JAUNDICED EYE

President Jacob Zuma was dished a drubbing this week. He had taken  on the two people most emblematic of resistance against state capture — Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela — and lost humiliatingly to both.

After earlier having had to back down in the face of public outrage from firing Gordhan’s predecessor, Zuma had hoped to fight the next round at arm’s length. Fraud charges would be engineered against Gordhan from his period as the head of the revenue service and he would, whether convicted or not, be forced to resign.

Except, that the head of the National Prosecuting Authority, Shaun Abrahams, had barely announced the charges, when they evaporated. On Monday, in response to intense criticism from the legal establishment over their patent flimsiness, as well as the prospect of demonstrations by business leaders and political organisations outside the court, Abrahams folded.

He withdrew the charges. Zuma’s heavyweight championship by proxy was over before it started, without a glove being laid on Gordhan. 

As if that abject throwing in of the towel was not bad enough, the week was to get worse. On Wednesday, his High Court interdict application to suppress Madonsela’s report into claims of state capture by his controversial cronies and benefactors, the Guptas, was exposed as a bluff. He withdrew his action and agreed to pay the costs of the opposing counsels. 

Zuma has twice rolled the dice against Madonsela. And twice he has now lost. In the Constitutional Court earlier this year he similarly withdrew his application to thwart her Nkandla report. Then, too, he had to cough up for costs. 

With every one of these setbacks Zuma’s presidency is losing momentum, while the forces arrayed against him are becoming more powerful. It is becoming almost irrelevant whether he resigns, is fired, or manages to hang in for the remaining three years of his term.

Even if he goes immediately, the damage that he has done to the African National Congress is incalculable and will take years to recover from. If he stays, he will become a mere figurehead, every act scrutinised not only by a reinvigorated opposition and his own party, but also by a hostile nation.

There’s an increasing air of desperation about the Zuma administration. The moves against Gordhan and Madonsela were ham-fisted and poorly considered as to the likely consequences if they failed.

Perhaps the biggest miscalculation was the arrogant assumption that South Africans would en masse passively stand by and watch the political mugging the Zuma-Gupta axis had planned. Instead, it galvanised the citizenry in a way that reminds one that in a developing country, democracy is always a contested terrain that has to be defended vigorously.

The past weeks show that despite a powerful ruling clique, this can be done. There has been an across the political spectrum popular mobilisation around a single goal — the defeat of state capture — of a scale last seen in the heyday of mass action against apartheid. 

Many in a corporate community that is by nature passive and pathetically placatory, have summoned the courage to speak out. Many in an ANC leadership whose first instinct is unity at all costs, have broken ranks to challenge their leader.

That these establishments have been roused to action is an indication of the dire state of the nation. They acted because the costs of not doing so have reached the point that they far outweigh the dangers of confronting Zuma.

One imagines that these powerful blocs could not help but be inspired, too, by the courage of Gordhan and Madonsela, who have been the primary targets of Zupta wrath and spite. Although isolated before the groundswell of support, they both have remained unflinching in their resolve. 

Madonsela’s State of Capture report, now in the public domain, is a particularly bruising body blow to Zuma. Not because it reaches any incontrovertible conclusions — there was simply neither time nor budget to carry out a thorough investigation — but because of the canny way that she finessed this potentially fatal flaw.

What Madonsela did was to assemble in her report a mass of prima facie evidence that makes obvious the need for a thorough investigation. Then she used her powers to order Zuma to appoint a judicial investigation, with adequate funds and operating within defined time limits.

With this single move she bypasses the danger that her successor at the Protector’s office might be an ANC stooge. She also strips Zuma’s wriggle room to appoint, as with the arms scandal investigation, a pliant judge to head the inquiry, for she ordered that a single name be given to Zuma by the Chief Justice. 

Cumulatively, these are not necessarily knockout blows for Zuma remains president, with the vast powers both overt and covert that this provides. But while he may well have the stomach to fight on, the past gruelling week has left him wobbly at the knees.

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