"Thinkers prepare a revolution; bandits carry it out" - Marios Azuela, the Mexican author of The Underdogs.
Is Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party of Julius Malema correct to characterize the ANC led by president Jacob Zuma as Zuma ANC (ZANC)? Is this a mere form of petulant insult? Is it a political gimmick? Or is it an accurate description of the fundamentally changed heart, soul and essence of the ANC under Jacob Zuma post-Mangaung?
Is Jacob Zuma's impact on the ANC so profound and pervasive that he can be said to have changed the entire ANC in his own image?
Not since its founding in 1912, until Zuma's rise to lead it, had the ANC been conflated so much with its leader, the way ZANC is today. There was never talk of MANC under the much-criticized Dr. James Moroka, or the much-beloved Nelson Mandela, nor under the controversial ANC presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Throughout its decades in exile, there was never a reference to TANC under the much-celebrated presidency of OR Tambo. Even at the height of its ideologically messy divorce from the ANC in the mid- to late 1950s, when it was throwing every available political kitchen sink at the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) spoke about "the Communist-infiltrated" and "Charterist" ANC, but never about Luthuli ANC (LANC) of the 1950s.
So why is the name ZANC catching so much traction and gaining such a wide currency in our ever-expanding political lexicon, especially among SA's black youth?
In his very influential classic, The State and Revolution, the Russian communist revolutionary and founder of Soviet power, Vladimir Lenin, made an interesting comment about the origin of the name Bolshevik. He wrote about "...a meaningless and ugly term as ‘Bolshevik'", which he believed "...expresses absolutely nothing other than the purely accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903 we were in a majority..." (Penguin Books, 1992, page 73).
Similarly, other than the fact that, accidentally or not, the Zuma supporters, Zumaphiles, Zuma sycophants and Zuma fanatics were in the clear majority at the ANC Mangaung conference of December 2012, the term Zuma ANC (ZANC) "...expresses absolutely nothing..." In fact, if truth be told, the name ZANC, like the name Bolshevik, is "a meaningless and ugly term", no doubt full of pejorative intent on the part of those who threw and are throwing these names around.
In relation to ZANC, such usage of "the meaningless and ugly" term has the unintended and unhelpful effect of reducing all the historical and contemporary problems of the ANC to one man, and one man only - Jacob Zuma. It is political reductionism of the worst order, because it presupposes, wrongly, that if only you remove Zuma from leading SA and the ANC, all our accumulated national problems would just evaporate away like dew before a hot morning sun. Just in terms of a logical argument, this obviously cannot be the case.
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