Publication: Sunday Times Issued: Date: 2005-08-28 Reporter: Mondli Makhanya

A House Split Asunder

 

Publication 

Sunday Times
Date

2005-08-28

Reporter

 Mondli Makhanya

Web link

 

Dangerous times loom as the downfall of a favourite son of the ANC threatens to take the best traditions of the ruling party along with it, writes Mondli Makhanya

[]‘There is no overestimating the grave nature of the period South Africa has entered. By unleashing the raw power of populism, Zuma has taken the country to a precipice’ []

It was never meant to end this way, many are saying as they watch the ruling ANC self-destruct. Yet here we are, witnessing the beginning of the end of ANC as we know it. When we emerge from the epic crisis gripping the ruling party, the character of the ANC will have changed dramatically. Gone will be the edifice that has thus far been able to display an implacably united front when it felt its mores and practices were under attack. When this battle is over, the often nauseating sycophancy and sometimes false solidarity that has come to characterise the ANC in recent times will be no more. It will be a very different animal from the party that governs at present.

History has a strange way of doing things. The ANC was always going to splinter some day, with different ideological persuasions going their separate ways as the glue of the national democratic revolution became less and less adhesive.

In the event, the party is being broken up by one of its distinguished sons, whose loyalty to his financial benefactors seems to have been greater than his commitment to his party and the government in which he served. The party’s traditions, carefully laid by a succession of leaders and activists who guided it through trying times, are being compromised by black South Africa’s very own Hansie Cronje.

The past two weeks have seen the ANC reach an undeniable point of no return. After a marathon battle, which saw sniper fire being volleyed across the trenches, Cosatu last week decided to resort to hand-to-hand combat. The federation’s demand that President Thabo Mbeki reinstate Zuma to his position and quash the former deputy president’s corruption trial was a direct challenge to Mbeki’s authority. As was the charge by youth formations that there was a political conspiracy against Zuma, who they pledged to defend with their lives, even if this meant making South Africa ungovernable.

All of these very direct challenges come on the back of Mbeki’s defeat by delegates at the ANC’s National General Council, when a Luthuli House decision to strip Zuma of his party duties was reversed.

Not since the ouster of Moroka in the ’40s has an ANC leader faced such open hostility from the party ranks. Mbeki is today a lonely man, buttressed only by his close Cabinet lieutenants and by the knowledge that he controls the levers of state power.

He knows he will win this epic battle only because, no matter how much his opponent scream and shout, it is he who has the last say on matters of the republic’s governance.

But the more he retreats behind the protective wall of state power, the more he loses control of the streets where ­ unfortunately ­ the real battle is being fought. Mbeki now risks spending the next four years of his presidency fending off attacks instead of concentrating on the projects he believes will define his legacy.

Zuma, on the other hand, knows that there is no way he can win this fight, but he is prepared to fight the battle to its last. He is determined not to allow Mbeki, who he believes treated him with contempt during the six years he spent at the Union Buildings, to govern at will.

With the support of vociferous but incoherent populists, he believes he has the street cred to face down the President.

And there you have the makings of a political battle that has few precedents in modern democracies: the might of state power versus raw mass appeal.

There is no overestimating the grave nature of the period that South Africa has entered.

By unleashing the raw power of populism, Zuma and his allies have taken the country to a precipice, threatening to undo much of what this nation has achieved in the past 11 years. The saga has unleashed the spectre of tribalism, the demon that the anti-apartheid struggle successfully exorcised from the body politic. With their backs to the wall, long-term ANC members in Zuma’s home province are beginning to sound like the cantankerous chief from Ulundi. Veteran soldiers who served under him during the days of Umkhonto weSizwe privately pledge their allegiance to him rather than to the state. On the streets, ANC members swear to make his case the cause célèbre of their rejection of Mbeki’s style of leadership.

The ANC is today a house divided against itself and Mbeki cannot hold it together. The only way for the ANC to save itself from disintegration is for Mbeki to violate the law and Constitution by acceding to demands to halt the trial.

This would certainly appease the Zuma camp, but it would render the South African Constitution a worthless document and rubbish South Africa’s much-vaunted commitment to the rule of law. It would free every corrupt councillor, traffic policeman and civil servant to do as he or she wishes. It would also leave Mbeki a weak leader, unable to stand firm when dictated to by street mobs.

It simply will not happen, no matter how many thousands of people keep vigil outside the Durban High Court over the next 12 months.

And so a battle supreme will be joined, and fought, until one side is neutralised.

Out of the rubble will emerge a very damaged ANC, one that will need severe surgery before embarking on its next phase.

Should the Zuma camp achieve any measure of success, South Africa’s ruling party will lose much of the sophistication it has developed over the decades. We will see a regression to raw politics ­ the kind of politics that says it is okay to take short cuts with the law, and which does not respect order.

One just has to look at the positions articulated by the Zuma camp during the course of the battle. This camp has, in the words of an ANC activist, “shown us the worst that this country can be”.

It has told us that corruption is fine as long as it is practised by someone of good political standing, and of sympathetic ideology.

The attacks on the judiciary and law enforcement agencies give us a glimpse of how state institutions would be regarded and treated should this camp gain ascendancy.

But neither is an outright Mbeki victory necessarily desirable. South Africa’s President can by no means be absolved of blame for the state we find ourselves in. His distant leadership style has allowed the populists to flourish and thrive.

In the absence of visible leadership from Mbeki, ANC alliance structures looked for a substitute leader they could relate to. In Jacob Zuma they found a willing and enthusiastic champion. They found in him the comforting father who would listen to their frustrations and share perspectives on the direction of party and republic. When the nation was going through a period of depression over the President’s views on HIV/Aids, Zuma seemed the sensible man, who said all the right things and appeared at all the right places. When Mbeki would absent-mindedly clap along to struggle tunes at party gatherings, Zuma would grab the microphone and lead the masses in song. And when Mbeki was seen on television arriving at foreign locales or addressing high-powered conferences, Zuma seemed to be present on the ground. He came to be loved and respected.

So when it emerged that Zuma had sold his soul to French arms dealers and other influence-pedlars, he was always going to be the recipient of great sympathy. And when his supporters started speaking darkly about conspiracies, they found fertile ground.

The distant President’s cold and sometimes contemptuous relationship with many in the upper echelons of the ANC and its alliance partners drove senior members of the coalition into Zuma’s hands.

It will be up to the next president of the ANC to make sure we never again see the rise of a populist anti-state camp that has little regard for democratic norms. That individual, who will be presiding over a much diminished and less influential ANC, will have to craft a different kind of leadership from that shown by the current protagonists in this battle.

That ANC will essentially be Mbeki’s ANC ­ a social-democratic party whose leanings will be biased towards the entrenchment of state power rather than the touchy-feely politics of the street.

While respecting the institutions of the republic and the centrality of the state, that person will have to re-infuse the ANC with a bit of the soul that was lost under the Mbeki era. That is the best safeguard against the rise of the demagogues who want to undo the gains of the past decade.

With acknowledgements to Mondli Makhanya and the Sunday Times.