The armoured vans parked next to the giant bust of Nelson Mandela, his face adorned with that trademark smile and his eyes peering out serenely over the Cape Town city centre. Out of the vehicles filed members of the heavily armed South African Public Order Police force. On 13 November 2014, this elite unit was not being deployed to quell yet another bout of labour unrest or one of the innumerable ‘service delivery protests' that have become hallmarks of daily life in post-apartheid South Africa. Instead, they were ready to execute their mandate of restoring order - to the country's Parliament.
They had been pre-emptively summoned by the African National Congress (ANC) government on what was expected to be a day of heated parliamentary debate. The main piece of scheduled business was a vote on whether to adopt an ANC-backed report absolving President Jacob Zuma from any responsibility in a scandal involving taxpayer-funded improvements worth $23 million to his private homestead at Nkandla in rural KwaZulu-Natal. The improvements, billed as ‘security upgrades' by the government, included the construction of a swimming pool, amphitheatre and chicken coup.
After an extended filibuster and opposition accusations that Zuma was a ‘thief', the call was finally made. The video stream to the publicly broadcast parliamentary news channel was cut, as the police were unleashed on unarmed opposition Members of Parliament (MPs). Amidst cheers of approval by the ANC delegation, the riot police proceeded to assault opposition MPs as chaos erupted in the heart of South Africa's democracy. With his back turned on these scenes, Madiba merely continued to gaze stoically into the distance.
This episode took place only three weeks out from the first anniversary of Mandela's passing on 5 December 2013. Along with incidents such as the August 2012 police killing of 34 workers at the Marikana platinum mine, it neatly captures the essence of what has become of his once-proud ANC. Under the presidency of Jacob Zuma, the party has undertaken a pronounced authoritarian shift marked by brazen contempt for the democratic ideals enshrined in the country's Constitution.
All in the name of defending a small group of ANC elites from accusations of graft and power abuse. In addition to facing a never-ending stream of corruption allegations, it has been widely reported that Zuma himself ordered the ANC to ‘crush the opposition' in Parliament. His deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, has meanwhile been personally implicated in the Marikana massacre.
Police brutality directed by a callous government is of course nothing new in South Africa. The same Public Order Police unit that mowed down the Marikana miners and descended on lawmakers in Parliament used to be a weapon of terror under the apartheid regime. But it is of grave concern that these authoritarian tendencies have re-emerged under the democratic dispensation Mandela devoted his life to establishing.
The ANC is starting to pay a political price for its perceived corruption and heavy-handed suppression of dissent. In addition to the fact that Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape province have already become opposition strongholds, the party faces the very real risk of losing municipal elections in four major cities next year, including in the capital, Pretoria.
Since 2009, the ANC has also endured two high-profile defections that directly resulted in the formation of new opposition parties. In both cases, the leadership of the splinter groups cited dissatisfaction with Zuma's ‘dictatorial' inclination as an important reason for the schisms. But the most spectacular development, one which has the potential to shake up the entire landscape of South African politics, is the fact that the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) recently decided to withdraw its support for the ANC.
As the largest trade union in the country, NUMSA had provided the party with a ready source of mobilised support throughout the past 20 years. But in the run-up to the 2014 national election, the union announced that it would no longer campaign for the ANC, as it looked to establish its own alternative political platform.
This was followed by calls from NUMSA's general secretary that ‘the president, as well as those ministers who scandalously defended the president and misled the public on Nkandla, must resign'. On 8 November 2014, less than a year after Mandela's passing, NUMSA was formally expelled from the ANC-aligned federation of trade unions. In order to suppress criticism of Zuma and his allies, the party had thereby sacrificed its single biggest source of coordinated mass support since it came into power in 1994.
This political instability has spilled-over into the economic sphere. Despite progress in the delivery of social welfare benefits and basic services, the economy has been marked by violent labour strife and stagnation in the five years since Zuma assumed office. It has grown at an average annual rate of only 1.9% since 2009, with the government projecting meagre 1.4% growth for 2014; well below the levels required to address an unemployment rate of at least 25%. In combination with a growing budget deficit of 4.1%, ratings agencies have responded by threatening to cut the country's credit status to ‘junk'.
Mandela's widow, Graça Machel, has since admitted that she purposefully kept such ‘bad news' about the government from him in the years before his death. She knew that Nelson Mandela would rightly have been ashamed of what had become of his beloved ANC. The authoritarian rot that has set in under Jacob Zuma means that the same organization that served as Mandela's political home throughout his entire life has itself become a threat to his legacy of peace, reconciliation and the rule of law.
*Leon Schreiber is a visiting fellow at Princeton University and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany. The views expressed are his own. This article first appeared on his blog athttp://theschreiberei.
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