The Arch vs the ANC: Tutu still raising Cain at 77 (News Feature)

By Clare Byrne Oct 8, 2008, 2:08 GMT

Johannesburg - Not for the first time, the all-powerful African National Congress got its comeuppance this week from the man known affectionately in South Africa as The Arch.

On the eve of his 77th birthday Tuesday, Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu told the liberation-movement-turned-ruling-party he would boycott next year's general election unless ANC leaders healed the hurt caused by a vicious internal power struggle.

'I would be sufficiently unhappy not to vote,' the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former anti-apartheid activist told South Africa's Sunday Times, referring to the party's unceremonious dumping of former president Thabo Mbeki in September, six months before Mbeki was due to retire.

The ANC demanded Mbeki step down over a court insinuation that he interfered in the decision to bring corruption charges against his foe, ANC leader Jacob Zuma.

Coming just fourteen years after millions of black South Africans obtained a vote for the first time in 1994, thanks mainly to the ANC, the bishop's threatened poll stay-away is symptomatic of growing disaffection with former president Nelson Mandela's party.

Mbeki's 'recall' by the ANC was seen by many, including Tutu, as part of a long-running settling of scores within the party that has distracted it from the business of tending to the poor.

Reacting to what Tutu called a 'cry from the heart,' Zuma said he would 'engage' Tutu over his remarks while rejecting the bishop's call for him to pass over the post of president next year because of the corruption cloud still hanging over him.

Others, including the leader of the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, berated the bubbly bishop for 'practically an endorsement of voter apathy.'

But Tutu, who, as as the chairman of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, became synonymous with forgiveness, is unrepentant on this score.

In an e-mail interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa just before Mbeki's resignation, Tutu said he was troubled by what he saw as the bullying of those who dared to stand up to the ANC.

Apparently referring to the radical ANC Youth League, whose leader Julius Malema said earlier this year he was ready to 'kill' for Jacob Zuma and who was instrumental in Mbeki's axing, Tutu told dpa: 'Freedom is what we fought for, and yet some of our young people have taken to shouting down any opposition.'

Yet, if some youth were yobbish 'the older generation should take part of the blame for not encouraging vigorous debate,' according to Tutu.

Since Mandela retired from public life in 2004, the role of South Africa's moral guardian has fallen almost exclusively to Tutu.

Although he has lamented the manner of Mbeki's ouster, he didn't spare him a tongue-lashing either when it came to his head-in-the- sand attitude on HIV/AIDS and other issues.

Despite his advanced age, the Cape Town-based bishop who admits to having harboured ambitions of becoming a doctor as a young man, refuses to go quietly into retirement.

'I will use my own voice to condemn these destructive habits (lack of debate), as I did the evils of apartheid,' he vowed.

Many of the problems facing the teenage Rainbow Nation, including stubbornly high levels of violent crime, racial intolerance and social inequality, were understandable, given the '300 years (give or take) of institutionalized and legitimized racism' that went before.

'It's no wonder that historic dysfunction continues to bubble up like acne on the complexion of the young democracy,' he said.

'But never give up on the South African people,' he urged.

'The vast, vast majority' of South Africa's 47 million people were making efforts to 'understand each other, to forgive, to integrate and to seek a unifying consciousness and national identity. They are the true, generous and wholesome heart of the nation.'