A political earthquake that was unthinkable a few months ago finally consumed South Africa's President Jacob Zuma.
He
had survived years of outrageous scandals and increasingly deafening
calls for his resignation that would have sunk a less wily politician.
The
last days of the Zuma presidency were characterised by nerve-wrecking
intrigue, impatience, anxiety, and great anticipation. Hours before his
resignation, the embattled president gave a rambling and defiant speech
claiming victimhood and bewilderment at his fate.
But
faced by the extraordinary resolve of the African National Congress
(ANC), a party he led for a decade and that had long shielded him from
accountability, President Zuma resigned on February 14 rather than face a
no-confidence vote the next day.
His proverbial nine
lives finally ran out as he faced his ninth vote of no-confidence that
he was destined to lose. It was a wildly welcomed Valentine’s Day gift
to the troubled Rainbow Nation. His humiliating rendezvous with history
marked a befitting end to a treacherous leader who had robbed South
Africa of the storied heroism of its protracted anti-apartheid struggle.
With
his legendary corruption, Zuma was the anti-Mandela, the canonised
founding president of democratic South Africa, who bestrode the world
stage as a moral colossus. He was also the anti-Mbeki, the cerebral
architect of the post-apartheid government.
Whereas
President Nelson Mandela benevolently left power after one term,
President Thabo Mbeki was ignominiously ousted before the end of his
second term.
President Mbeki lost to the forces loyal to his former deputy, Jacob Zuma, who he had fired in 2005 over corruption allegations.
Yet,
it should not be forgotten that it was Mbeki who elevated Zuma from the
backwaters of provincial leadership in KwaZulu-Natal to national
prominence as his deputy.
Like many insecure or
calculating African leaders, Mbeki picked an incompetent side kick for
bringing his ethnic and factional base, who he underestimated but later
came to bite him and wreck the beloved country.
Zuma's reputation
In
an ironical twist of fate, ten years after Mbeki's ouster the chickens
came home to roost for Zuma himself. Unlike Mbeki who readily accepted
to resign despite his misgivings, Zuma sought to cling to power.
Consequently, Mbeki left with his reputation intact, while Zuma’s is in
tatters.
Under President Zuma, South Africa lost its
proud halo as a much beloved and promising post-liberation society and
descended into an ordinary postcolonial African state.
The
myth of South African exceptionalism, deeply etched in the imaginaries
of both apartheid and democratic South Africa, finally burst. Zuma
exhibited all the unsavoury characteristics of Africa’s notorious Big
Men: patrimonialism, paranoia, profligacy, populism and pettiness.
The
litany of his scandals was depressingly long: there was the shady arms
deal of the late 1990s, the disgrace of the rape case in 2006, the
larceny of Nkandla, and the destructive state capture of Guptgate.
Zuma
cultivated criminal patronage networks, oversaw the debasement of state
institutions, eroded the integrity of public life and trust in
politics, and his deeply embarrassing personal and political behaviour
robbed the country and its citizens of their hard won dignity.
And
he left behind a dismal economic record: 27.7 per cent unemployment;
the country’s credit rating downgraded to junk status by all the major
agencies; the budget deficit had ballooned to 4.3 per cent of GDP, the
highest since 2009; the rate of economic growth remained anaemic falling
from 3.1 per cent in 2008 to a projected 0.7 per cent in 2017.
Twenty-four
years after the end of apartheid ten per cent of the population,
predominantly white, still control 90 per cent of the economy.
Inequality
In the meantime, inequality deepened, although its racial edges were slowly blunted by the expansion of the black middle class.
According
to a survey of 154 countries by the World Bank, South Africa enjoys the
dubious distinction of having the worst Gini coefficient (0.63). It
could be argued that the Zuma saga is part of a much larger story.
It
reflects the challenges of redressing massive historic inequalities by a
ruling coalition transitioning from a protracted liberation struggle
led by a new political class seeking to anchor its political prowess on
the levers of economic power. As in other postcolonial societies, the
state becomes a key instrument of accumulation for the political class
and aspiring national bourgeoisie.
The political class
incubated out of African nationalism was not the first in South Africa
to travel this road. The original robber barons of South Africa go back
to Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape
Colony, who helped to engineer the South African War of 1899-1902 to
seize the goldfields of the Transvaal.
In turn, the
Afrikaner nationalists, who lost the war that led to the formation of
South Africa in 1910, inherited the political kingdom of settler
colonialism. They spent the next several decades turning political power
into economic power through the affirmative action of racial
segregation and expansion of state capital through the creation of state
enterprises and discriminatory support for Afrikaner business
interests.
This culminated with the creation of
apartheid in 1948, through which South Africa’s brutal regime of racial
capitalism and the fortunes of the Afrikaner bourgeoisie were
consolidated.
