Tutu turns scorn on Mbeki in row shaking black South Africa

Published on Tuesday 30 November 2004 02:09

ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu yesterday fired the latest salvo in a bitter row with South African president Thabo Mbeki that is threatening to divide the country’s black leadership.

The public slanging-match between the two leaders began last week when Mr Tutu accused the president of deepening the country’s poverty and stifling debate among his party.

Mr Mbeki, who led the ANC to a 70 per cent victory in elections in April, hit back, charging the Nobel Peace laureate with speaking out of turn and resorting to "empty rhetoric".

Yesterday, Mr Tutu responded with a sarcasm that will do nothing to defuse the row. "Thank you Mr President for telling me I am a liar with scant regard for the truth and a charlatan posing as a champion of the poor, the hungry, oppressed and voiceless," he said.

Mr Tutu, second only to Nelson Mandela as the face of the struggle for black emancipation from apartheid, added: "I will continue to pray for you and your government by name daily, as I have done and as I did even for the apartheid government. God bless you."

Mr Tutu is becoming as formidable a thorn in the side of Mr Mbeki’s African National Congress government as he was of former white governments.

He has criticised the notoriously thin-skinned Mr Mbeki for his silence on AIDS, which has infected 5.6 million South Africans; his cosy relationship with Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe; the creation of a narrow, super-rich black oligarchy; the stifling of debate; and his prejudices against the whites.

Criticism has been building from all sectors of society, but detractors in the ANC’s trade union partner, the Coalition of South African Trade Unions, have been dismissed as "ultra-leftists" while white critics, some lifelong ANC members, have been denigrated as "racists" by the president.

Mr Tutu, hugely popular across the racial spectrum, is less easily put down. He again raised the president’s ire when he gave the annual address at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, a major charity, in Johannesburg last Friday.

It provoked a 3,000-word attack on the Archbishop by Mr Mbeki, who defended the spectacular enrichment of some ANC leaders.