In a rare moment of public frankness on the situation in neighbouring Zimbabwe, President Mbeki blamed ill-judged and profligate economic policies for the growing crisis in that country.
In an address to the newly-established Centre for Education in Economics and Finance in Africa, Mr Mbeki referred to the "very, very big" budget deficits which the Harare government had run up over two decades to finance its ambitious programme for education and human resource development, in rural and urban areas.
"Mugabe borrowed money, borrowed inside Zimbabwe, borrowed from the rest of the world," Mr Mbeki said. "It couldn't be sustained," he observed.
Mr Mbeki's comments appeared in part to be a riposte to political opponents at home clamouring for the African National Congress-led government to increase expenditure on social services generally, and on the campaign to halt the spread of AIDS particularly, even at the cost of relaxing the strict policy of fiscal discipline which it has pursued since it came to power in the 1994.
Within hours of Mr Mbeki's speech there were further signs that the Zimbabwe crisis was intensifying. Two members of Mr Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) told a court in Bulawayothey had been tortured to confess to the murder of Cain Nkala, a stalwart of President Mugabe's ruling party, Zanu-PF. Nkala was abducted from his home at the beginning of November; his corpse was found in a shallow grave a week later.
President Mugabe and several of his lieutenants described the killing as a act of terror and pointed fingers to Mr Tsvangirai's MDC. Their allegations were emphatically denied by the MDC and described as an attempt to make it the scapegoat for a common law crime.