Thabo Mbeki’s Net Worth: Biography, Earnings & more

Alamu TosinAugust 27, 2023

Thabo Mbeki’s Net Worth, Biography, Earnings & more – Thabo Mbeki is a South African politician who served as the second president of South Africa from 14 June 1999 to 24 September 2008, when he resigned at the request of his party, the African National Congress (ANC).

Before that, he was deputy president under Nelson Mandela from 1994 to 1999. The son of Govan Mbeki, a prominent ANC intellectual, Thabo Mbeki has been involved in ANC politics since 1956, when he joined the ANC Youth League, and was a member of the departed ANC National Executive Committee.

Born in Transkei, he left for South Africa at the age of twenty to attend university in England and lived in exile abroad for nearly three decades, until the ANC was lifted in 1990. He rose through the organization in its information and publicity section and as Oliver Tambo’s protégé. At the same time, he is also a diplomat and official representative of the ANC in some of the predecessor countries of this organization.

He was an early advocate and leader of the diplomatic engagements that led to negotiations to end the apartheid regime. Following the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, he was appointed vice president of the country. Over the next few years, it became apparent that he was Mandela’s chosen successor and he was elected unopposed ANC president in 1997, making him president as the candidate of the ANC in the 1999 election.

As vice president, Thabo Mbeki was seen as responsible for the government’s growth, employment, and redistribution policy, introduced in 1996, and as president, he continues to endorse relatively conservative and market-friendly macroeconomic policies. During his presidency, South Africa experienced a reduction in public debt, a falling budget deficit, and moderate and steady economic growth.

However, despite his upholding various social-democratic programs and notable expansion of the black economic empowerment agenda, critics generally consider Thabo Mbeki’s economic policies to be neoliberal, do not give sufficient consideration to the goals of development and redistribution.

For these reasons, Thabo Mbeki increasingly distanced himself from the ANC’s left wing and led the ANC’s Tripartite Alliance partners, the South African Trades Union Congress and the South African Communist Party. It was these leftists who supported Jacob Zuma against Thabo Mbeki during the political rivalry that erupted after Thabo Mbeki removed Jacob Zuma from his position as vice president in 2005.

As president, Thabo Mbeki clearly has a penchant for foreign policy especially multilateralism. His pan-Africanism and vision of the “African renaissance” were central elements of his political character, and commentators say he secured a role for South Africa in African and world politics disproportionate to the size and historical influence of the country. He was the central architect of the New Partnership for African Development, and as the first president of the African Union, he led the introduction of the Mechanism.

After launching the IBSA Dialogue Forum in 2003, his government worked with India and Brazil to push for reforms at the United Nations, advocating a stronger role for developing countries. Among South Africa’s various peacekeeping commitments during his presidency, Thabo Mbeki was the main mediator in the conflict between the ZANU-PF and the Zimbabwean opposition in the 2000s. He was frequently criticized for his “silent diplomacy” in Zimbabwe, in which he refused to condemn Robert Mugabe’s regime or impose sanctions on him.

Thabo Mbeki’s policy on HIV/AIDS is also controversial globally. His government only introduced a national program for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission in 2002, when it was authorized by the Constitutional Court, and did not provide antiretroviral treatment and it was withdrawn from the public health care system before the end of 2003. Subsequent studies estimate that this delay caused hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

Thabo Mbeki himself, like health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has been described as an AIDS denier, “dissident” or skeptic. Although he does not explicitly deny a causal link between HIV and AIDS, he often emphasizes the need to study other causes and alternative treatments for AIDS, and frequently that immunodeficiency is an indirect result of poverty.

His political roots began at the ANC’s Polokwane conference in December 2007, when he was replaced by Jacob Zuma as ANC president. His term as National President did not expire until June 2009, but on 20 September 2008 he announced his resignation at the request of the ANC’s National Executive Committee.

The ANC’s decision to ‘recall’ Thabo Mbeki is related to a Supreme Court ruling earlier that month in which Judge Chris Nicholson alleges inappropriate political interference in the National and Special Prosecutor’s Offices, especially the corruption allegations against Jacob Zuma. Nicholson’s ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeal in January 2009, at which point Thabo Mbeki was replaced as president by Kgalema Motlanthe.

Thabo Mbeki was born in Mbewuleni, a small village in the ancient homeland of the Transkei, now part of the Eastern Cape. The second child in a family of four siblings, he has an older sister Linda (born in 1941, and died in 2003), and two brothers Moeletsi (born in 1945) and Jama (born in 1948, and died in 1982). His parents are Epainette, a teacher by training, and Govan a shopkeeper, teacher, journalist, and senior activist in the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).

However, when Mbeki was young, his family was separated when Govan moved to Ladysmith alone to work as a teacher. Thabo Mbeki said he was “born in struggle” and recalled that his childhood home was decorated with portraits of Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi. Indeed, Govan named him after the senior South African communist Thabo Mofutsanyana.

Thabo Mbeki is sometimes described as aloof and academic, although during his second presidential campaign in 2004, many observers described him as finally comfortable adopting traditional campaign methods, more traditional, sometimes dancing at events and even kissing babies, and writing weekly columns on the ANC’s Today newsletter, to generate discussions on a variety of topics.

Thabo Mbeki seems comfortable with the Internet and willing to quote from it. For example, in a column on Hurricane Katrina, he cited Wikipedia, a lengthy quote from a discussion of Katrina’s lessons on American inequality in Native American publications. Indian Country Today,[156] and later included excerpts from a column by David Brooks in The New York Times in a discussion of why the Katrina events exemplify the need to develop global development and redistribution of wealth.

In October 1959, Thabo Mbeki had a son, Monwabisi Kwanda, with Olive Mpahlwa, a childhood friend with whom he had a romance in Lovedale. Kwanda was raised by his mother and later by Mbeki’s mother, Epainette. His family last saw him in 1981 and is presumed to have died in exile, but the circumstances of his death are unknown. Olive testified of her disappearance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, issuing a fervent appeal to those with information to report it.

Since 1974, Thabo Mbeki has been married to Zanele Dlamini Mbeki, a social worker from Alexandra, whom he met in London before leaving for Moscow. The wedding took place on November 23 at Farnham Castle in Surrey, England. Adelaide Tambo and Mendi Msimang represented Thabo Mbeki at loco parentis, and Essop Pahad was his witness. They have no children in common.