Publication: Cape Times Issued: Date: 2005-12-28 Reporter: Allister Sparks Reporter: Reporter:

2006 could be a Thunderous Year

 

Publication 

Cape Times
Date 2005-12-28

Reporter

 Allister Sparks

Web Link

www.capetimes.co.za

 

Looking at what the future holds for Mbeki, Zuma

Looking ahead to what 2006 may bring, the forecast must be for a thunderous year - both at home and abroad.

The political action at home will begin with local government elections on March 1. These are likely to be disappointing for the ANC with a poor voter turnout - because of low party morale and dissatisfaction at the government's failure to deliver basic services.

That will set the tone for the year, with the ANC having lost some of its liberatory gloss as it emerges from what has been its annus horribilis with the Jacob Zuma crisis and the conflicts that produced in the tripartite alliance.

Thus wounded, the ANC will spend 2006 trying to sort out its succession struggle against the backdrop of two Zuma trials, which themselves may produce damaging fallout.

Zuma himself may be dead politically - it is the rape charge that kills him - but he is not the only victim of the crisis. His left-wing supporters have suffered a major setback and, while President Thabo Mbeki may appear to have emerged vindicated, he, too, has been damaged. He has presided over the worst crisis in the 90-year history of the ANC, and his presidential aura has been diminished *1 by the criticism and abuse hurled at him in the heat of the conflict.

Moreover, the socio-economic forces underlying the conflict are still there. Historically, the ANC has been a coalition of many political elements brought together for the common purpose of ending apartheid. That is the glue that held them together through the struggle and its immediate aftermath.

Now that cross-class solidarity is coming under pressure because of the growing inequalities between the rapidly emerging black middle-class and the underclass.

That is the fault line that runs through South Africa's political strata. The government is straddling a rapidly widening class divide. The Mbeki-Zuma conflict played itself out across that fault line and, while Zuma may be gone, the fault line remains.

Logically, the ANC alliance should split and the left-wingers go their own way to challenge the Mbeki administration at the polls. But they won't do that. The very name of the ANC is too embedded in the psyche of black South Africans for anyone to dare going into opposition against it. Instead the leftists will hang in there and fight for control of the ANC itself.

A bigger question is whether the resentment of Mbeki and his "commandist" style of administration, which the conflict revealed, will prove strong enough to prevent him from anointing a successor of his own choosing.

There has been speculation that Mbeki may seek to remain president of the ANC and have a protegé take over as president of the country, so enabling him to continue ruling from behind the throne. But the opposition to him may be strong enough to prevent that too.

The short answer, therefore, is that the ANC - and South Africa - face a wide-open succession struggle. There are many potential candidates: the ANC is not short of talent in its upper echelons. It will be a long and strenuous contest, but not a public one.

The selection will take place through a process of debates and negotiations through all the party's structures. When finally a candidate is agreed upon, that will be the nominee of the ANC's national executive committee and he or she will not be opposed at the party's national conference in 2007.

There will be a show of solidarity, but the fault line through the ANC and its alliance partners will still be there. Eventually the split must come, to produce two separate parties to serve two distinct emerging constituencies. But that is perhaps still a decade away.

• Sparks is a veteran journalist and political commentator

With acknowledgements to Allister Sparks and Cape Times.


*1  Nothing like that still to come.