Publication: Business Day Issued: Date: 2007-11-13 Reporter: Karima Brown

SA's Settlement of 1994 Goes On Trial with Zuma

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date 2007-11-13
Reporter Karima Brown

Web Link

www.businessday.co.za

 

Jacob Zuma, the phenomenon, shows up the imperfections of a compromise political settlement carefully constructed 13 years ago.

But Zuma, the man, may be of no lasting significance. If he is convicted of corruption, he will surely go to jail, and because people forget, the crowds milling around courthouses to cheer him on will melt away.

But the political phenomenon of Zuma will leave SA with serious questions about the sustainability of its institutions and the appropriateness of its political order. In his fight to stay out of jail and to revive his political fortunes, Zuma has exposed the soft underbelly of the state apparatus.

There were indications as far back as 2005 that the security services had been drawn into the battle around Zuma. When I first warned about this , I was dismissed as an outrageous "Mbeki critic". But when President Thabo Mbeki suspended National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) head Vusi Pikoli, in dubious circumstances, the penny finally dropped for the chattering classes. The move pointed to a president knee-deep in political intrigue within the security agencies.

There are strong indications that the judiciary will not be spared its share of the crisis. Already the Congress of South African Trade Unions has raised questions about the "leaking" of the Supreme Court of Appeal ruling last week which clears the way for the state to recharge Zuma. That court's bungling of another ruling involving the infamous "generally corrupt relationship" between Zuma and Schabir Shaik, which the court wrongfully attributed to Judge Hilary Squires, will also come into play.

What makes these institutions so vulnerable is they remain untouched, except in the most superficial way, by the change that swept SA 13 years ago. While the face of our judiciary and the police is increasingly black, this has not given these institutions the broad legitimacy they need to be immune from such attacks. This is because their transformation has been limited to replacing white functionaries with black ones, and the culpability of these institutions in apartheid is still largely unacknowledged *1.

But the Zuma phenomenon is not just about the ghosts of the old order. It is also about the inheritor class of black elites, of which Zuma is a powerful member. It remains to be explained why, despite Zuma's membership of this group, he has become a magnet of disaffection, attracting the support of people who are essentially his class enemies, as well as regional and other marginal elites angry at the unequal division of the spoils. Zuma manages to attract and sustain this support, it seems, only because he is such an insider, acting with the benefit of privileged access to the inner workings of the state and the ruling elite. For his political supporters, this is the dominant prism through which we should view Zuma's pending trial *2. They rightly contend *2 that his troubles with the law cannot be seen outside of the broader political battles that define the period.

It has been written that the major fault line in the African National Congress is the one separating a liberal elite around Mbeki *3, whose power base is the state, from a populist front organised around Zuma. The ruling party's crisis of unity is not so much a class chasm as it is a clash of interests within a single inheritor class *4. It is only a matter of cosmetics that one of these factions has appropriated Zuma, and now deploys the jargon of revolution to assure its ascendancy.

On the opposing end, another faction of capital coheres around Mbeki and his inner circle, appropriating to itself not only the machinery of state but the rhetoric of constitutionalism and probity in its attempts to perpetuate its power. What makes this relevant to the country is the possibility that the state can be bent to the will of either faction.

The state apparatus being so used is not without precedent. The US during the McCarthy era and Putin's Russia are examples. Countries with mineral and energy resources and those of strategic geopolitical interest are most vulnerable to interference. On both counts, SA's significance is not in doubt . Therefore, Zuma's pending trial is as much about the downfall of an antihero as it is about reshaping the ANC, the state and the SA of the future. When Zuma goes on trial, the settlement of 1994 goes with him.

* Brown is political editor *5.

With acknowledgements to Karima Brown and Business Day.


*1       Just so much twaddle.


*2      Just so much twaddle.


*3      Mbeki a liberal?


*4      A clash of interests within a single inheritor class - about the only true thing in this opinion piece.


*5      Karima Brown - the main twaddler in Business Day - otherwise an excellent newspaper.