No offence was meant, presumably, but it still felt vaguely insulting to see Nelson Mandela identified in the photo caption of a British newspaper this week as a “black leader”. As it would be to see Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln, whose statues are, like his, in Parliament Square, described merely as “white leaders”.

To identify Mandela by his race is to diminish him, and to miss the point of the magnanimous example he has left us. Tony Benn got closer to the mark at the unveiling of his statue last Wednesday when he said: “If Diana was the people’s princess, Nelson Mandela is the president of humanity”.

Pity, then, about his successor, Thabo Mbeki, who chose the month when Mandela is immortalised in bronze to remind us of just how far short he falls of the best his country has to offer; how strong a candidate he is to rank, with his friend Robert Mugabe, among the worst Presidents in the world.

The backdrop is Mbeki’s twisted relationship with AIDS, a disease that affects one in nine South African people and kills 900 of them a day. Specific events this past month concern two women, rivals in South Africa’s AIDS drama: former Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, whom Mbeki fired on August 8, and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in whom he has retained total faith.

Beyond the sycophants who surround Mbeki and his loyal-to-a-fault cabinet, the consensus is widespread in South Africa that he fired the wrong minister. And that in so doing he has laid bare the wilful ignorance and criminal neglect with which he has responded to a humanitarian crisis of such vast proportions that any half-decent leader anywhere else would not hesitate to flag as his country’s overwhelming national priority.

Yet Mandela’s heir, the man charged with preserving the admirably principled tradition of the African National Congress, behaves as if South Africa’s AIDS disaster is no such thing. It is as if another of his rivals for worst President, US president George Bush, were to pretend the Iraq war was a little local difficulty.

During Mbeki’s first five-year term, he used to say, with the enthusiastic backing of his Health Minister, a doctor, that AIDS was not a sexually transmitted disease and that the anti-retroviral drugs that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives around the world were poisonous. He also famously declared that he knew no one who has AIDS.

The government’s official policy on AIDS today is medically sound at last. But Mbeki continues to show an abject lack of leadership, indicating that he is less than half-hearted in his commitment to the cause; that the great $64,000 question of South African politics — what the hell is going inside Mbeki’s head on AIDS? — remains unanswered. Because he is an otherwise eminently rational, intelligent man.

While Mbeki has battled with repression, the crisis has cried out for Diana-like theatrics. Mbeki should have gone out into the worst-affected areas and held the hands of AIDS patients; he should have publicly celebrated the Lazarus-like return to life of people on the anti-retroviral programmes; above all, he should have gone out of his way to set people straight on AIDS, to counter the ignorance and confusion he himself has sown, contributing immeasurably to the scale of the catastrophe.

Mandela, deep into his 80s, has done all of that and more. But out of Mbeki, not a peep. The one person in government who has had the courage implicitly to defy Mbeki both by pushing hard for the new government strategy on AIDS and by showing active leadership on the matter was Madlala-Routledge. So much so that she has become a much respected figure in the global AIDS community.

Beyond the office-holding ranks of the former heroes of the ANC’s liberation struggle, the clamour has been insistent for the reinstatement of Madlala-Routledge and the firing of Tshabalala-Msimang.

He seems oblivious to the callousness of the message he is sending in persisting with the buffoonish Tshabalala-Msimang, a drinking buddy of long-standing, in a ministerial post that Mandela would have considered the most critical in his government by far.

Observer