South African politics have entered a period of what can best be described as a new brutalism - unconstrained intimidation to ensure that a criminal trial against Jacob Zuma is withdrawn so that he can proceed unhindered to the country's presidency. If this is not an invitation to vigilantism - or something even more sinister - what is?
Hopefully, the darkness will be no more than a period. The new rulers have been in office for less than nine months. Before their identity had time to mature, the Zuma affair was upon them. But they made the wrong decision, and soon perhaps they will regret it/ But the omens are not good. The Zuma affair may be the factor that defines the new ANC - and dooms it. More about this later.
ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, Cosatu secretary general Zwelinzima Vavi and the ‘new" ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe (he also moonlights as SACP chairperson) echo or support each other in declarations that they will "kill" for their cause, and that remnants of the "counter-revolution", like the opposition Democratic Alliance and Constitutional Court judges, must be "eliminated." The vocabulary of these leaders is crude and menacing. The impression they convey - do they realise it? - is that brutalism is innate in ANC politics: it only needs a trigger to unleash it; it is here to stay.
There seems to be a curious reluctance in South Africa to take the Zuma camp's bellicosity seriously. Remarking on chants by Zuma supporters of their leader's war cry, "Bring me my machine gun," John Kane-Berman (chief executive of the SA Institute of Race Relations) remarks: "Does nobody take Zuma's war cry seriously? Not even when some of his leading lieutenants threaten to kill for the revolution, which in practice means kill for him?
"The Human Rights Commission, the supposed public watchdog against this sort of thing, was too cowardly to draw the required line in the sand. In effect, it condoned the killing talk. These are menacing words at any time, but especially ominous with an election due in less than a year's time. Thuggery in language can easily slide into thuggery on the ground, and into thuggery in government."
Ex-ANC cabinet minister, Professor Kader Asmal, says this new political language is "The ‘militarisation' of our political discourse -talking of ‘shoot the bastards,' ‘prepare for war,' ‘ready to kill,' ‘ready to fight to take over the streets,' reference to ‘counter-revolutionary' courts - is not only offensive, but constitutes a danger to our democratic order...excess insults coarsen our collective intelligence" (it is) "populism, demagoguery, debasement of language..."
Civil society hopes in its timidity to appease the clamouring mob of SA political life, who are threatening the social order if they don't get what they want. How close is the country to Zimbabwe's ‘enforcement' style politics? Cosatu's secretary general in KwaZulu-Natal says the ANC will not hesitate to "kill" the Scorpions - the elite police unit which has assembled the case against Jacob Zuma (racketeering, four charges of corruption, a charge of money laundering and 12 charges of fraud, arising out of the multibillion rand government arms deal.
"If the scorpions bite the wrong people," says Let Zuzipho, "we will kill them." The "wrong people"? A chilling description. Luzipho's remarks followed protests outside 16 police stations in Durban calling for the criminal charges against Zuma to be dropped. Some South Africans just shrug their shoulders these days when they hear the "militarized" vocabulary. We seem to have forgotten the lesson of history - those seeking appeasement are seldom appeased, only emboldened to reach out for more.
The media tell us a "consensus" is forming that the Zuma trial must be stopped, whatever contorted formula needs to be constructed to bring this about (withdrawal of the prosecution, pardons, amnesty, whatever). The argument is that if the trial is not stopped, South Africa will become politically unstable. The slurred over part of the gathering debate is that the reason why it will become unstable is that Zuma's backers will make it unstable. Put that way, the argument is unanswerable.
This is a definitive moment in the ANC's career, coming not only when the ANC (admittedly temporarily) has a split personality - the state under Thabo Mbeki and the party under Jacob Zuma - but also when the party's top-six leadership do not seem to amount to an entity. As one reaches out to touch them they seem to dissolve. By contrast, the two partners in the Tripartite Alliance, Cosatu and SACP, tighten and harden their identities, so much so that (as the Johannesburg Sunday Times observed) they seem to think they run the new ANC. Is this what has happened - by default the ANC leadership has gone to freebooters?
