Publication	Sunday Times
Date	2005-12-11
Reporter	Ray Hartley
Web Link	www.sundaytimes.co.za

South Africa has been robbed of a vital and defining political encounter by the rape charge that has been laid against former Deputy President Jacob Zuma. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that the rape claim is part of some Byzantine plot to politically assassinate Zuma.

On the contrary, the case must be heard and a verdict handed down without a thought to its political consequences.

But the fact is that Zuma’s political career has ground to a messy end and so too has the political contest his ambitions had spawned.

Those who are celebrating this turn of events should think twice.

South Africa’s soul has been well described on paper in a Constitution that ranks among the world’s most progressive charters.

Fine, but the words written in the Constitution mean nothing until they have been forged into immutable truths in the furnace of political battle.

I made myself unpopular a few years back when I lamented the Constitutional Court’s decision to instruct government on what its Aids policy ought to be. Far more powerful, I argued, would such an instruction have been had it come from its voters, mobilised into political action. This view was quickly caricatured as Aids denialism.

But no one can deny that the effect of the Constitutional Court decision was to demobilise activists who had been arguing for antiretrovirals.

Its consequences have since played out: a slow, contradictory, half-committed dragging of the heels by the new dissembling Cheshire cat of South African politics, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

Why Cheshire cat? Here’s an example from Alice in Wonderland:

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where ­” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“­ so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Dissembling, diversionary, not quite too clever by half ­ you get the picture.

The point is that the battle over Aids and anti-retrovirals was taken off the streets, where the people would have effectively and dramatically changed policy, and placed in hallowed chambers where it has become a museum piece of legal arcana.

Which is what has happened, in a very different and perhaps more tragic way, to the contest between Zuma’s populist backers and those who thought him unfit for public office.

Before going further, a popular misconception needs to be cleared up: Zuma did not have popular support ­ he had something very different, namely populist support.

From the moment he fired him for his corrupt association with Schabir Shaik, it was President Thabo Mbeki who enjoyed popular support.

A large and credible poll by Research Surveys showed that 74% of South Africans, four percentage points more than voted for the ANC in the last election and a majority in every race group, supported Mbeki’s decision to kick the man out of government.

If there were a vote there and then on the matter, Zuma would have had less support than the DA enjoyed in the last election.

But he enjoyed populist support within the ruling party, where labour and communist leaders described him as “an unstoppable tsunami” heading for the shores of Lake Tshwane with a natural (perhaps even supernatural) force. They loved him with uncomfortable desperation.

The ANC’s provinces were tallied up and more than half of them were “100% Zuma”.

The ANC’s leadership, hypnotised by the tsunami and with one eye on the greasy pole, performed the rituals of populism to a fault.

The ANC’s secretary-general, Kgalema Motlanthe, its KwaZulu-Natal leader, S’bu Ndebele, and other populist luminaries marched at Zuma’s side to the courthouse where he faced corruption charges as if he were Martin Luther King on trial for sedition.

The defining conflict was under way and the stakes were high. A simple question was about to be answered: would the ruling ANC be the handmaiden of this irrational populist movement and its attempt to pervert the will of the majority, or would it finally mature into a modern political party and define itself by the standards set out by its voters?

It was a very important question, the answer to which would have defined our country and our way of life.

The optimists among us believed that right would have prevailed, signalling the end of the populist rebellion and the beginning of a new order in which the morality of the ordinary person would triumph over the venality of the politicians.

Then came the rape charge and the end of Zuma. He was, as it turns out, more a tidal pool than a tsunami.

And so this great question still hangs in the air. Are our political leaders the servants of the people or do they think they are their masters?

We have been robbed of an answer.

Hartley is Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times