The Fall of Jacob Zuma

For President Jacob Zuma and his ruling African National Congress (ANC), 2017 is the year of decision. For although national parliamentary elections will not occur until 2019, in December this year the ANC will hold its quadrennial conference, at which a new party president will be chosen. This person immediately becomes the country’s presumptive next President and Zuma becomes a lame duck. With the stakes so high, the campaigning has already been under way for some time and will reach a crescendo as the year goes on.

Zuma’s presidency has been disastrous. Corruption has run riot, led by the example of the President’s own family and their friends and benefactors, the Gupta family, an immigrant Indian family whose tentacles are everywhere in government departments and in state-owned industries. Various cabinet ministers have testified that the Guptas know government business before they do, have frequently offered ministers promotion in government in return for favours and are able to control the allocation of contracts and tenders almost anywhere in government. The Guptas lavish wealth upon the extended Zuma family—who, as a result, won’t hear a word against them—leading Julius Malema, leader of the far left Economic Freedom Fighters, to term them the Zuptas, a label which has stuck. In effect, the state has been criminalised. Officials who refuse to allocate contracts in the right direction will receive death threats, and as there were nearly two dozen political murders last year, no one believes that this is only bluffing. Confidence and trust in government have never been lower, not even under apartheid.

In December 2015 Zuma sacked his finance minister, who had refused to approve a scam proposed by Dudu Myeni, a Zuma girlfriend who heads South African Airways. In his place Zuma appointed a tame Gupta protégé, a clear sign that even the national Treasury was about to be looted. The Rand fell 30 per cent overnight and a crisis meeting of big business and the ANC leadership forced Zuma to dismiss this new minister and bring back Pravin Gordhan, a tried and tested former finance minister. Zuma has never ceased to complain that he was forced to do this against his will by “white monopoly capital” and has waged a guerrilla war against Gordhan, who has had to face one trumped-up charge after another.

Zuma has never recovered from this setback. After this, business simply wanted him out and so, soon, did the trade unions and the Communist Party. The Constitutional Court declared that Zuma had broken his oath to uphold the constitution by refusing to accept that he must pay back even a small part of the enormous sums of public money squandered on building him a luxury home in Nkandla (Zululand). Opinion polls showed him with only a 20 to 25 per cent popularity rating, and in the ANC he was seen as an electoral albatross, largely responsible for the party’s dismal showing in the August local elections where it lost control of Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and Pretoria to the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA). The Port Elizabeth result was particularly striking, for this city was the great cradle of the militant ANC and the party had been so solidly ensconced there that it had seemed it could never lose. Yet runaway corruption and mismanagement have done their work and so in 2016 this overwhelmingly black city voted for a white farmer to become its mayor.

The result was greatly to weaken Zuma, who has ruled through his disposition of patronage. Not only did many hundreds of ANC councillors lose their seats (and thus their salaries) but the new DA mayors have been putting to flight large numbers of ANC party activists previously paid from the municipal payrolls. And, of course, all sorts of cosy relationships with ANC-led companies enjoying lucrative municipal contracts are bound to be disrupted. All this lost patronage is bound to be blamed on Zuma. Soon open demands for his resignation began to be heard even in the ANC—a hitherto unimaginable event. This culminated in a recent ANC national executive meeting at which a motion for Zuma to resign was openly put and supported by a number of cabinet ministers. Inevitably, it lost—but the party elders intervened to say that none of these ministers should suffer for their open opposition, which means not only that Zuma has lost the power to sack them from his cabinet but also that he has lost power over a significant bloc of cabinet appointments.

At each setback, Zuma retreats to address meetings in his native Zulu heartland, where he complains bitterly (in Zulu) about how he is being persecuted by Western imperialism and white monopoly capital, talks of how God and the ancestors will punish those who fail to stay loyal to the ANC, and sometimes even refers to his critics as “witches”. Although he can be sure of a loyal tribal response on such occasions there is nothing presidential about Zuma as he blunders on. He is seventy-four, only just literate, and commits such howlers as asserting that Africa is bigger than Asia. Newspapers no longer give much coverage to each latest embarrassment.

The importance of this situation is threefold. First, South Africa has 40 per cent unemployment and its growth rate was under 1 per cent in 2016. The country desperately needs firm executive action to carry out overdue economic reforms if a credit downgrade to junk status is to be avoided. But with Zuma in charge there is no prospect of such action. Second, Zuma still faces some 800 charges for fraud and corruption. He has cleverly managed to delay judicial action but time is running out and at least some of these cases are likely to come before the courts this year—despite the fact that Zuma tries to insist that courts, laws and judges are “not the African way”. Finally, Zuma’s growing political weakness has begun to undermine his ability to control the succession.