The Young Communist League has taken it upon itself to articulate what former Democratic leader Tony Leon calls South Africa's "dark currents." It says the ANC should accept a quota system for the National Assembly - taking one-third of the 400 seats for itself and giving one-third each to Cosatu and the SACP. Cosatu - a trade union federation whose members crisscross the political divides? The SACP - a handful of Marxist activists with overheated opinions of their theoretical reach and matching egos?
What is interesting about this chutzpah is that obviously it reflects the view of a not inconsiderable number of Zuma followers that the ANC is finished and that this is take-over time. The quota system would locate political power in South Africa in the hands of two of the weirdest organizations in the country. As for the ANC - would this once mighty movement hear the tidings from a bunch of youngsters that its demise is at hand? The politics of the Tripartite Alliance (ANC, Cosatu, SACP) admittedly are a shambles at present, but surely it is not ready yet to be so debased?
Interestingly, it was also the SACP (through its Central Committee, August 24) which spell out in more detail than anyone else the reasons why a deal should be struck over Zuma. Yet only two years ago, the SACP was thinking aloud (in print, in fact) that one of its options might be to quit the Alliance and take to the political wilderness, with just a copy of Marx (and maybe a curry takeaway) to sustain it. Now it positions itself as the Alliance's think tank.
This is almost like the good old days when through Moscow funding the Central Committee had a throttlehold on the ANC. Admittedly, in the present intellectual exchange, there is little competition. Cosatu's thinking is led by its secretary general, Zwelinzima Vavi, who is as wild as they come; while on behalf of the ANC's top-six leadership, its secretary general, Gwede Mantashe (who made a promising start a couple of months ago by publicly telling Cosatu not to meddle in ANC affairs), tosses out occasional statements and interviews which contain no consistent threads. As for the ANC Youth League, its contribution is brawn not brain.
The trouble with the SACP's outline of the case for a Zuma deal is that, like all other explanations and excuses, it omits the central point that, even if there has been political motivation, the legal case against Zuma stands apart and should be judged as such. Zuma himself used to demand, repeatedly, that he needed his day in court, but now that the state is ready to give it to him, he reverses his position. He should accept that it is time for the Scorpions, too, to have their day in court, instead of facing dismantling. The intimidation Zuma's backers have unleashed is on a scale never seen in South Africa, and this is the rub: no one, not even the ANC, will be immune from the consequences of this intimidation, if it succeeds.
To compound the folly upon which the Alliance has embarked, as Business Day's Karima Brown reported, "members of the business community are among the leading proponents of a push for a political solution." She quotes a senior ANC leader (unnamed) as saying: "We are going to mobilise the masses against the continuation of this trial, and the bourgeoisie will be the first to say make this (trial) go away." The obvious question is whether the "bourgeoisie" are sure the deal will ensure stability, or just create a different kind of instability.
Except for ambition, and an accompanying measure of greed, the new ANC seems to have no sure guidelines. If the "bourgeoisie" have found something solid on which to base the assurances they have been given by the ANC, they should share it with their fellow South Africans, so that everyone can rejoice. For instance, when Zuma placated them earlier this year with the promise that "nothing will change" when the new ANC took over, did he override Vavi's warning that "everything will change?" And when the Tripartite Alliance holds its Economic Summit later this year (to which the SACP looks forward excitedly), will South Africa stick to the free-market map drawn by that experienced cartographer Thabo Mbeki? Or significantly modify it? Even reverse it?
Alliance politics are a whole new ball game. Under Mbeki, the state clashed regularly with Cosatu and the SACP over its foundation macro-economic policy GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution). To Cosatu and the SACP, GEAR is sanitised capitalism, requiring serious reversals, such as more state spending instead of budget surpluses, more state "intervention," a brake on privatisation, etc.
Whereas Cosatu and the SACP appear to have hardened their policies since they ousted Mbeki as ANC president last December, the ANC itself is elusive. Who is it, what is it, where is it heading? If, a new "liberation struggle" (from capitalism) is to be fought over macro-economics - the future of the free-market - will the instability be more, or less, acceptable than the instability from putting Zuma on trial?
