Mbeki says African leaders must put shoulder to the wheel in addressing continent's challenges
JOHANNESBURG - Former President Thabo Mbeki said African leaders need to put their shoulder to the wheel in addressing a range of challenges faced by the continent.
Mbeki made the renewed calls at the 15th Thabo Mbeki Africa Day Lecture in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at the weekend.
Mbeki was joined by other former heads of state from Africa and policy leaders in a packed hall.
Social cohesion, democracy, economic rebuilding and growth, and the positioning of Africa as a significant player in geopolitical affairs are among priorities Mbeki said still need to be addressed urgently.
READ: MTDP a vision that lacks necessary steps to bring it to life, says Mbeki
'To do this thing that all of us wish for, this rebirth of the African continent, practically what do we do, we have the vision, we think we know where we want to go but what do we do practically?'
Mbeki said, despite his exit from active politics, he continues to be part of leaders heeding the calls for transformation on the continent.
"Other things being equal, I should have retired as President of South Africa in 2009 but other things being unequal, I retired in 2008. Before that, my colleagues, other heads of state at the time, said, 'When you retire, you must continue to focus on these African challenges.'"
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
IOL News
4 hours ago
- IOL News
Phumlani Mfeka emerges as front-runner for MKP Secretary-General position
Phumlani Mfeka is tipped to replace Floyd Shivambu as a new MKP Secretary-General. Image: Supplied As speculations gather momentum on who the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) supreme commander Jacob Zuma was considering to appoint as the new party Secretary-General following the axing of Floyd Shivambu, Phumlani Mfeka has emerged as the front runner for the position. The position became vacant after the party axed Shivambu on Tuesday following his unsanctioned trip to Malawi, where he attended a church service of a fugitive pastor, Shepherd Bushiri, who skipped bail in South Africa in 2020. Mfeka, the leader of socio-economic group Injeje yaBenguni, which advocates for African nationalism, was expected to hold a meeting with Zuma in Durban on Thursday. Sources within the party said the discussion will be followed by Mfeka's announcement as the new Secretary-General. Mfeka commands a lot of support from traditional leaders, something that Zuma regards as an important constituency for his party. Mfeka confirmed earlier on Thursday that he would meet Zuma in Durban but refused to be drawn on what they would discuss in their meeting, saying it was a private meeting between himself and the party leader. Mfeka's name had always been mentioned as a possible successor to Shivambu after rumours of his (Shivambu's) future in the position started circulating. The rumours were fueled by Shivambu's fallout with Zuma's daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, who publicly insulted him and questioned his leadership, as well as Mfeka himself, who, when resigning as both a party member and a member in the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature, cited issues with Shivambu as one of the reasons. Other names that emerged on Tuesday after Shivambu's fall were former ActionSA member and founder of Xiluba Party, Bongani Baloyi, who joined the MKP in September last year, and Advocate Busisiwe Mkhwebane. However, sources in the party said Zuma will opt for Mfeka because of his support among traditional leaders and traditionalists, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, which is the party's stronghold. It is believed that Zuma convinced Mfeka to return to the MK Party because he (Zuma) felt he needed Mfeka and his constituency in the party. Mfeka has been Zuma's strong backer before the founding of the MK Party and immediately joined after it was launched in 2023. He was on the national list to parliament during last year's general elections, however, he was deployed to serve in the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature and sat in various portfolio committees. He was among the dissenting voices within the party who were unhappy that senior positions were given to the newcomers while overlooking the founding members. If Mfeka gets appointed, he will be the fourth person to hold the secretary-general position in the party after Arthur Zwane, Sihle Ngubane, and Shivambu. [email protected].