For the new political class that emerged
out of the liberation struggle, access to state power offered immense
opportunities for personal and collective accumulation.
As I argued in an essay commemorating Nelson Mandela’s life following his death in December 2013, “Mandela’s Long Walk with African History”, South Africa’s protracted liberation struggle followed the contours of nationalist struggles across the continent.
Following
the demise of apartheid in 1994 the country was destined to traverse
the well-trodden path of postcolonial Africa, notwithstanding the
illusions of South African exceptionalism spawned by settler colonial
racism, that South Africa was an outpost of European civilisation in
darkest Africa.
Decolonisation
The
liberation movement in South Africa sought to achieve the five historic
and humanistic goals of African nationalism: decolonisation,
nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration.
The
pursuit of these goals was conditioned and compromised by the complex,
changing, and contradictory legacies and intersections of the
neo-colonial order with colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation.
Like
many of Africa’s founding presidents, Mandela’s long and large life
spanned much of South Africa’s existence as a nation, traversed the
various phases of the country's nationalist movement, and embodied the
trajectories of postcolonial Africa.
In the essay
mentioned above, I pointed out that the lateness of South Africa’s
decolonisation helped compress the sequentiality, as it turned out for
the early independent states, of the five objectives of African
nationalism.
While the latter achieved decolonisation,
they struggled hard to build unified nations out of the territorial
contraptions of colonialism, which enjoyed statehood without nationhood.
They came to independence in an era when development, democracy, and
regional integration were compromised by weak national bourgeoisies,
relatively small middle classes, and the Cold War machinations of the
two superpowers, the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Mandela’s
South Africa benefited from both the positive and negative experiences
of postcolonial Africa, the existence of a highly organised and
vociferous civil society, and the end of the Cold War, which gave ample
space for the growth of democratic governance and the rule of law.
But
the new post-apartheid state was held hostage to the dictates of the
negotiated settlement between the ANC and the apartheid regime arising
out of the strategic stalemate between the two sides—by 1990 South
Africa had become ungovernable, but the apartheid state was not
vanquished as happened in Angola and Mozambique.
This,
combined with the global triumph of neo-liberalism in the post-Cold War
era, guaranteed the powerful interests of capital in general and the
white bourgeoisie in particular against any serious economic
restructuring despite the great expectations of the masses and the
ambitions of successive development plans by the new government from the
‘Reconstruction and Development Programme' to 'Growth Employment and
Redistribution’ to the ‘Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative.’
Economic growth
To
be sure, the post-apartheid state achieved much faster growth than the
apartheid regime ever did. The country witnessed massive expansion of
the black middle class and the ANC government fostered the growth of a
black bourgeoisie through the Black Economic Empowerment Programme much
as the apartheid regime before it had cultivated the Afrikaner
bourgeoisie through apartheid affirmative action.
There
was also some reduction in poverty, although huge challenges remained
in terms of high levels of unemployment and deepening inequality.
Interestingly, as much of the continent once deemed as ‘hopeless’ turned
into a ‘rising Africa’, South Africa lagged behind in terms of rates of
economic growth.
In part this reflected the lingering
structural deformities of the apartheid economy in which the peasantry
was virtual destroyed, the labour absorptive capacity of the economy
remained limited by its high cost structures, and the country suffered
from relatively low levels of skill formation for an economy of its size
because of the apartheid legacy of poor black education.
Before
long, South Africa was overtaken by Nigeria as Africa's largest
economy. Currently, South Africa ranks third behind Nigeria and Egypt.
The continent’s rapid growth, reminiscent of the immediate
post-independence years, rekindled hopes for the establishment of
democratic developmental states that might realise the remaining goals
of African nationalism.
Rhetoric of reconciliation
The
compromised decolonisation of South Africa, also as elsewhere on the
continent, was sanctified by the rhetoric of reconciliation, which was a
staple among many African founding presidents in the immediate
post-independence years.
President Jomo Kenyatta of
Kenya used to preach reconciliation, urging Kenyans to forgive but not
forget the ills of the past as a way of keeping the European settlers
and building his nation fractured by the racial and ethnic divisions of
colonialism.
Even Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe
in the euphoric early days after independence urged reconciliation
between white and black Zimbabweans before domestic political challenges
forced him to refurbish his revolutionary credentials by adopting
radical land reform and rhetoric.
Reconciliation was
such a powerful motif in the political discourses of transition to
independence among some African leaders because of the imperatives of
nation building, the second goal of African nationalism.
It
was also a rhetorical response to the irrational and self-serving fears
of imperial racism that since Africans were supposedly eternal wards of
whites and incapable of ruling themselves, independence would unleash
the atavistic violence of ‘intertribal warfare’ from which colonialism
had saved the benighted continent, and in the post-settler colonies, the
retributive cataclysm of white massacres.