If the Alliance and the "bourgeoisie" really are concerned about instability, shouldn't they be looking rather at the "street committees," authorized at the Polokwane conference? Ostensibly, these committees will mobilize communities to counter crime; but they could also be used for more malign intentions: to reinforce intimidators outside High Courts, or (ominously) to back up the ANC when it confronts Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party in next year's general elections (provisionally set for about May 6).
For Buthelezi there is a bitter twist to those elections. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his IFP Zulus fought a bloody war with the ANC for control of KwaZulu-Natal - control which his IFP has lost since 1999. The twist is that as Mbeki's envoy Zuma, himself a Zulu, became the peacemaker between the ANC and IFP - while stacking up a Zulu power base for some future use. Now that the use has arrived, Zuma is returning to employ it - not to make peace again between the ANC and IFP, but to enlarge ANC control of the province.
Addressing a meeting in Durban, the biggest city in Zulu territory, Zuma announced the formation of three street committees. In another of his extraordinary speeches, he advised his audience not to be soft on criminals. The police should not ask too many questions when the committees brought criminals to them. "Criminals have a lot of rights. One of them is the right to remain silent, so when they come to the station, don't ask too many questions, just put them in jail."
By criminals does Zuma mean IFP supporters? This is what Buthelezi suspects. He takes his followers back to the ANC-IFP clashes when "so-called street committees were used to intimidate and terrorise communities...when thousands lost their lives to political violence...We must never forget recent history and must not be naïve." Replying to "entreaties" for a political "marriage" between the IFP and ANC, Buthelezi swore the IFP would never "merge" with the ANC or any other political party at any time whatsoever. The ANC, he said, was continuing to "vilify" him and "provoke open confrontation."
Analyst Aubrey Matshiqi says there should be no doubt about "the political temperature rising even higher in KwaZulu-Natal" if ANC and IFP leaders "fail to get a firm handle on the situation." He confesses to "a sense of alarm born out of the fear of reliving the nightmare of the violence that engulfed KwaZulu-Natal and the province of Gauteng" more than a decade ago. "One cannot preclude," he said, "the possibility of Zulu nationalism becoming a factor...(the IFP) is desperate for victory in 2009. The last thing they need is an ANC president who is as Zulu as they are."
Earlier in this article, I made reference to the possibility that the ANC's identity will mature soon, and lead it out of its present morass. Now there are other important developments. Last Tuesday, the National Assembly's public works committee reportedly resolved to scrap in its present form the outrageous Expropriation Bill, which authorises gross seizures of movable and immovable property, and is clearly unconstitutional (although the relevant government itself is still fighting for its passage through the Assembly).
Also, ANC treasurer general Mathews Phosa, one of the more cultured members of the ANC leadership, delivered an address to a Pretoria conference last week on land reform which made utter commonsense, particularly his observation that commercial agriculture is a vehicle through which prosperity can be targeted. In the name of "land redistribution," Robert Mugabe destroyed commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe - and brought in famine. This is the direction in which South Africa's hardliners are heading.
The other development is the open warfare between the ANCYL and Kgalema Motlanthe, formerly ANC secretary general (under Mbeki), and now deputy president of the new ANC. Motlanthe recently rebuked the ANCYL for the disgraceful behaviour of some of its delegates at the league's recent conference, and he has since warned the league, party leaders and Alliance partners to respect the judiciary and desist from attacking institutions meant to protect the country's fledgling democracy. The league's key point was that Motlanthe should not behave as if Zuma was "no more," which means a huge rift may be opening in the new ANC.
City Press thinks this could lead to Motlanthe's "marginalisation," but the reverse could be true. Leading members of both Cosatu and the SACP did not conceal their aversion to Zuma when he was on trial for corruption and rape (both trials collapsed). And when the new ANC elected its top-six leadership, Motlanthe (a "moderate") was positioned as deputy president (ready to step into Zuma's shoes). What is not known yet is how far Phosa and Motlanthe are prepared to go, and who in the ANC's 86-member National Executive Committee will back them. But history tells us that sometimes it needs only a few men, a few good men, to save a whole country.
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