By Fiona Forde
It was 3am in the early hours of Saturday, September 20, and Essop Pahad's cellphone began to ring. Smuts Ngonyama was on the other end of the line.
"Well, have you heard the news?" the former ANC spokesperson asked.
"Jesus Christ. I'm sleeping nicely, you know," Pahad gruffly told his comrade.
"No. What sleeping?" Ngonyama retorted. "They are asking Comrade President to step down."
Pahad's wife, Meg, was also awoken by the night call and he relayed the news to her. She wanted to chat to him about it. "But I said, 'No. Please leave me with my thoughts for now.'"
And during the hour that followed Pahad decided to put an end to his 45-year political career and began gathering his thoughts for his resignation letter.
He has since closed the door on politics. His resignation from parliament and the cabinet took effect on Thursday. But the events of the past fortnight will have little effect on the 50-year friendship he has enjoyed with Thabo Mbeki.
Born in Schweizer-Reneke, the small town in North West province from which Ahmed Kathrada also hails, Pahad moved to Johannesburg at the age of seven. By the time he was a teenager he was already active in the anti-apartheid struggle.
He had joined the Transvaal Indian Congress and was elected to its executive in 1957 at the age of 18. Three years later, he met Mbeki for the first time, when the latter relocated from the Eastern Cape to Johannesburg to complete his A-levels.
A friendship quickly developed between the pair and Pahad was clearly taken with his newfound activist.
"I thought he was exceptionally charming. He had this wonderful way of speaking. And he was very, very bright... with a deep understanding of politics."
They would regularly socialise together, two young men fond of a bit of fun. But Pahad soon became the wallflower as the youngster from the Eastern Cape was a big draw in social circles. And a true seducer.
"That's life," he shrugs. "There's always someone who is more charming and better looking than you are."
Two years later Mbeki went into exile and Pahad wouldn't meet him again until he himself went into exile in December 1964. While abroad their paths regularly crossed. They set up the London branch of the ANC Youth and Students Section. They studied together at the University of Sussex for a year. It was there Mbeki befriended Meg Shorrock, whom he later introduced to Pahad, whom she would later marry.
"But I knew Zanele first," Pahad remarks. "They are the two things I have on him: I'm three years older than him so he can never beat me on age. And I knew Zanele before he did."
Mbeki married Dlamini in 1974 and chose Pahad as his best man at the London registry office ceremony (a second African ceremony took place at a castle in Surrey).
Pahad recalls it as one of the happiest moments he shared with his life-long friend. That "and the announcement that we had won the elections in 1994".
As deputy president of South Africa, Mbeki appointed Pahad as his parliamentary counsellor.
"And that was the last time I called him Thabo."
From then on he called him chief, or Comrade Thabo and later Comrade President. "But never Thabo again."
It was a move that was of his own making, Pahad points out. "We needed to have some distance."
Two years later, Mbeki appointed him deputy minister in his own office, before elevating him to minister in the presidency in 1999, a position Pahad held until this week.
Although the friendship remained, the professional gap between them grew. Pahad recalls a time in the run-up to the 1999 poll when they were together in Durban. They were having dinner and Pahad wanted to talk to the chief about a colleague (whom he declines to name) who he thought was worth considering in the incoming administration.
"But who asked you?," Mbeki inquired. "I have not asked you."
"It's my view. I'm just expressing my view," Pahad explained.
"But I didn't ask for it," came the steely response. "And I think it's time for bed now."
That was the last time he talked to the chief about his colleagues, he claims. Yet his respect for Comrade Thabo is second to none. To him Mbeki is nothing short of a remarkable man who has taught him more, politically, than anyone else. "And remember I grew up with all the greats."
And to Pahad, Mbeki is also a man who is not deserving of the ANC's executive decision to recall him. As the national executive committee gathered in Esselen Park last Friday, Pahad says the atmosphere in the presidency was relatively relaxed, although word was out that the chief might be asked to step down.
"But my real hope was that knowing the ANC as I do, and knowing how the NEC works, that rationality would prevail." That has been the tradition of the NEC down the years. "We've always been able to find the rational way out."
Pahad spoke to Mbeki that morning. Mbeki was preparing to leave for New York for the United Nations meeting a day later.
He shared with him his concerns. "Let's wait until we hear their decision," came the response.
What followed took him truly by surprise. "Something has happened. I'm not sure what. But this NEC decision is not the NEC I know."
The sticking point for Pahad is that the NEC acted on inferences in the Nicholson judgment and brought down the president. But the same judgment implicated the entire cabinet.
"So why didn't they push for all of us to go? All of us were implicated in the inferences."
According to the Natal judge, "We violated our oath of office and our constitution."
It was Gwede Mantashe and Kgalema Motlanthe who travelled to Mahlambandlovu to break the news to Mbeki that Saturday morning.
Pahad went to see him on Saturday afternoon and spent a few hours in his company. The house was busy with ministers and deputy ministers passing through. But the pair shared a whisky and talked through the events. The die had been cast. And Mbeki had agreed to go. He could have challenged their decision. "But there would have been a huge commotion and instability if he had taken that route."
Instead, the former president and his then cabinet have decided to leave it in the hands of the law and appeal Nicholson's findings.
Pahad has stood by Mbeki through thick and thin and this was not going to be an exception. He supported his stance on the controversial Aids debacle and continues to do so to this day.
"Many of the things he said back then about the relationship between Aids and poverty are commonplace today He really was one of the first to see things that way."
He is with him on Zimbabwe, crediting him for bringing the two sides of Harare's political divide together earlier this month.
On the arms deal he will not be drawn, one way or the other: "Where's the evidence?" he asks. "Too much conjecture and speculation."
On Jacob Zuma's alleged involvement, he is equally reticent: "A person is innocent until proven guilty."
On Zuma's future presidency he has this to say: "He's not an Mbeki but Mbeki was not a Mandela. He's a Zuma. And we shouldn't try to compare."
But he is still undecided about whether or not the chief made the right move in contesting the ANC leadership last year. "Now that's a question that's still nagging me. But I need to give it more thought. Maybe that's one for my book."