Instead of
comprehensive accountability for apartheid and its normative
institutional violence, which engendered ‘crimes against humanity’,
post-apartheid South Africa pursued ‘truth and reconciliation’ that
individualised both the victims and perpetrators and shifted the logic
of crime and punishment of the Nuremberg Trials for the logic of crime
and confession, justified tendentiously in the name of ‘Ubuntu.’
Presidents
Mandela and Mbeki came to embody the limits of South Africa’s
neo-liberal capitalist transition, for a party steeped in the promissory
rhetoric and aspirations of profound socioeconomic transformation
embedded in African nationalism and socialist ideology.
Despite
economic growth, the expansion of the black middle class, and emergence
of a black bourgeoisie from the largess of Black Economic Empowerment
policy, poverty and unemployment remained entrenched for the majority of
black South Africans.
President Mbeki bore the brunt
of the growing disaffection, as President Mandela withdrew from public
life into the rarefied existence of a sanitised global icon for a world
bereft of great leaders of high moral stature and dignity.
To
be sure, his critics who became louder towards the end of his life did
not spare President Mandela of his failures of commission and omission
in transforming South Africa. They accused him of having failed to
dismantle the South African apartheid economy that left millions of
black people especially the unemployed youth in grinding poverty.
Reconciliation,
they argued, rescued whites from seriously reckoning with apartheid's
past and its legacies and deprived blacks of restitution.
‘People’s president’
This
is the context in which President Mbeki’s 'recall' by an increasingly
disenchanted ANC alliance occurred in September 2008, about nine months
before the end of his second term.
They had lost faith
in him despite the growth of the economy at an average annual rate of
4.5 per cent, expansion of the black middle class, his continental
leadership as the proponent of the African Renaissance, architect of
NEPAD, and a key player in the transition from the Organisation of
African Unity to the African Union.
His vociferous
opponents found his apparent elitism and aloof intellectualism
unappealing, and his HIV/AIDS denialism appalling. They gravitated to
his more flamboyant, populist, and ill-educated deputy who he had
dismissed several years earlier. Jacob Zuma was hailed as the ‘people’s
president,’ who would bring the fruits of Uhuru to the impoverished and
expectant masses.
Thus, for many President Mbeki's
ouster was a cause for celebration, a tribute to party democracy and a
harbinger of better days for the masses who had not yet seen the fruits
of uhuru.
In short, great hopes were pinned on the
Zuma presidency by radicals in the ruling tripartite alliance of the
ANC, the South African Communist Party, and Congress of South African
Trade Unions.
Many local newspapers and elite opinion
were critical of Mbeki’s removal. They saw it as a sign that the once
mighty liberation party had lost its soul under the strains of
governing, that it marked the beginning of South Africa's descent into
dangerous postcolonial populism.
History was to prove
the sceptics right. In fact, before long some of President Zuma’s
loudest supporters lost faith with his kleptocratic regime. They
included the controversial Julius Malema, who served as President of the
ANC Youth League from 2008 to 2012, and Zwelinzima Vavi, former
General-Secretary of COSATU from 1999 to 2015.
Both
became bitter critics of President Zuma’s government. Malema went on to
form the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) following his expulsion from
the ANC.
Slumber of complicity
The
events surrounding President Mbeki's ouster pointed to the fracturing
of the ANC alliance, the sharpening of ideological dissensions within
the party that could no longer be papered over by the uniting heroism of
the liberation struggle and the ANC's fabled love of unity.
As
elsewhere in postcolonial Africa, South Africa was undergoing the
complex and challenging transition from liberation politics to
postcolonial governance.
South Africa is of course not
doomed to follow the familiar and tortuous postcolonial path of other
African states. As I wrote on September 19, 2008 a day after President
Mbeki’s ouster in an essay entitled, “The Fall of Thabo Mbeki: Whither
South Africa?” “The ANC may rue the day they rolled this dangerous
political dice and precedent.”
High levels of
corruption compounded President Zuma’s poor record of performance. The
ANC began to wake up from its slumber of complicity as its electoral
appeal began to plummet.
In the General Election of
2014 it won 62.15 per cent of the vote compared to 65.90 per cent in
2009, which translated into a loss of 15 seats in the 400 member-seat
National Assembly.
The real shocker came with the
municipal elections of August 2016, which the ANC won with 53.9 per cent
of the vote, the lowest level since 1994. The two major opposition
parties, the Democratic Alliance and EFF garnered 26.9 per cent and 8.2
per cent, respectively.
The opposition parties seized
control of three major metropolitan areas, namely, Nelson Mandela Bay,
Tswane, and Johannesburg. This was a severe rebuke to a party, which
seemed poised to shed its urban roots and identity into a rural party.
