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Clouds of political uncertainty hang over South Africa in the race to
succeed President Thabo Mbeki. What happens in South Africa matters
enormously to Africa as a whole, given the country’s relative size and
importance as a sub-regional hegemonic power, not to mention the faith
and hopes that tens of millions of people across Africa, the African
diaspora, and the world invested in its protracted struggles against
apartheid and the transition to a democratic society and developmental
state. That is why the legal and political wrangles involving the former
Deputy President, Mr. Jacob Zuma, who was dismissed from his position
last year, should be of grave concern to all who wish South Africa well.
Today’s dismissal of the corruption case against him in the
Pietermaritzburg High Court on technical grounds is cause for alarm for
the political forces it might unleash. Although the state could
reinstate the case, some leading legal and political commentators in the
country have already pronounced the damage done to the state’s case as
beyond repair.
Coming from a Southern African country, South Africa has always held a
special fascination for me. I grew up listening to its music, reading
its magazines, and hearing of relatives who had gone to work in its
mines, factories and farms, some of whom never returned. I read and
listened to harrowing tales of the racist brutalities of the apartheid
regime as well as exhilarating accounts of heroic liberation struggles.
I came of age at the very moment of the Soweto student uprising in 1976,
an event that marked a critical watershed in the struggle for Black
liberation. Since 1994, when the skunks of segregation and apartheid
that had for centuries deformed this land of spectacular natural beauty
and wealth, and the inhuman cruelty of the minority racist government
were defeated, and the redemptive possibilities of the human spirit
restored, I have been visiting South Africa regularly. Within the last
ten months I have gone there four times to attend conferences, give
lectures, and for a holiday. And over the past two and half decades, I
have intermittently taught South African history on its own or as part
of Southern African history or African history in general.
The Zuma saga started when he was implicated and later charged in a
corruption case involving an arms deal. Last June President Mbeki
relieved him of his duties as the country’s Deputy President, although
he retained his position as Deputy President of the ruling African
National Congress, when his financial adviser, businessman Schabir
Shaik, was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison and the
presiding judge described the relationship between the two as ‘generally
corrupt.’ As if that was not enough, towards the end of last year Mr.
Zuma was accused of rape by a 31 year old HIV-positive family friend.
This incendiary mix of political and moral corruption seemed lethal and
some began writing his political obituary. In reality, whatever might be
the eventual fate of Mr. Zuma’s legal troubles and presidential
ambitions, the drama over his rape and corruption trials opened the
simmering tensions underlying South Africa’s seemingly successful
transition from apartheid to a new democracy, the unfinished business of
the historic struggles for social transformation.
There is much to admire about the new South Africa: over the last twelve
years following the demise of apartheid its economy has been growing
more rapidly than it had done in the previous three or four decades,
fueling the explosive growth of the black middle class that now numbers
more than two million, 10 percent of the adult black population, which
is rising by 50 percent a year; its politics is played out within an
admirable constitutional framework characterized by vibrant freedoms,
separation of powers, official levels of gender representation almost
unmatched anywhere in the world let alone Africa, and a civil society
noisily protective of its autonomy and memories of struggle; its diverse
society is becoming more educated, more multicultural, more secure in
its Africanness, and more confident of the future as it looks forward to
the World Cup in 2010, the first African country to host the world’s
greatest sporting spectacle. Moreover, post-apartheid South Africa has
staked out, if not established, its leadership not only within Africa
but in the larger global South as well. But the structural scars of the
past linger, three centuries of unrelenting racist violence and racial
capitalism have left enduring legacies that manifest themselves in some
of the sharpest socioeconomic inequalities in the world, relatively high
rates of crime and sexual violence, persistent rural poverty and squalor
for the urban poor, palpable racial and ethnic tensions, rising
xenophobia against African immigrants, growing impatience with the rate
of change, and the cruel ravages of the scourge of our times-South
Africa currently has the second largest number of people infected with
HIV/AIDS after India.
Much of Africa has traversed this road before, the early exhilaration of
independence, the immediate post-independence years of relatively rapid
economic growth, the expansion of the middle classes, followed by
creeping disillusionment with the fruits of uhuru by the once beloved
but increasingly neglected masses. Of course the two moments-the
decolonization and independence of many African countries in the 1950s
and 1960s and the demise of apartheid and construction of the new South
Africa in the 1990s and 2000s and- vary in their historical legacies and
possible trajectories. But the myth of South African exceptionalism must
be resisted; it is a conceit fueled by the very fantasies of racist and
apartheid South Africa that it was an extension of ‘Western
civilization’ on the ‘dark continent’, and encouraged by European
imperialists who saw it as a European outpost in need of their material,
moral and political support and protection.