For some time Zuma has made it clear that he would like his ex-wife, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to succeed him as President—his calculation being that since she is the mother of several of his children she will not want him to go to jail on any of his 800 charges or be dispossessed of his ill-gotten gains. Dlamini-Zuma is just finishing a not terribly distinguished term as chairperson of the African Union. Amazingly, given that she is a doctor, the AU made no move to do anything about the ebola epidemic until long after several Western countries and many NGOs had rushed to help, thus stirring memories of how, as South Africa’s health minister, she had wholly ignored the Aids epidemic. If elected, she will be over seventy when she takes office.

Nonetheless, Dlamini-Zuma is the favourite mainly because she is a Zulu and also because she has the backing of the so-called “premier league”, a group of three provincial premiers who will largely control the votes of their provincial delegations. In effect the Zuma system works by supporting clients to become premier who then reward him with their support while he allows them to loot their provinces. Naturally, such men have done so well under Zuma that they would prefer him to continue in office (despite the two-term limit set by the constitution) and, failing that, will support Dlamini-Zuma on the understanding that her succession will mean the continuation of the Zuma patronage system by other means. Indeed, many fear that Zuma himself might continue to pull the strings from behind the scenes in such a scenario.

Dlamini-Zuma is opposed by Cyril Ramaphosa, the current deputy president, a former ANC secretary-general and an extremely wealthy businessman. He is younger, still enjoys a reputation for having negotiated the constitution and, given his wealth, lacks the incentive for personal corruption. His great weaknesses are that he is a Venda—a small and low-status tribe—and that he lacks a major support base. He is, however, supported by all the out-groups which have failed to benefit from Zuma’s patronage, together with ANC reformers who fear that their party will simply not survive another five years of Zuma-ism. He also has solid support from the trade unions and the business community.

As the contest heats up, the spotlight will fall on two other possible candidates, Kgalema Motlanthe, a former deputy president who ran against Zuma in 2012, and Zweli Mkhize, the current ANC treasurer-general. Motlanthe commands significant support from the Sotho and Tswana groups. A former trade unionist, he stands for the values of the old, Mandela-era ANC. Mkhize was a successful premier and party boss of KwaZulu-Natal and can probably command the Zulu vote even against Dlamini-Zuma. At present he is thought to be backing Ramaphosa but he could still emerge as a compromise candidate in his own right.

The country has a difficult year ahead. The Zuma period has put paid to any remaining idealism about the ANC and this has in itself become a major constraint on the economy. The combination of a significant Communist presence in the government, aiming at de-linking South Africa from the capitalist world economy in order to build socialism in one country, with an even larger component of corruption barons and rent-seekers, is a toxic mix which inhibits both domestic and foreign investment. Moreover, as the ANC becomes more threadbare and discredited, it has fallen back on the only thing which remains—appeals for black solidarity against the whites. There are constant ANC attempts to discover “white racism” in every corner: when the DA premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, expressed pleasure at how well used were the libraries she had built in townships, she was immediately attacked for implying surprise that blacks read books. It is an atmosphere in which Julius Malema could recently announce that he had no plan “to slaughter whites—yet”, without any restraint or penalty.

The most hopeful thing about 2016 was the demonstration that this sort of appeal is no longer working as well as it used to. In Cape Town, for example, the DA had captured power in 2006 thanks to a shaky coalition with other minor parties, but as black migrants from the destitute, ANC-ruled Eastern Cape continue to move in large numbers to Cape Town, the ANC was expected to win the city back for simply demographic reasons. Yet in fact the larger the city’s black population has grown, the bigger the DA’s majority has become. The ANC vote in the city fell between 2006 and 2016 from 38 to 24 per cent.

The other great positive from 2016 was that despite a huge ANC campaign against “regime change” in the major cities, when the opposition won, power was simply handed over. To be sure, there have been some ANC attempts to make the cities “ungovernable”, the launching of land invasions and some violence against DA councillors, but overall democracy has worked—mainly because that is what the public, black and white, wants and expects.

This indeed is the main thing to hang on to when, as frequently occurs, whites lament that the country is sliding downhill exactly as Zimbabwe did. The big difference is this: from 2000 on there has been a steady majority for the opposition in Zimbabwe but elections have been rigged and violence used to ensure that Mugabe’s Zanu-PF remains in power. In South Africa there have been regular and free elections, there is freedom of speech and assembly, and on the one occasion that the ANC did successfully rig elections in Potchefstroom, the Constitutional Court annulled the elections and forced a re-run—on clean lines.

It remains of fundamental importance that parliamentary elections have been going on in the Cape and Natal since the 1850s—in the former case involving a good number of black and Coloured voters. Even though blacks were everywhere excluded from the franchise from 1910 on, the non-white part of the population watched the whites-only elections like spectators at Wimbledon, understanding the game perfectly even though not allowed to participate themselves. They became habituated to seeing governments bitterly criticised by a free press, hearing free debate in and out of parliament, and watching MPs evicted from their seats in freely conducted contests. This gradually created what one can only call a cultural expectation of democracy. This is one of the country’s greatest strengths. As the ANC decline continues—and the temptation for it to cheat grows—this is likely to assume ever greater importance.