Tag: mbeki

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Dangers of AI training

ANTHONY BUTLER | What if AI trains using Mbeki’s speeches?

Argument in a report by former president’s foundation ignores the real issues

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

1 October 2026

Amid all the brouhaha about the threat that Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to the future of human life, one even more frightening prospect has hitherto been overlooked. Rather than killing us, AI may instead subject us in perpetuity to the eternal guidance of large language models trained on the collected speeches and writings of former president Thabo Mbeki.

This terrifying spectre has been raised by the Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s release of a new report entitled The United States of America and the Future of Afrikaners in South Africa.

A pithy 123 pages long, and so relatively condensed for a contribution to the Mbeki oeuvre, the paper reinterprets the current disputes between the two countries as a manifestation of the “national question” in both countries.

In Mbeki’s usage, the national question refers to the resolution of colonial conquest’s legacy by freeing the dispossessed indigenous majority and building one united, non-racial nation where race no longer determines wealth or opportunity. The basic parallel the report draws is that the US has faced its own national question exhibited in slavery, segregation and the continuing socioeconomic marginalisation of Black Americans.

From this perspective, the Foundation argues that it is historically inconsistent for Washington to demand that SA abandon racial redress only three decades after 1994 when the US continued to use affirmative-action and other remedial policies long after emancipation.

This is not a very good argument, of course, which is one reason we can speculate that Mbeki played a personal role in the preparation of the report.

There is further evidence of Mbeki’s hand in accounts of transition era negotiations with Constand Viljoen which seem to be presented from his personal perspective, and the text slips into the first person singular when describing Mbeki’s interactions with Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthlezi.

To its credit, the foundation assembles empirical material to contest American misconceptions about SA, deploying the analyses of notable Afrikaners Frans Cronje and Herman Giliomee to argue that Afrikaner living standards rose faster between 1994 and 2004 than during any comparable 20-year period since 1945.

This certainly suggests that a genocide or persecution narrative cannot plausibly describe the socioeconomic condition of Afrikaners as a whole (but then we all knew that already).

The report then veers rather alarmingly in an Mbekian direction by equating the building of Afrikaner community institutions with a revival of apartheid-style “separate development”. It also speculates that the current US administration has aligned itself with a “white supremacist faction” in SA, citing as evidence US connections of Solidarity and AfriForum, the refugee programme, and opposition to land reform. There is evidence for each element of this narrative, it is true, but this does not amount to proof of such an alignment.

For now, Mbeki Foundation’s work still clearly draws on Mbeki’s intellect rather than on AI. A sophisticated language model would usefully have placed more weight on Trump’s domestic political coalition, US polarisation over racial preferences, immigration politics, evangelical and conservative networks, SA foreign policy with regard to China and Iran, US commercial interests, and SA’s involvement in the International Court of Justice against the government of Israel – all matters elided by Mbeki’s abstract and characteristically paranoid theoretical generalisations.

It is therefore essential that any future global AI safety plan prohibits the training of language models on archival materials gathered by the Mbeki Foundation. In the centuries ahead, when human beings send robots between the stars in fleets of interstellar rockets, we cannot take the risk that their interactions with alien civilisations will be mediated by Mbeki-trained embodied AI. Such robots will surely antagonise Daleks, Vulcans and Klingons by presenting reports about how to avert threats to the national democratic revolution, and by ruminating at great length on the application of the national question to human-alien relations

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

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Grumpy old presidents and their legacies

 ANTHONY BUTLER | Antagonists Mbeki and Zuma spar over anti-migrant politics

Former presidents’ rivalry shapes debate on xenophobia and national identity

First published in Business Day

12 June 2026

Former president Thabo Mbeki was born on June 18 1942. That makes him
83 years old. His successor and current MK party leader, Jacob Zuma, was
born on April 12 1942, making him 84. Next week Mbeki will catch up with
Zuma, as he has done every June 18 since the nation was blessed by his
arrival.

Both seem to be benefiting from the well-documented psychological
phenomenon of “competitive longevity” that describes how having a strong
purpose or goal can extend life. Elderly people may hold on through illness or
frailty to reach a meaningful milestone. Wanting to outlive a rival is a specific,
potent form of this drive.

A general desire to witness a rival’s decline or death is well-recognised
emotionally. However, for politicians the strongest “will to live” motivation
may be the drive to control the narrative of their time in office.

Long-serving politicians spend their later years defending their legacies by
writing memoirs, giving interviews and revisiting history. A living peer
complicates this reputational burnishing, since they can contest the subject’s
claims. Outliving a key rival means having the last word.

In the Mbeki-Zuma case this dynamic is particularly rich. They have
intertwined and contested legacies and genuine mutual animosity.

One current example concerns mobilisation against undocumented migrants
in South Africa. As president in 2009, Zuma denounced xenophobic attacks.
Sadly, today’s anti-migrant marches appear to be backed by MK. When it
called on supporters to march against undocumented migrants, many
responded.

MK has confirmed it has been engaging with protest group March and March, its secretary-general defending the movement for holding peaceful protests allowed by the constitution. A partnership between the MK party and March and March now seems to be on the cards ahead of the November 2026 local government elections. 

For his part, Mbeki recently reminded citizens that the anti-apartheid struggle was fought by Africans across the continent who treated South Africa’s liberation as a collective mission. The growing wave of xenophobic sentiment ignores sacrifices made by African countries that sheltered exiles and stood behind the ANC during apartheid.

Politicians sometimes refuse to acknowledge their own failures because admission would damage the legacy they are psychologically invested in protecting.

Africa formed the centre of Mbeki’s presidential project after 1999, which resulted in the creation of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the replacement of the Organisation of African Unity with the African Union, the establishment of the African peer review mechanism, and the inauguration of a Pan-African parliament. Hand-in-hand with Nigeria’s veteran leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, he advanced a developmentalist vision for the continent.

However, during Mbeki’s tenure, his stance on Zimbabwe proved his most consequential legacy. Under the rubric of “quiet diplomacy”, and amid accelerating land seizures, orchestrated state violence, systematic repression and currency collapse, Mbeki used conciliatory mediation in the hope of averting regional destabilisation — and perhaps to protect a fellow liberation movement.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai depicted Mbeki as a “dishonest broker”, and Mbeki’s refusal to confront Harare’s depredations sat uneasily beside his continental evangelism for governance reform. Most importantly, the haemorrhaging of Zimbabwe’s population fleeing state and economic collapse contributed to the combustible social terrain that produced the xenophobic conflagrations in South Africa that started in 2008.

Mbeki’s successors found themselves trapped in the contradiction that he created between an imperative of African fraternity abroad and an imported political volatility at home. However, in the spirit of competitive gerontocracy, Mbeki waded in with the observation that “Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa caused high levels of crime and unemployment, not illegal immigrants”.

In some respects it is heartwarming to discover that politicians like Mbeki and Zuma are still alive and kicking in their declining years. The trouble is that they are no longer just kicking each other.


• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.