This is to suggest that South Africa has much to learn, far more in fact
from the rest of Africa than from Euroamerica, as far as its future may
be concerned. And these lessons are quite sobering. We have all
witnessed the destructive power of populist demagoguery. The Zuma
phenomenon smacks of a desperate populist search for a more workable
future. The frenzied support Mr. Zuma has received from his supporters
reflects the creeping disaffection by important social constituencies
with the post-apartheid dispensation and a struggle not only for the
soul of the ANC, but the country as a whole. It is a conjuncture
pregnant with pitfalls and possibilities as South Africa struggles to
settle into the normalcy of ordinary politics. The transition from the
revered President Nelson Mandela to President Thabo Mbeki will prove
less momentous for South Africa’s future than that from the latter to
his successor.
To most outsider observers, and for many South Africans, the possibility
of an accused rapist ascending to the nation’s highest office is
frightful in its implications. To be sure, Mr. Zuma was cleared of the
rape charges, although he admitted to having unprotected sex with a
woman who was the daughter of a comrade who had grown looking up to him
as an uncle. His defense was staggering in its mendacity: the distorted
and sexist invocation of Zulu culture, the infamous shower as protection
coming from the mouth of a former head of the National Aids Council, the
martial masquerades outside the courtroom by his supporters and the
gratuitous attacks on the accuser.
Why would such a deeply flawed politician, one so tainted by moral
decrepitude and accused of corruption, claim and be seen by his
supporters as worthy of leadership of Africa’s major power? The answers
surely go beyond Mr. Zuma’s own personal ambition, although he has
rejected entreaties from some of South Africa’s most renowned figures,
including the Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu to withdraw voluntarily
from national politics and save the country the supreme agony and
embarrassment of a possible Zuma presidency. Why is he able to garner
such fierce support from so many different constituencies within South
Africa, be greeted with rapturous welcome at various forums especially
in parts of his regional homeland, KwaZulu-Natal, and among the militant
wings of the ANC alliance including the ANC Youth League, the South
African Communist Party, and the labor federation, COSATU?
The Zuma saga is embedded in and reflects at least four interrelated
dynamics in South Africa’s contemporary political economy and
sociocultural terrain: fractures within the ANC alliance, the
centrifugal forces of class, ethnicity, and gender. The cracks within
the ANC coalition are born out of the overwhelming dominance of the ANC,
the difficult transition from the commandist politics of a liberation
movement, the accumulative imperatives of the new black bourgeoisie, and
the challenges of transformation. The ANC increased its electoral
standing from 62.6% in 1994 to 66.4% in 1999, and to 69.7% in 2004. The
leading opposition parties, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the Democratic
Alliance, pose little credible challenge to ANC hegemony: one is
circumscribed by its ethnicity and the other by its whiteness. Under
such circumstances it is not surprising that political contestation
within the ANC alliance takes assumes such salience.
The growing dissension within the ANC over the presidential succession
reflects pressures for political transparency, for the open contestation
of the ANC’s top leadership position. And yet, the apparent current
beneficiary of that drive is the very person whose rise to prominence is
owed largely to his appointment as Deputy President in 1999. Much is
made of the different personal predispositions of the current president,
often seen as intellectual and technocratic, standing aloof from the
masses, and his estranged deputy who is notable for his populist touch
and mass appeal, more empathic and connected with the average man and
woman on the street, but there is little indication of concrete policy
differences between them. The speculation that a Zuma presidency would
adopt more radical, leftist economic policies remains just that.
The dynamics of class politics have shifted as the rigid boundaries
enforced by apartheid have eroded and social differentiation among the
black population has accelerated. Not only is the black middle class
growing rapidly as noted earlier, so is the black bourgeoisie through
the black economic empowerment, a project elsewhere called
Africanization or indigenization that was central to nationalist
movements and the postcolonial state across the continent. Indeed, in
South Africa’s own history, the apartheid state was critical to the
expansion of the Afrikaner bourgeoisie and middle class. As the class
dimensions of black identity and politics have become more pronounced,
ideological faultiness within the ANC, both old and new, are rekindled
and reframed.
One of the main lines of contestation is between those enamored by the
reformist policies of neo-liberalism and African accumulation and those
still wedded to the old radical dreams of structural transformation and
the empowerment of working people. The latter are concentrated in the
ANC Youth League, the South African Communist Party and COSATU. But
their electoral prowess is uncertain were they to break into a separate
party and so they invest their hopes in Mr. Zuma, one of the architects
of ANC government policies and whose expensive lifestyle brought him the
grief of corruption charges. Thus as Mr. Zuma lost his official position
in government and credibility among the elites and middle classes, his
leftist credentials were burnished and his political star rose among the
left anxious for a new political direction in the post-Mbeki era. Such
cynicism is the stuff that populism is made of; it is a telling
commentary on the ideological impasse facing the South African left.
