There is no such thing as a free lunch, goes the saying. If aspirant president Jacob Zuma was not yet aware of this dictum, it was made abudantly clear to him last week at a high-level caucus meeting of his most powerful backers — four key leaders in the African National Congress (ANC) tripartite alliance.

The group gathered early in September at the house of a senior KwaZulu-Natal politician in Pietermaritzburg, as Zuma prepared for his September 5 court date. They met to discuss, among other things, the upcoming corruption trial, prospects for a Zuma presidency should he scale the legal hurdles, and what such a presidency would look like policy-wise. And so the first, tentative policy negotiations for a post-2009 SA began in earnest, on the margins of SA’s most sensational trial.

“There has been no significant dividend for the poor over the first 12 years of democracy,” the lunchtime meeting was told by one ANC leader who is on the ruling party’s national executive (NEC).

The Weekender has agreed to protect the identities of the men at the meeting.

However, one source said there was consensus that a possible Zuma presidency would face huge expectations from ordinary people left out of post-1994 growth and reconstruction. The challenge would be to fulfil or otherwise manage these expectations within inevitable constraints.

Since August 2003, when former national prosecutor Bulelani Ngcuka dealt Zuma an apparent political death blow, left forces in the tripartite alliance moved to prevent his descent into oblivion.

This was especially evident after President Thabo Mbeki fired Zuma from the deputy presidency, following the corruption conviction of his associate Schabir Shaik. Soon after, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) publicly took the view that Zuma was the victim of political machinations within the ANC, linked to the race to succeed Mbeki.

In August last year, Cosatu’s central committee adopted a resolution calling on Mbeki to reinstate Zuma and “drop the charges” against him. The charges, Cosatu said, constituted a “political trial” engineered by Zuma’s enemies through the illegal use of state machinery.

“If it weren’t for us, Zuma would be counting cattle in Nkandla by now,” said a member of Cosatu’s central executive committee.

While it never adopted as hardline a stance, the South African Communist Party (SACP) also stood foursquare behind the beleaguered politician, contributing to his repackaging as a friend of workers and the poor.

These two organisations, along with a radicalised ANC Youth League that increasingly defies Mbeki and challenges key government policies, also provided Zuma with numerous public platforms that allowed him to maintain a high profile and subtly distinguish his leadership style from Mbeki’s.

Zuma had, until recently, failed to define an alternative path on policy matters regarding the economy, crime, education, health and foreign policy.

But the run-up to Cosatu’s national congress, which gets under way on Monday, introduced a new trend. At numerous union gatherings, Zuma launched broadsides against government policies, hitting at well-known weaknesses in Mbeki’s presidency. And his criticisms have been decidedly left-inspired.

At the congress of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), Zuma endorsed the left’s call for compulsory free education, and rounded on government’s well-documented bungles on HIV and AIDS. The call was later echoed by ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe, speaking at an ANC Youth League gala dinner. Motlanthe has been touted as a possible “plan B” candidate for the alliance left should Zuma be convicted.

A week later, speaking to members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu), Zuma encouraged Cosatu’s declared goal to “take over” the ANC, whereas labour leaders have felt unwelcome in Mbeki’s ANC.

Zuma also reminded Sadtu that while the ANC was a broad church that incorporated people of all classes, it had always maintained special relation towards the plight of the poor, a policy which it had to pursue. This is in contrast to Mbeki’s attempts to “modernise” the party along the lines of the British Labour Party, which involved, among other things, establishing workplace “professional” branches to recruit middle-class members.

The KwaZulu-Natal meeting of Zuma’s backers also signals that these organisations would be poised to demand their ideological pound of flesh from a President Zuma.

“Nothing is for ‘mahala’ (free). I don’t think Zuma understands our support for him as a free lunch,” the Cosatu source said.

But if the pre-trial meeting is anything to go by, the most dramatic impact of the left on the post-2009 period would be on social rather than economic policy.

There would be massive reinvestment aimed at rebuilding the rapidly collapsing public health system, said a senior Zuma aide and close confidant. The stop-start responses to HIV and AIDS, perhaps Mbeki’s biggest delivery failure to date, would come to an end. The source said Zuma wanted to speed up the roll-out of life-saving anti-retroviral drugs to the estimated 500000 people who currently need the drugs.

Also reflecting a long-standing demand of the left, the source said Zuma was sympathetic to free compulsory education.

While Mbeki is generally thought of as a successful foreign policy president, the source said Zuma would not follow Mbeki’s lead in Africa. SA would seek to beat a path freer of US influnce — both on the continent and in global multilateral institutions.

“While you can’t send the tanks into the streets of Harare, we will stop ignoring the problem,” the source said, referring to Zimbabwe’s slide under octogenarian dictator Robert Mugabe.

But Zuma’s left backers will have to make some concessions on economic policy. The sudden advent of socialism would be unlikely. The aide said Zuma would seek to “incentivise” domestic capital to play a bigger role in SA’s reconstruction and development.

This would be in contrast to the current “over-reliance” on foreign direct investment, he said. Government would intervene strongly to strengthen the country’s manufacturing capacity.

But before any of this comes to pass, Zuma must scale one more hurdle in the Pietermaritzburg High Court — starting this Wednesday.

With acknowledgement to Karima Brown, Vukani Mde and Business Day Weekender