After the IBSA Dialogue Forum was launched in 2003, his government collaborated with India and Brazil to lobby for reforms at the United Nations, advocating for a stronger role for developing countries.

His government did not introduce a national mother-to-child transmission prevention programme until 2002, when it was mandated by the Constitutional Court, nor did it make antiretroviral therapy available in the public healthcare system until late 2003.

The ANC's decision to "recall" Mbeki was understood to be linked to a High Court judgement, handed down earlier that month, in which judge Chris Nicholson had alleged improper political interference in the National Prosecuting Authority and specifically in the corruption charges against Zuma.

[8]: 4  The couple had met in Durban, where Epainette had become the second black woman to join the SACP (then still called the Communist Party of South Africa); however, while Mbeki was a child, his family was separated when Govan moved alone to Ladismith for a teaching job.

During the ensuing Rivonia Trial, Mbeki appeared before the United Nations (UN) Special Committee on Apartheid and later led a student march from Brighton to London, a distance of fifty miles.

Working with Albert Dhlomo, Mbeki was responsible for helping to re-establish underground ANC networks in the South African provinces of Natal and Transvaal, which shared a border with Swaziland.

He established some of his own high-level intelligence networks, with key underground operatives reporting directly to him, and Gevisser claims that these led to the initiation of relationships with many of the domestic activists who later became his political allies.

Working primarily through Mugabe's righthand man, future Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mbeki negotiated an extraordinarily congenial agreement between ZANU-PF and the ANC.

These included academics, clerics, business people and representatives of liberal white groups who travelled to Lusaka to assess the ANC's views on a democratic, free South Africa.

A news article pointed out that this was an expression of pride, explaining, "For Govan Mbeki, a son was a mere biological appendage; to be called a comrade, on the other hand, was the highest honour.

[19] According to historian Tom Lodge, Ramaphosa's election was a putsch carried out by the party's "internal wing", in defiance of the former exiles and political prisoners who had hitherto dominated the ANC's leadership.

[31][32][33] In comparison to the Reconstruction and Development Programme policy which had been the basis of the ANC's platform in 1994, GEAR placed less emphasis on developmental and redistributive imperatives, and subscribed to elements of the liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation at the centre of Washington Consensus-style reforms.

[34] Conservative groups such as the Cato Institute commended Mbeki's macroeconomic policies, which reduced the budget deficit and public debt and which according to them likely played a role in increasing economic growth.

[43][44] Although Mbeki also forged strategic individual relationships with key African leaders, especially the heads of state of Nigeria, Algeria, Mozambique, and Tanzania,[3] perhaps his central foreign policy instrument was multilateral cooperation.

[54] Controversially, in February 2007, South Africa followed Russia and China in voting against a draft resolution calling for an end to political detentions and military attacks against ethnic minorities in Myanmar.

[59][60][61] The Economist posited an "Mbeki doctrine" holding that South Africa "cannot impose its will on others, but it can help to deal with instability in African countries by offering its resources and its leadership to bring rival groups together, and to keep things calm until an election is safely held.

[64][74] A South African government observer mission also endorsed the result of the Zimbabwean parliamentary elections of 2005, apparently leading Tsvangirai's party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), to effectively sever relations with Mbeki's administration.

[77] Mbeki mediated the negotiations and brokered the resulting power-sharing agreement, signed on 15 September 2008, which retained Mugabe as president but diluted his executive power across posts to be held by opposition leaders.

[80] Similarly, chronic highly active antiretroviral therapy for AIDS-sick people was not introduced in the public healthcare system until late 2003, reportedly at the insistence of some members of Mbeki's cabinet.

"[84] He also defended scientists who had challenged the scientific consensus on AIDS: Not long ago, in our own country, people were killed, tortured, imprisoned and prohibited from being quoted in private and in public because the established authority believed that their views were dangerous and discredited.

We are now being asked to do precisely the same thing that the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed did, because, it is said, there exists a scientific view that is supported by the majority, against which dissent is prohibited... People who otherwise would fight very hard to defend the critically important rights of freedom of thought and speech occupy, with regard to the HIV-AIDS issue, the frontline in the campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism...[84] The letter was leaked to The Washington Post and caused controversy.

[86] In July 2000, opening the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, he proposed that the "disturbing phenomenon of the collapse of immune systems among millions of our people" was the result of various factors, especially poverty, and that "we could not blame everything on a single virus.

[88][89][90] For example, in October 2001, in a speech at the University of Fort Hare, he said of the West: "Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.

"[105] However, some analysts suggested that insufficient investment was not the hindrance to electricity supply, and that other policy decisions by government and at Eskom, including the implementation of black economic empowerment criteria in coal procurement contracts, had contributed to the crisis.

His penchant for quoting diverse and sometimes obscure sources, both from the Internet and from a wide variety of books, made his column an interesting parallel to political blogs although the ANC does not describe it in these terms.

This noted that South Africa had the world's second-highest murder rate, with about 50 people a day being killed, and that although serious crime was reported as falling, security analysts said that the use of violence in robberies, and rape, were more common.

[169][170] In December 2007 the final African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) report on South Africa, again suggested that there was an unacceptably high level of violent crime in the country.

[172] In 2004 the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, criticised President Mbeki for surrounding himself with "yes-men", not doing enough to improve the position of the poor and for promoting economic policies that only benefited a small black elite.

[189] In 2007, Mbeki was made a Knight of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem at St George's Cathedral in Cape Town by the current grand prior, Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

[191] He received the Newsmaker of the year award from Pretoria News Press Association in 2000[184] and repeated the honour in 2008, this time under the auspices of media research company Monitoring South Africa.