“The ANC's awful choice - Only when both Mbeki and Zuma are removed from the fray will the ANC be able to revitalise South Africa” by Andrew Feinstein
First published in January 2008 by Prospect magazine.
Jacob Zuma is a barrel-chested man with a large,
open face which often breaks into a brilliant smile, Down
the right side of his face is a long scar which attests to a life of
struggle and hardship. Arriving illiterate on Robben
Island in his early twenties, Zuma revealed not
only a great capacity for learning but a political shrewdness and toughness
that after his release saw him rise to become head of ANC intelligence, in
1987.
With the advent of democracy in South Africa, Zuma became ANC leader in his Zulu-dominated home
province of KwaZulu-Natal. He served as the province's economics minister
before being made the country's deputy president by President Thabo Mbeki
in 1999.
But in 2005, Zuma's
financial adviser, Schabir Shaik,
was sentenced to 16 years in jail for corruption based on a relationship of
"mutually beneficial symbiosis" with the deputy president. Mbeki
fired his former ally, who soon faced his own corruption trial and was also
charged with the rape of a young, HIV positive family friend.
In May 2006, Zuma was
acquitted of the rape charges, and a few months later his corruption trial
was struck from the roll for procedural reasons, although prosecutors are
about to re-charge him. Zuma and his supporters
claim these legal difficulties were the work of Mbeki, attempting to
prevent Zuma undermining the president's quest
for an unprecedented third term as ANC leader.
Mbeki, who is constitutionally prevented from
serving a third term as South Africa's president when his current mandate
expires in early 2009, hoped to continue as party president. He would then
have been able to handpick a successor and remain the power behind the
presidential throne. But Zuma, despite his legal
difficulties, appears, at the time of writing, likely to defeat the
incumbent at the ANC electoral conference in mid-December.
This battle for the leadership of the party has
torn the ANC apart, engendering factionalism, division and open hatred that
has left this once-feted liberation movement of Mandela, Tambo and Luthuli
facing its gravest ever crisis. The fact that Zuma
is likely to emerge victorious is more a reflection of Mbeki's failings
than of Zuma' s qualities. Where Zuma is a
populist "man of the people," Mbeki has been a detached,
autocratic technocrat during the almost ten years that he has led the ANC.
In modernising the ANC
into a governing party, Mbeki has transformed it from a broad church of
vibrant, internal debate to a closed shop in which a small clique of
trusted allies makes decisions, A master of
behind-the-scenes intrigue, Mbeki seldom listens to outside advice, takes
criticism very personally and vilifies those he perceives as being against
him. This unfortunate leadership style has led an intelligent man into many
major blunders. His continuing denial that HIV causes Aids has
unnecessarily cost tens of thousands of South African lives. The
"quiet diplomacy" approach to Robert Mugabe's tyranny in Zimbabwe
has made a joke of Mbeki's New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad).
But the area Mbeki regards as his greatest success
has been the seed of his political failure. Faced with the difficult act of
balancing reacceptance into a conformist global economy with the need for
social justice, Mbeki expended significant political capital in imposing an
orthodox economic framework on the country. Despite bitter opposition from
the ANC's allies in the trade union movement and the South African
Communist party, the framework undoubtedly restored stability and growth to
the anemic apartheid economy. However, it has failed to make big inroads
into the country's 30 per cent formal unemployment rate. Deracialisation of education, the building of low-cost
housing and the provision of basic services have all improved the lives of
most black South Africans, but very slowly.
At the same time, the policy of black economic
empowerment has seen the emergence of a growing black middle class, but has
also been distorted to enable the creation of a
small elite of massively wealthy black oligarchs, most of whom are
politically well connected. Mbeki's refusal to allow open debate on these
key policy area!, within the ANC has been
paralleled publicly by an aloof insensitivity to the impact of the violent
crime battering the country. As his detachment and isolation have grown, so
Mbeki's paranoia has intensified. By stamping out dissenters and creating a
mindset of "the leader knows best," he has engendered an
environment of fear and patronage in which loyalty is the only reliable
currency.
Moreover, in an elision of government and party,
Mbeki has been willing to use state organs to neutralise
potential threats to his power. In 2001, before a previous ANC electoral
conference, his minister of police announced to a shocked press briefing
that three senior members of the ANC were plotting to overthrow and even
physically harm the president. In fact, the three were simply organizing a
slate of anti-Mbeki candidates. Unsurprisingly, all oppositional
mobilization came to a rapid end.