The Zuma saga also has an ethnic dimension. During the days of the
liberation struggle many progressive South Africans were inclined to
believe that a post-apartheid South Africa would be saved from
‘tribalism’, a specter that would have been duly discredited by
apartheid, diluted by urbanization, and dented by nationalism. But the
seductive power of ethnicity was wished away too soon. As the sun set
over white political power, the inclusive blackness forged by Black
Consciousness began to fracture for ‘Coloreds’, ‘Indians’, and
‘Africans’, and for the latter ‘moral’ ethnicity, i.e., ethnicity as a
complex web of social obligations and belonging, became increasingly
tinged with ‘political’ ethnicity-‘tribalism’-the competitive
mobilization of ‘ethnic contenders’ for access to the material and
social resources controlled and mediated by the state.
Xhosa domination in the ANC-presidents Mandela and Mbeki are both
Xhosas-is an issue of contention in parts of the country however
reluctant the party may not want to talk about it openly. In fact, Mr.
Zuma owed his rise to national leadership to ethnic brokerage, to the
crucial role he played, as a provincial Zulu ANC leader, in ending
political violence in KwaZulu Natal between the ANC and Inkatha and
promoting the fortunes of the ANC in the region. In his recent political
and legal misfortunes, many of Mr. Zuma’s loudest supporters have come
from KwaZulu Natal and articulate their support in Zulu cultural idioms.
Zuma’s accession also shows a troubling African political tendency of
incumbent presidents choosing lackluster leaders in the mistaken belief
that they will not pose an immediate threat to their own position and
domination. A classic example is President Jomo Kenyatta choosing Daniel
arap Moi, an ill-educated politician who proceeded to misrule Kenya for
twenty-four years.
No less glaring are the gender dimensions of the Zuma saga. For a
country that boasts some of the most progressive policies on gender
equality in the world, Mr. Zuma’s rape trial was a disheartening display
of the enduring perils of misogyny in the rainbow nation that has one of
the world’s highest rates of sexual violence including rape. As many
South African women activists noted during the course of the trial and
after the verdict, the grotesque abuses hurled at the complainant by Mr.
Zuma’s supporters, including women, represented a serious setback for
women’s rights and empowerment. The fact that the ANC Youth League and
COSATU held a pro-Zuma demonstration during the trial and vilified
members of the People Opposing Women Abuse was a troubling sign of
masculinist apathy and antagonism to women’s progress in ostensibly
radical movements. The reportedly lukewarm reception the current Deputy
President, Ms. Phumuzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, reportedly has received at these
organizations’ forums, as compared to the ecstatic reception accorded to
Mr. Zuma, cannot be unrelated to gender politics. Although the apparent
failure of most of the leading lights in the women’s movement- including
the ANC Women’s League-to manifest loud and visible support for her is
equally troubling.
There is little doubt the presidential succession struggle will
aggravate the increasingly fractious politics of the ruling party and
its underpinning class, ethnic, and gender contestations. In such a
context, in the absence of clear ideological choices given the current
hegemony of the ANC, personalities loom unusually large and populism
becomes a substitute for principled leadership. The emotionally charged
politics of populism, the hunger for a charismatic leader, the cynical
appeal to the working and poor masses, accompanied by stifling webs of
clientelism has been a damaging feature of many a postcolonial state in
Africa. Mr. Zuma has all the hallmarks of Africa’s notorious ‘Big Men’,
the patriarchal, personalistic, populist leaders that have ruled with
impunity and done so much damage to Africa’s prospects. The last fifty
years have taught us the harsh lessons of bad leadership; the quality of
leadership is fundamental to our nations’ prospects for development,
democracy, and self-determination, the age-old goals of African
nationalism for which so many people sacrificed their lives. The
prospects of a man charged with rape and corruption becoming a leader of
South Africa is too ghastly to contemplate, for the blot on his
character and credibility will linger well beyond the technical
discharges and acquittals from the courts.
When Mr. Zuma was dismissed as Deputy President much of Africa and the
world was impressed that South Africa was serious about stemming the
scourge of corruption, that no one was above the law. When he was
acquitted of the rape charges, and today his corruption case struck off
the roll, it confirmed that the legal rights of an accused leader could
be respected. But at stake is not legality; it is leadership, the
quality of Mr. Zuma’s potential leadership of this important country.
South Africa has a vibrant civil society and democratic culture, born
out of decades of struggle against apartheid, and embodied in vigorous
associational life, independent institutions, and the media that may yet
ensure that political reason will prevail, or that might even limit the
damage of a Zuma presidency. Some of the very forces that facilitate
populism may undermine it: the power of business, the search for
alternatives by labor, the dynamism of the women’s movement. And the ANC itself has a long distinguished history of rising to new challenges.
One can only hope that all these players will save their beloved country
from a discredited populist leader. Otherwise they will traverse a
well-trodden path in Africa’s postcolonial history: the specter of
morally bankrupt and bad leadership. The only difference they will not
be able to claim they did not know who they were getting or what they
were getting themselves into.
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