IOL News
6 hours ago
- IOL News
AfriForum and the Criminalisation of Black Memory
After losing its hatespeech bid to silence the liberation song Dubul' iBhunu, AfriForum has recast itself as a victim on a Washington roadshow—proof that South Africa's culture wars now trade on transAtlantic markets. Image: IOL The legal campaign by AfriForum against Julius Malema for singing Dubul' iBhunu exposes a deeper problem in post-apartheid South Africa: the refusal to recognise Black historical expression as legitimate political speech. The case becomes a proxy for a wider battle—over how trauma is voiced, who owns remembrance, and whose narrative the law protects. Even though the Constitutional Court ruled in March 2025 that the chant does not constitute hate speech and refused AfriForum's final appeal, the group continues to push a cultural logic that seeks to erase African memory and symbolic resistance. In the wake of that defeat the organisation's leadership flew to Washington, DC, courting White-House-aligned conservatives and evangelical pressure groups. There they resurrected the discredited 'white genocide' myth, recasting their legal loss as a global human-rights emergency and lobbying for US intervention. Through laundering a local culture war into trans-Atlantic respectability AfriForum weaponises the language of victimhood to criminalise Black grief on an international stage. The chant in question gained prominence through the ANC Youth League in the 1980s, where it boosted morale, unified activists, and encoded a shared narrative of resistance. It resurfaced during Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall, accompanying toppled statues, confrontations with institutional power, and the mobilisation of a generation unafraid to connect past to present. Framing it as a Malema issue ignores the collective histories it carries. Struggle songs such as Dubul' iBhunu emerge from moments of crisis, mourning, and confrontation. They are ritual expressions forged in the crucible of generational trauma. The word dubula is not a literal instruction. It channels defiance, spiritual rage, and unresolved loss. Bhunu became a cipher for the apartheid state's armed wing—those who brutalised, detained, and executed under racial law. AfriForum chooses a narrow, decontextualised reading. Its interpretation deletes the cultural logic of African expression and dismisses the long tradition of symbolic resistance found across pre-colonial societies. Among the Xhosa and other Nguni peoples—including Zulu, Swazi, and Ndebele—war dance was political dramaturgy, signalling readiness without declaring bloodshed. Choreographed movement, chanting, and regalia combined into displays of spiritual authority and communal strength. These traditions preserved dignity, summoned ancestral guidance, and often prevented violence through symbolic confrontation. The Khoekhoe and ǀXam (San) held equally intricate cosmologies of performance and protest. For the ǀXam, trance dance was healing. It was also social memory and boundary. Khoekhoe resistance rituals used song and oral invocation tied to land custodianship and lineage, later suppressed by missionaries and colonial administrators who labelled them chaotic or threatening. Under settler rule, performance was criminalised; suspicion replaced meaning. Similar traditions surface worldwide. The Māori haka projects strength, summons ancestors, and faces power, often in peacetime assertion rather than wartime aggression. Indigenous nations across the Americas and Australia use ritual chant and dance as spiritual-political speech—warning, remembering, dignifying in the face of settler encroachment. Colonial authorities never grasped this. Ritual was 'primitive'. Song was 'subversive'. Expression itself became a crime. That legacy lingers in how courts treat African performance today. While Dubul' iBhunu is condemned and policed, Die Stem remains sacrosanct—its lyrics celebrating settler conquest and Christian dominion. Its presence in the national anthem shows how power still accommodates the spoils of conquest while rejecting the memory of the conquered. Settler symbols are validated by law; Black resistance is sanitised or prosecuted. The demand is reconciliation without responsibility, visibility without history. The aftermath tells its own tale. On Human Rights Day (21 March 2025) EFF supporters sang Dubul' iBhunu in Sharpeville; AfriForum threatened contempt but had no legal foothold. Two months later the lobby group turned to new litigation, filing papers in the Gauteng High Court to strike down the 2025 Expropriation Act as 'part of a genocidal land-grab'. Simultaneously, Washington rewarded AfriForum's alarmism: a special refugee track has begun admitting small Afrikaner cohorts, and an executive order now withholds USAID funds until Pretoria tackles so-called 'farm murders'. President Ramaphosa has condemned the campaign as 'disinformation diplomacy' and lodged a protest note with the US State Department—but the propaganda has already taken flight. The unresolved question is whether the National Prosecuting Authority has the mettle to deem AfriForum's trans-Atlantic lobbying an act of treason against the republic.
TimesLIVE
10 hours ago
- TimesLIVE
Republic of Congo's dollar bond slides after Trump travel ban
The Republic of Congo's international bond dropped in early trade on Thursday after the country was included in a list whose citizens are banned from travelling to the US. The bond, which matures in 2029, fell by 2.5 cents on the dollar to bid at $83.50, Tradeweb data showed. US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Wednesday banning the citizens of 12 countries from entering the United States, citing threats. Seven of the countries are African.
