Publication: Business Day Date: 2005-11-25 Reporter: Vukani Mde Reporter: Karima Brown

Symptoms of a Deeper ANC Rot

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date

2005-11-25

Reporter

 Vukani Mde, Karima Brown

Web Link

www.bday.co.za

 

The demise of Jacob Zuma ­ which has played itself out as a protracted drama over the past three years ­ does not signal a victory for his opponents in the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies.

For those in the national executive committee (NEC) of the ANC who want to prevent a Zuma presidency, the signs look encouraging enough. Zuma has two criminal investigations against him. He is already on trial on two counts of corruption. He is likely to face further charges of perjury and tax evasion, all stemming from a relationship with Schabir Shaik which was found by the judiciary to be “generally corrupt”. This led directly to his humiliating sacking from the cabinet and a public fall from grace.

In recent weeks, the Zuma saga took an ugly turn when newspapers published allegations that the former deputy president was being investigated for rape. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) now has to make a call on prosecuting Zuma for the second time since his sacking. Even if he is not charged, the fact that the matter has got this far without any clarity on what went on between Zuma and his alleged victim, means that politically he is marred by the furore.

This week Zuma was humiliated by the NEC when it rejected his view that he was the victim of a political conspiracy to dent his chances in the ANC succession. More salt was rubbed into his wounds when he was forced to report to the NEC that he was the subject of a rape investigation. Looked at from this perspective, Zuma is down and very possibly out.

Many in the NEC are of course greeting this with a sense of schadenfreude *1. This is certainly true for the business wing of the NEC, comprising the ANC’s emerging moguls. Their glee is based on the perceptions that Zuma is the “candidate of the left”. Moreover, as the argument goes, he is not sophisticated enough to balance his own accounts. With Zuma down, they reckon that the left will be truly marginalised and its political project banished to the fringes. Not only will the ANC be saved from a man who could have embarrassed it and the country, but their class interests will have been safeguarded for at least another generation. Their class allies across the globe will no doubt be delighted at this defeat of a corrupt “populist”, and SA’s place on the world stage will be secured.

This class has never forgotten that SA’s place in the world, and by extension its own stature, is based on the preservation of the elite pact that made possible the “miracle” transition. This legacy is not safe in the hands of any candidate who is not under the sway of this elite.

But a moment of pause is required. Even a cursory glance at the crisis that has festered in the ANC over the past decade will reveal a simple truth: the disease ailing the ruling party is not Zuma or his succession ambitions.

The ANC is suffering from a systemic malaise that infects all aspects of the organisation. This malaise is structural, moral, political, strategic and historical. The roots of the crisis lie in the inability of the ANC to interrogate itself and define its identity in the era after the Cold War. Its refusal to deal with the reality of the collapse of the Soviet socialist model ­ because the ANC “has never been a socialist party” ­ robbed it of an opportunity for internal democratic revival.

Thus the party turned its back on socialist economics without ever having to say so publicly. But equally quietly it kept the Stalinist political culture ­ the legacy of its intimate relationship with Soviet politics ­ as well as its vanguardist notions of itself and its role in South African history. Under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki this ideological paradox has been deepened, with predictable results. This has included a crackdown on dissent, a marginalisation of the left, and centralisation of power in the state, especially the presidency. These tendencies are accompanied by a regressive class project characterised by crude accumulation.

Thus today the party’s NEC is a collection of crony capitalists living off the largesse of the state. The victimhood suffered by all blacks under apartheid has been appropriated by this crowd as a badge of entitlement, allowing them to use their status as “previously disadvantaged” to milk all they can out of foreign and white capital.

What the Zuma phenomenon has threatened to do is disrupt this Mbeki-ite arrangement. Therefore ridding these people of the “Zuma-gevaar” does not guarantee their victory, for the interests they pursue lack popular legitimacy.

They are also morally ambiguous, failing various tests of their ability to lead. It is this moral deficit of the ANC’s ruling elite that has allowed Zuma to fudge the issue of his possible complicity in corruption, and to pretend his troubles stem from a vast conspiracy against him led by these corrupt compradors.

In the rape claims made against Zuma, the chickens of this decade-long moral and political stagnation have come home to roost. As the drama unfolds in daily instalments, Zuma’s enemies believe quite wrongly that only he is damaged. On the contrary, the ANC cannot escape the muck. By the silence and the refusal to act in the face of such serious allegations, Mbeki and the entire NEC are open to the charge of complicity in a society that permits rampant abuse *2.

For Mbeki in particular, the latest episode exposes the extent to which he has all but forfeited principled leadership of the ANC. For how could any president of the ANC do nothing against a senior NEC member mentioned in the same breath as the word “rape”? It is perhaps a mark of the president’s deep complicity in the power-games element of the Zuma saga that he cannot act in defence of principle without his actions being interpreted as just another salvo in the Zuma-Mbeki power struggle?

If Mbeki was commended for firing Zuma when he was implicated in the Shaik judgment ­ before he was charged with any crime ­ should he not be condemned for remaining quiet when the same Zuma is being investigated for a crime far worse than corruption?

It will not be unfair to interpret Mbeki’s actions in these two instances as an indicator of whom the president governs for. While the international markets will be alarmed at the prospect of a Zuma with his hands in the kitty and who consorts with leftist undesirables, they will not be moved by an allegation that Zuma may have assaulted a working-class black woman.

Brown is political editor. Mde is political correspondent.

With acknowledgements to Vukani Mde, Karima Brown and Business Day.


*1  Noun: pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/13/S0131300.html

*2  Apparently, there are indeed some among us who regularly get quite lucky without having to resort to the use of brute force.