South Africa is on the edge of hope and despair. Worse, Zuma is central to the unresolved future. With strikes bringing almost all municipal services to a halt in the country, the president's backers, Cosatu and the SACP, say they support the unrest. Does this confirm that Zuma will not let Cosatu/SACP push him into a "left" ideology? This column has warned that the Tripartite Alliance (ANC, Cosatu, SACP) will not last much longer. Is this it? In Cape Town, the respected activist Rhoda Kadalie has called on the judiciary and legal profession to resign en masse if Judge John Hlophe is appointed to the Constitutional Court or becomes Chief Justice? As we have asked before, for how much longer can this tension last?
So far, only a tight clique of insiders seem to know whether Zuma will continue with the market-friendly policies where ex-President Thabo Mbeki left them when he was ousted, or shift "leftwards" to the policies over which Cosatu and the SACP warred with Mbeki for the 15 years in which the ANC has been in office. Now maybe Zuma at last will be forced to play his hand - if Cosatu/SACP are trying to cut him off at the knees.
On May 10, Zuma announced his first cabinet - an excessive 34 ministers and 28 deputies. He has been given time to settle in, but more than two months later there are still no real signs of where some of the minsters stand; what the functions of the new ministries are he has created; why there is so much talk of "overlap;" and why Zuma has placed such extraordinary emphasis on "Monitoring... Performance... Intelligence," suggesting not only that surveillance will be everywhere, but that it is needed for some time yet to keep Zuma's enemies at bay.
For someone with no formal education, and tribal habits like polygamy, Zuma is extraordinarily politically adroit. He has survived corruption and rape charges, charmed his way around business leaders nervous about a "socialist" future, and made himself the standard bearer of Cosatu, the SACP and the ANC Youth League, with their unchallenged capacity for raw street demonstrations and strikes, as well as feral intimidation outside High Court doors. Since 2005, some Cosatu and SACP leaders quite openly have disliked Zuma, doubting his reliability, but still they need his populism more than he needs their comradeship. So there is talk of a "collective" behind Zuma helping him with his strategic planning.
Ever since he hit the headlines about three years ago, Zuma has evaded committing himself one way or the other over macro-economics. Apparently, he has charmed many potential investors, although sceptics remind us that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that since 2005 Zuma has played all sides as the situation demands - benign reassurance one day, calling for his machine gun the next; telling business leaders what they want to hear, and then appearing at rallies in his leopard-skin (symbolically dressed to kill).
All this could be categorised as playing to the audience, leaving analysts to guess at the encryptment; but there are other, more serious moves that point unmistakeably to long-term machinations. To give just one example: the ANC has notified the country's nine provinces that they can be turned into administrative arms of central government, or reduced in numbers through mergers, or abolished altogether. The future of the provinces, according to a cabinet minister, will be decided next year.