Background
Thabo Mbeki was born on June 18, 1942. He spent his childhood in village. His parents, opponents of the apartheid regime, feared to be arrested, so Thabo often lived with his relatives and friends. He connected his life with politics already in 14 years, when in 1956 he joined the Communist Party and became one of the leaders of the League of Youth.
Education
For his participation in a student strike in 1959, he was expelled from school. But Thabo continued to study at home, thus successfully graduated from secondary school.
High economic education he got at the University of London.
Career
In the years 1967-1970 Thabo worked in the party African National Congress (ANC) in London. Within this period, he spent several months in Moscow, attending courses at the Institute of Social Sciences. Here Thabo Mbeki got the opportunity to meet colleagues from different countries and received military training in Skhodnya (Moscow area).
In 1973, the ANC sent Thabo Mbeki in Botswana. Here he was the first party leader, who made contacts with the members of “The Black Consciousness Movement”, and formed clandestine organizations. In 1974 Thabo Mbeki left Botswana and began to work as a representative of the ANC began in Swaziland. In the same year he went through a personal tragedy when the South African secret police stole his foster child and brother in order to put pressure on him.
In 1993, Mbeki was elected the chairman of the ANC. In 1994 the national hero and the Nobelist Nelson Mandela, who crushed apartheid regime in South Africa, became the president. Mbeki was appointed to the post of executive representative of the president of the South African Government National Unity. On December 18, 1997 he was elected the president of the ANC. On June 16, 1999 Mbeki became the President of South Africa. After the victory of his party in the elections of April 2004, Thabo Mbeki became president again.
In March 2004, the South African government refused to provide patients with antiretroviral drugs. The President Thabo Mbeki has publicly expressed doubts that HIV infection causes AIDS. In 2000 he made a statement that multinational pharmaceutical companies misinform the world community about the causes of cancer (only in South Africa cancer killed 250 thousand people). He said that in reality AIDS is not caused by immunodeficiency virus, but poverty and malnutrition. At the moment, the ban against HIV infection treatment is removed, but the situation has not changed for the better: about 20 percent of the population is HIV positive.
The president didn’t manage to cope with unemployment: 30 percent of the able-bodied population doesn’t work.
The street crime remained the real problem of South America. The crime tends to be racial. The black-skinned people kill, rob and rape the whites with such rage as if they want to compensate for their humiliations in the apartheid period. They terrorize immigrants, who arrived in South Africa from neighbor countries. The number of the whites decreases each year. They move to England, Australia and New Zealand mainly. Some information sources say that 500 000 people left South Africa during the last decade. During his inauguration, Mbeki gave a promise to cope with crime, which is unfulfilled. Moreover, the situation continues to worsen and the white population is seriously concerned about mass attacks.