The
rising political cost of continued support for the reviled Zuma
presidency increasingly became apparent to the ANC and its allies.
Attempts by the increasingly beleaguered president to engineer dynastic
succession through the candidacy of his ex-wife, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini
Zuma, ruffled more ANC feathers.
Despite her
impressive credentials as an accomplished politician and a long-serving
member of the Cabinet under all South African presidents, and
chairperson of the African Union Commission, she went to narrow defeat
by Cyril Ramaphosa at the ANC’s 54th National Conference in December
2017.
Two months later, President Zuma finally fell
from power, convulsed by the emboldened forces of opposition to his rule
in the party he had served for decades and that had long protected him
from his litany of transgressions.
The electoral system
President
Zuma survived for so long because of the structure of the South African
electoral system. It is based on closed-party-list proportional
representation, in which the electorate votes for a party rather than an
individual candidate.
Parliamentary seats are
apportioned to each party based on its proportion of the popular vote.
Each party then allocates seats to a preselected list of candidates.
Under such a system, members of parliament are less beholden to voters
than toeing the party line. This gives the party leadership including
the president enormous powers of control.
But it also
means that changes in party leadership quickly translate into loss of
political power for the unsuccessful faction and its leaders in often
fiercely contested party elections.
In such systems,
the presidency of the leading party determines the presidency of the
country because it is parliament that elects the president. This is why
the ANC’s ‘recall’ is such a powerful weapon because failure to heed it
can lead to a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.
This
is what happened in South Africa’s dominant party system in 2008 and
2018 with the sudden ouster of Presidents Mbeki and Zuma. The latter was
threatened with the prospect of a vote of no-confidence.
Thus,
Zuma survived for so long because of the electoral and party system,
but was ousted because of South Africa's vibrant political culture as
manifested in the values, beliefs, orientations, and aspirations of the
demos.
'Cyril Spring'
As
is often the case with moments of major political change, the
investment in the new leader as the saviour of the nation tends to be
excessive. Needless to say, President Ramaphosa has inherited daunting
challenges and great expectations.
Some place stock in
the fact that he was President Mandela’s preferred successor; that he
is a multi-millionaire business tycoon less likely to be corrupt (he is
reportedly worth about half a billion dollars) and will be better at
managing the economy than his predecessors; that as a former trade union
leader he understands the working class; that as a skilful negotiator
he will navigate through the treacherous quicksands of competing
interests. Some even talk of a “Cyril Spring.”
But
others point to the skeletons in the new President’s closet. There is
his unsavoury role in the Marikana massacre in 2012 for which he later
apologised and was absolved by an official inquiry.
President
Ramaphosa was then a director of Lonmin, the platinum mining company,
where a violent police response to the miners’ strike left 34 workers
dead and scores injured in one of the worst massacres in recent South
African history.
President Ramaphosa will be no
miracle worker in rescuing South Africa from its structural deformities
of uncompetitive corporate monopolies, high unemployment and low skills,
deep inequalities and widespread poverty, and pervasive corruption.
But he cannot do worse than President Zuma, but that is a low bar.
Although
salvaging the country and its economy from the enormous challenges left
by the Zuma presidency is likely to take time, his rise underscores the
resilience of South African democracy, the stubborn independence of its
judiciary, the indefatigability of its expansive and noisy civil
society that brought President Zuma to heel and forced the ANC to reckon
with its slide into ignominy, from the proud party of Mandela into the
despised cabal of Zuma.
Thus Ramaphosa is part of the
desperate rebranding of the ANC ahead of the 2019 General Election. The
ANC’s political renewal is of course possible, but not guaranteed. What
is more certain is the fact that South African society has been
reinvigorated, its democratic and developmental hopes given a fresh
start.
South Africa after the wreckage of the ‘Zunami’
has also recovered some of its lost shine as a political beacon in an
increasingly illiberal world of dangerous populisms.
The
ANC's resolve to oust President Zuma, notwithstanding its belatedness,
is unimaginable in the Republican Party in the United States that has
sold its soul to an unprincipled, bombastic, and deceitful huckster
called Donald Trump.
It is also unlikely in many
African countries held hostage by sleazy dictators who routinely abolish
term limits, rig elections, and loot their nations meagre resources.
The
transition in South Africa, following soon after the demise of the
Mugabe dictatorship in Zimbabwe, and the apparent dismantling of the
Santos kleptocratic dynasty in Angola, seems to suggest the possible
resurgence of the winds of democratic change in southern Africa.
One
hopes such winds do not represent passing clouds destined to dissipate
swiftly and that they will spread to the rest of the region and the
continent. As we say in southern Africa, the struggle indeed continues.
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is the Vice Chancellor at United States International University - Africa.
No comments :
Post a Comment