, as we report elsewhere today, condoned while she actively undermined the government's policies on HIV/Aids with her unscientific caveats and brought ridicule upon the nation with a comic misrepresentation of good diet.

She let hospitals go to ruin and bungled plans to make medicine cheaper, all at the cost of countless lives.

Mbeki told Parliament recently that ministers could not be held individually responsible for non-performance. The blame should be shared by the whole Cabinet team. That probably explained his tolerance of Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, Correctional Services Minister Ngconde Balfour and Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who have all failed spectacularly.

Mbeki has made bad appointments and, because he can admit no error, defended them to a point of absurdity.

He has retained Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi in spite of his deeply inappropriate friendship with known gangsters, and cowed his colleagues into denial of the tragedy unfolding in Zimbabwe.

Madlala-Routledge, though a deputy and not a member of the Cabinet, brought hope to the bleak realm of healthcare. She challenged the complicit silence in government and the ANC about the pandemic culling hundreds of young lives every day. When her boss jumped the queue for a liver transplant, she, with acting minister Jeff Radebe and Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, pumped life into the moribund HIV/Aids programme.

Then, when East London's Frere Hospital was exposed as one of the country's more deeply dysfunctional facilities, she went to see and did not try to cover up what she found. Where she had offered comfort, Tshabalala-Msimang and the President tried to tell the mothers of needlessly dead babies that their grief was statistically appropriate.

Madlala-Routledge is no Mother Teresa. By some accounts, she is challenging, difficult to work with and not entirely respectful of authority. But those are qualities that an able leader should manage when packaged with evident courage and competence. Mbeki failed this simple test of his leadership. In craven defeat, he sacked her.

His dismissal of this outspoken woman on the eve of Women's Day made a nonsense of his mealy-mouthed speech the next day about the rights and status of women in our country. He had done violence to a woman who dared to stand up to him.

It calls into question his suggestion that the next president should be a woman. A strong woman?

The President is entitled to hire and fire ministers and deputies. If he had consistently used that authority to enforce a standard of excellence rather than subservience, his decision would have been accepted. Without that track record, it was clearly just the spite of a political bully.

He cited her official trip to Spain in June, which he disallowed on the day of her departure. But if it was about unnecessary travel, then he should have acted against the deputy president, who took friends on holiday to Abu Dhabi at government expense, Speaker of Parliament Baleka Mbete, who hired a private jet to attend a presidential inauguration in Liberia, and the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba, who used government transport for associates in non-government projects.

If it was about some unrevealed corruption, he or the party would have had to act as strongly against MPs who defrauded Parliament's travel fund and all the councillors, mayors, senior officials and empowered business people who have manipulated the system to their own illicit profit.

If it was because she responded to the Frere Hospital reports, then heaven help us all.

It is time for men and women of courage in the ANC to stand up for what they believe in their hearts, to break this code that masquerades as loyalty.

Mbeki deserves great credit for much of what he has done, but his legacy is unravelling like an emperor's ill-made cloak. If his measure of performance is to be the praise for his clothes, we must ask: can we afford another two years?

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