JAUNDICED EYE

SA and ANC in turmoil but Zuma’s focus wanders

It’s one of the anomalies of the modern Western democracies. Their political parties are mostly not at all tolerant of internal differences of opinion. 

It’s about “singing from the same hymn sheet”, as the leaders of secular Britain persist in describing it. And not being “on message” of the inner-circle’s unfolding policy positions is a quick route to being booted from party power structures. 

The reason for such authoritarianism is that these countries, certainly in the Anglophone world, have electorates that are highly intolerant of governments and parties that do not deliver a clear, consistent message. So, too, are economic markets.

In these countries, endemic internal dissent is seen not as an admirable tolerance of disparate points of views, but a sign of weak leadership. For differences can quickly morph into dissidence and then thence to disaster and defeat.

A party or government that cannot or will not quickly and quietly quell stirrings in the ranks is soon confronted with insurrection, followed by electoral defeat. Ask Britain’s Labour Party, both immediately before and after the stewardship of Tony Blair. 

Our own African National Congress government, rather endearingly for the anarchist that lurks in me, has been completely different from these developed-world examples of the imperative for unity and coherence. And it nevertheless has been electorally successful for 22 years, to boot. 

Despite its self-congratulatory moniker of “Africa’s oldest liberation movement”, with all the military connotations of discipline and order that description evokes, the ANC reality is quite different. Partly because of being a broad church of workers, communists and nationalists, it historically was compelled to be intellectually flexible – to allow debate, to tolerate differences, to broker mind-boggling ideological compromises. 

For all the propaganda of “disciplined cadres” marching in lockstep towards the great national democratic revolution, ordinary ANC members were generally free to challenge their leaders, whether it be at branch meetings or congresses. The expectation, until the elevation of the notoriously thin-skinned Thabo Mbeki to the presidency, was that the leadership would suck it all up in the spirit of the socialist mantra of brotherhood and equality.

It was Mbeki’s intolerance of ANC opinions other than his own, which led to his recall. At which point we became saddled with the intellectually incoherent but tactically accomplished Jacob Zuma, who somehow managed to camouflage his real presidential objectives  – staying out of jail and in the money – as a welcome laissez-faire leadership ethos.

Laissez-faire relatively quickly degenerated into licence. There were unrebuked outbursts of racial and gender abuse, especially by the ANC Youth League, way beyond the robustness that has always characterised South African politics. Minorities became increasingly alienated.

On occasion, a minister would publicly announce legislation, only to have a colleague just as publicly repudiate the need for it. Laws were drafted without sufficient thought, passed in haste, and then – when reality set in – they either remained unsigned or were sent back for rewriting. 

The economy became becalmed, while the tenderpreneurs and Zuma’s cronies got an open sesame to massive state resources and even, it is claimed, the power to appoint and dismiss cabinet ministers. 

Matters may now have reached some kind of a tipping point. The drubbing that the ANC took in local elections has caused consternation at the feeding trough. The 2019 general election looms. The economy is tanking. Dissent within the party, as well as on the explosive township streets of its traditional supporters, is at an all time high. 

From the way that ministers publicly slag one another off, it would be difficult for an unsussed visitor to the country to believe that these people were from the same government. And, in a sense, they aren’t, for while ANC hasn’t split, it is divided into fiercely warring camps. 

There’s a Zuma-protected alliance of political pirates, set on seizing the commanding heights of the economy, not to transform them, but to drain them. Arrayed against the pirates is a beleaguered “old-ANC” – with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan as lightning rod, but as yet without any leader of note willing to venture a head above the bulwarks – that claims to be committed, however much cynics may snigger, to building a modern, developmental state based on social justice.

Through the increasing chaos and confusion, Zuma retains a cherubic smile and an inscrutable countenance. It’s left to Deputy-President Cyril Ramaphosa last week to warn of a party at war with itself and for ANC General-Secretary Gwede Mantashe this week to lambaste the various factions for their intemperate attacks on one another, for their “ill-discipline”, and for “hurting the economy”.

It’s a warning given substance by the subsequent decision of Futuregrowth, the continent’s biggest private fixed-income money manager, to end loans to six of SA’s largest state-run companies until “proper governance and oversight” are restored.

Whatever the political lessons from abroad, whatever the warnings of his colleagues and from normally schtum corporate leaders, Zuma does not seem overly concerned. He remains resolutely disengaged and often abroad.

This week he was in Swaziland at a summit of the SA Development Community, of which he is, after all, to be the next chair. Although, judging from his faintly risqué banter with fellow heads of state about the bare-breasted maidens dancing for them – “I kept telling them to just look … they were hoping to get closer…” – his mind was on other matters. Maybe on selecting a Swazi maiden as Wife No.9?

Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye