In just over three years, the grinding vendetta between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma has torn the African National Congress apart. Founded in 1912 as a "broad church" for the African cause, the ANC now is a crippled movement, and next on the casualty list is South Africa itself. On the one side, affirmative action and cronyism have wreaked their damage; on the other side corruption and the pursuit of power.
One by one, government departments have failed to maintain even moderate standards of governance; as for provincial and local government administrations, many are little more than grim jokes. If the "new" ANC under Jacob Zuma repeats this pattern even the last fragments of competence will be removed.
Between 1994 and 1999, 57,000 early retirement packages were gift-wrapped for mostly white public servants (the numbers exclude the defence force), resulting in a loss of skills and institutional memory that will take much more than a generation to replace.
Presently, the ANC is getting rid of Mbeki-appointed provincial premiers and hopeless ANC mayors, party office bearers and public servants, many of whom deserve their fates (official audits disclose useless book-keeping and missing millions). Other heads will roll. But will replacements be more equipped for their jobs, or as one analyst has asked, will there be "a clean sweep of the old competent ANC politicians in government"?
To the question whether Zuma's regime will be any better than Mbeki's, the answer is no. This stands to reason if to Mbeki's cronyism is added Zuma's cronyism, as it will be to judge by the impatience already evident at party gatherings: one layer of incompetence and corruption replaces another.
The problem with the Zuma camp
Also, the Zuma leadership endorses the core Mbeki ideology that the "levers of power" should come under the control of party placemen - in the public service, army, police, intelligence, judiciary, parastatals, regulatory bodies, public broadcaster, National Prosecuting Authority, Reserve Bank, etc. This will obliterate the separation of powers between party and state.
As for the "new" ANC's ethics and values, two of Zuma's extraordinary exhortations can be added: "God expects us to rule this country. We will rule until Jesus comes back"; and opposition parties have no right to exist if they cannot come up with better policies than those of the ruling party - as Zuma inquiries, "If the ANC has the best policies, what is the problem?".
There is the further critical point that the constituent elements of the "new" ANC just do not seem to add up to a coherent leadership. It is not clear with whom power lies and where future directions point. An enlarged 86-member National Executive Committee has been elected (a Heinz variety if ever there was one), with - perched on top - six leaders, some familiar, others not. Zuma is the best known of the lot, and even his writ is not clear - there are too many backers waiting to pull too many strings.
Zuma is more a weather vane politician than most. Because by nature he is "inclusive," he will have many voices to heed, and the course he steers will depend on the pressures of the time, with lines of least resistance appealing to him most. The global trend is for left-leaning politicians to follow the conservative course, and because conservatism is fairly hard-wired into the technocracy, Zuma probably will be wary of undoing it. He doesn't have the hard-line ideology of a Chavez or Morales, so he is unlikely to lead a populist revolution from the front, but South Africa could unwind gradually as populist elements plug away.
Finance minister Trevor Manuel is a likely casualty, which would be a big loss. Tito Mboweni at the Reserve Bank is immersed in centralbankspeak, has a long track record, and would not topple easily. However, there are many circumstances where the conservative structure could unwind at the edges, and in the event of a global economic dislocation, the unwinding could even move to the core. On balance, Zuma could be net negative for high-growth, low-inflation advocates, and things could start to unwind, slowly at first.
Since mid-December then, state and party have fallen under two opposed presidents, but under the ANC's rule book Zuma, as party president, is custodian of the ANC logo and legend. For six months, Mbeki stalled a demand from the Zuma leadership for Motlanthe to be given entry to his cabinet, but in July he yielded. Motlanthe is embedded now (to use a U.S. military term) as "minister in charge of government business". With the collaboration of the National Assembly's pro-Zuma Speaker, Baleka Mbete, he is the Zuma camp's eyes and ears in the Mbeki camp; its instrument of remote control.
Unfortunately perhaps, in this period of otherwise rapid change, Mbeki's legislative programme in the National Assembly is untouched. At Polokwane, the Zuma leadership endorsed the controversial Expropriation Bill, which will put pressure on expropriated owners to accept the state's decision on the amount, timing and manner of payment of compensation, possibly at less than market value. Within the bill's ambit, too, will be movable and immovable property and "rights in property" without limitation - land and minerals, business premises, homes, patents, all decided in the "public interest" (still to be defined). Parliament's own legal advisers say the Bill is unconstitutional, but the ANC has not intervened.
Other legislation, it is said, will "cripple" private health care, interfere (racially) in the selection of sports teams, and under information legislation "negate the public's right to know." No protests are on record from the ANC's top six.