Mbeki has continued to protect his incompetent chief
of police, Jackie Selebi, who proudly admits to a
friendship with the country's most notorious mafia warlord. In fact, when Vusi Pikoli, the country's
director of public prosecutions (equivalent to Britain's attorney-general),
recently issued a warrant for the arrest of Selebi,
he was removed from his post. Similarly, Mbeki has kept faith with his
health minister, Manto Tshabalala
Msimang, a fellow Nds denialist, who recommends beetroot, garlic and the
African potato as preferable to anti-retrovirals
in the treatment of Aids.
It is no coincidence that the health minister's
husband, Mendi Msimang,
is the ANC's treasurer. The man in charge of the party's finances has
overseen the receipt of funds from a controversial (and later assassinated)
gold-mining magnate; from a state oil company, illegally; and, most
damagingly, in kickbacks from a £5bn arms deal in 1999 (involving BAE
Systems, among others), the investigation of which Mbeki ruthlessly
undermined, subjugating parliament to his will.
The British Serious Fraud Office and German
prosecutors are investigating more than $200m of bribes paid in the arms
deal. Besides the ANC itself, alleged recipients include the then defense
minister, Joe Modise-a close Mbeki confidante
until his death in 2001-and Modise's political
adviser. The fact that only Zuma and Schabir Shaik have faced
prosecution in relation to the deal reinforces the view that Mbeki uses the
justice system selectively to address his political needs. Some in the
South African media even suggest that a further reason for the suspension
of Vusi Pikoli is his
seeming unwillingness to re-charge Zuma before
the ANC electoral conference.
Such an intervention would have been very useful
to Mbeki in his quest to prolong his dominance. For Jacob Zuma has been very successful at styling himself as the
victimised "man of the people," in
contrast to the technocratic president and his "briefcase
carriers." This appeal has mined the rich vein of anti-Mbeki feeling
within the ANC, with the result that 60 per cent of party branches have
nominated Zuma as ANC president in preference to
Mbeki. But if Zuma were to become ANC president,
he would do so with more than just his legal travails hanging over him. His
embarrassing comments at his rape trial-that he avoided contracting Aids by
showering vigorously after unprotected sex-were followed a few days later
by aggressive homophobic remarks. This created the image of a macho bigot
rather than an enlightened leader of a progressive organisation.
Zuma's trade union and Communist supporters have
proclaimed him a "man of the left" who will change economic
policy in favour of the poor. But nothing in his
time as a provincial economics minister, nor in
his few policy pronouncements to date, suggests this is the case. Nonetheless,
he will very quickly come under sustained pressure from these allies to
deliver a return on their support. His less-than-public financial backers
are likely to have quite different expectations. These contradictory
choices might be delayed for a while, though, because even if Zuma has become ANC president, he is not assured of the
country's presidency come the general election in April 2009. In November, Zuma lost two high court appeals attempting to quash
aspects of the evidence against him. The victories have expanded the
state's case and prosecutors are confident of success, given the damning judgement against his financial adviser. He is,
therefore, likely to be recharged in the new year.
So the ANC has been faced with an awful choice. If
Mbeki has defied the odds and won again, the party will be damned to a
further erosion of its historic values and traditions by an aloof,
autocratic president. Or it could have a new party president on trial for
corruption, with two competing centres of power-party
and government-marshaled by men who are sworn enemies.
However, at the time of writing there is a small
possibility that the two mighty elephants will give up their fight to the
death and withdraw in favour of a compromise
candidate unsullied by the recent years of moral decline. Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sex wale, two popular ANC leaders
who have spent the Mbeki years away from politics amassing business
for-tunes, are often mentioned as possibilities. The more likely scenario
is that Zuma wins the election, is soon embroiled
in a corruption trial and, if found guilty and given a prison sentence with
no option of a fine, is constitutionally excluded from seeking the
country's presidency. With Mbeki discredited by defeat, this would provide
the political space for a compromise candidate to emerge.
With the ANC embroiled in this unedifying
spectacle, it will only be when both Mbeki and Zuma
are removed from the fray that the organisation
can hope to revitalise both itself and South
African politics. For the country is in desperate need of focused,
enlightened and efficient government to address the linked catastrophes of
Aids, poverty and crime.
© 2008
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