Prospects of change
A concerned Helen Zille, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, proposes a centrist coalition to restore "constitutionalism," offering to stand down from her own leadership if necessary. This could work both ways: it is not desirable for the ANC to break up in chaos. Political power presently is virtually the exclusive preserve of 37.6m blacks (79.5% of the population), and if the ANC is unstable, so will the country be. In another way, if the ANC stays intact, politics stays intact - or in growth terms inert.
In 2005, the ANC held 293 of the 400 National Assembly seats; 15 opposition parties divided 107 seats between them, with the DA taking 47, the (Zulu) Inkatha Freedom Party 23, and the rest six seats each or fewer. Whites (4.36m), Coloureds (4.2m) and Indians (1.16m) made up the remaining 20.5% of the population. Politically, they can do little more than articulate values, which probably is what the country needs anyway.
The tectonic plates moved at Polokwane, but within the ANC stockade. Only mild waves, not Richter readings, reached the white, coloured and Indian ethnic sub-groups. The grating of the plates shifted black politics to the left, not to the centrist position where coalition hopes might sprout. Justice Malala wrote in The Times on Monday: "since the defeat of Mbeki in December last year, it seems that the organisation has lost its voice and its direction. In its place we seem to have the SA Communist Party and the Congress of SA Trade Unions. These two alliance partners seem to believe that they now run the ANC."
A Faustian bargain?
In April, Zuma's ANC will contest its first general elections. Some black voters, fed up with politics, may stay at home, and generally the ANC could feel battered, but almost certainly it could still muster the simple (not two-thirds) majority required to elect Zuma as president. Nothing then will stand in Zuma's way, unless the state prosecutes him for corruption and convicts him.
Under two constitutions - the country's and the ANC's - this would debar him from holding office. The ANC's response to this possibility has been outrageous. Claiming that the trial is politically inspired (by the Mbeki camp), it declares it will not accept a guilty verdict, or indeed even a trial. It wants to snuff the whole process out now.
Since mid-2005, the Zuma camp have tried openly to intimidate the National Prosecution Authority and the courts, staging demonstrations outside High Courts and making verbal threats. This anger will gather force after Zuma's election in April-May next year, when he will be in the dock as a sitting president - an unprecedented situation, and a very disturbing one for presiding judges.
When the case came before the Pietermaritzburg High Court briefly in early August, the Zuma top brass and the baying mobs were there. The message of Julius Malema, the ANCYL President, came through loud and clear: "If you touch the old man, you must touch us first."
At the hearing, Judge Chris Nicholson said he would rule on September 12 whether Zuma's trial should go ahead. He could either throw it out, or order it to proceed, in which case a provisional start would be made on December 8. A single sentence by the judge on September 12, proclaiming the second collapse of the trial, means the Zuma camp would win. From then on not a single national institution will be immune from intimidation in Zuma's South Africa.
Compromise solutions are under debate: a general amnesty for everyone involved in the arms scandal, which would let Zuma, Mbeki and scores of others off the hook, or a plea bargain only by Zuma. The suggested compromise has been hammered by eminent South Africans and analysts, but surprisingly quite a few liberals and business leaders think it might be the only option. At stake, they agree, is the country's political and economic stability.
Against this though is the warning that once a country abandons principle for the sake of some expedient it is on a slope which ends in its complete fall from grace. Also, invariably, it is denied the reward of the experience it sold its soul for - a theme as old as literature, the Faustian bargain. The compromise recognises that the country is too damaged to take much more rocking of its boat.
The question though is whether stability in a society really can be engendered by undermining its values - in this case the most fundamental one of all, the rule of law? What truly binds a nation is its "social contract" in which all its members aspire to and buy into an enduring set of principles and values that exist above any temporal concerns and individuals?
This view sees South Africa's future as drift without values; a time and place for operators, grifters, dodgers, dissemblers, hoodwinkers and, worse, the Mr. Bigs and their enforcers, and policemen looking the other way.
The view from Mount Pisgah
When Nelson Mandela was South Africa's president (1994-1999), in his all-embracing way, he calmed the country's nerves. Some cynics said that unwittingly he had prepared the way for Mbeki's race-obsessed regime. He was South Africa's prozac, infusing the three minority ethnic groups (white, coloured, Indian) with a false sense of security.
However, there is often encouragement in the past, to have a vision of the future. Martin Luther King had a dream: "He's (God) allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land." Nelson Mandela, too, had a dream - of a "rainbow nation" - and he failed to see it fulfilled either. He has not lost faith in it though.
It is written in Deuteronomy 34: 1-4: "And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho . And the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan. And all Napthali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, And the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar. And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither."
So, as he celebrates his 90th birthday, his dream unfulfilled, Mandela still can say: I did not lead our people into the promised land, but it was a splendid view from Pisgah.
To subscribe to Politicsweb-by-email click here.
