South Africa

Is Tokyo Sexwale laying the foundation for a run at the Presidency if Jacob Zuma’s path to power is cut off by his corruption case?

That was the first question that came to mind when I saw that Sexwale has started pressing Thabo Mbeki to come clean about his role in the arms deal that increasingly is taking on a life of its own in South African politics. After all, Sexwale might assume, Zuma’s case will play out on its own, so there is no need right now to take on the ANC president. But by going after Mbeki, and by doing so on an issue that will allow Sexwale to show his moral probity, he has also engaged in a cunning act of political triangulation.

If Sexwale throws his hat in the ring (or if he plays it so that he is summoned by his party and his people to service after a Zuma implosion) we may look back on this as the crucial moment of origin.   

Jacob Zuma is in trouble. Yesterday Constitutional Court Justice Zac Yacoob announced that he had “no difficulty” with the justifications that the state put forth to justify the search and seizure operations it conducted on Zuma and his attorneys’ homes and offices and that the “creative conspiracy” Jacob Zuma was allegedly involved in justified broad investigation. Even before the Constitutional Court levied its ruling state lawyers accused Zuma of attempting to “delay justice” by his gambit of challenging the state’s evidence and the National Prosecuting Authority accused Zuma’s seemingly desperate machinations and attacks against the state (the very state he hopes to lead) of “[giving] the administration of justice a bad name.”

(Zapiro, Mail & Guardian, 11 March 2008) 

So what now? Well, although Zuma still has his defenders, and presumably will marshall those supporters through his trial, scheduled for August, things do not look good for the embattled president of the ANC. And presumably even if his base sticks with him, Zuma is destined to lose a lot of his soft support or those who, even if they do not consider themselves loyalists, were willing to go along with his ascension. The NPA appears confident that it will successfully prosecute Zuma and that he will be convicted.  If that happens, all hell will almost certainly break loose, at least in the short run. Even now the business community is jittery and South Africa’s international reputation has taken a hit, whether fairly or not.

So, now what? Well, the legal process still has to play out, and one assumes that Zuma will continue to put up a fight given that his freedom and his political life are at risk. But it does not take a lot of imagination to see the political buzzards circling Zuma’s corpse before long, even if he emerges unscathed from his trial but humiliated and weakened, which seems inevitable. Zuma does not strike me as the type to resign, but would the ANC call for a special conference, a revisitation of Polokwane? And who will emerge to challenge Zuma? Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma? Tokyo Sexwale? Or perhaps my long-suspected coyly reluctant candidate, Cyril Ramaphosa?

Whatever happens, my guess is that the schadenfreude is barely hidden at Tuynhuys, where Thabo Mbeki probably wears a guilty smile on his lips today. The beleaguered President has taken quite a beating of late at the hands of Zuma and his supporters. This must seem like apt poetic justice.  

Apparently media criticism, fair and unfair, comes from without as well as from within. The BBC has been taking the attack to both South Africa and Jacob Zuma, and while I’ve been a critic of Jacob Zuma in particular in the past, at least some of the Beeb’s coverage appears to couch sensationalism in the guise of its traditionally staid mien.

A controversial recent documentary on South Africa breathes deeply the fumes of Afropessimism without bothering to look beyond the surface and past some of the admittedly controversial stories of late. It seems remarkably one-sided and not especially nuanced, and naturally South African defenders have lashed back.  An example of the more sensationalistic elements of the show come with an interview with Zuma in which the interviewer goes for shock tactics rather than earnest engagement.

Part of the problem, for me, is that the jaundiced view not only from the BBC but from so many of South Africa’s critics is cartoonish. But more than that, it also smacks of condescension. And perhaps the Brits in particular ought to be wary of being patronizing toward the South Africans, all things considered.

Jacob Zuma’s day in court has come. Well, not the big day that everyone anticipates, but the ANC’s president and South Africa’s presumed successor to Thabo Mbeki has appeared before the Constitutional Court to determine which documents might be able to be used against Zuma (and the French arms company, Thint) and which may be excluded. The question swings on whether the Scorpions search and seizure that secured the documents in 2005 was legitimate. The final decision will inevitably play a huge  role in Zuma’s corruption case. Exclusion would represent a major victory for Zuma and a defeat for the state. But if the court allows the documents to be included, Zuma’s defense might be in trouble.

In the meantime, Zuma recently gave an extensive and wide-ranging interview to the Financial Times last week in which one of the central issues was the seemingly contested nature of internal ANC politics. The tone of the interview (or at least the interviewer) and a story that accompanied it  raised the ire of the ANC and its spokesman Jessie Duartie, who felt the need to write in to the Financial Times with a rejoinder. Zuma and his people seem to have had to clarify comments to the media quite regularly of late, which brings about the question of the kind of relationship Zuma and the ANC will have with the press during a Zuma presidency. Naturally much depends on the outcome of his trial, but even Thabo Mbeki had a honeymoon period with the media, however short it must have seemed from Mbeki’s perspective.

Although the ICC One Day cricket World Championship does not carry with it the cache of a World Cup title, it still would represent a nice feather in the cap of the Proteas. The South Africans are within range of claiming that title if they can just muster up two more wins over Bangladesh. Given the recent crises within the sport, the One Day crown might salve at least a few wounds.

Meanwhile, fresh off of their more significant rugby world championship, South Africans hope to host the Rugby World Cup in 2015, twenty years after the Springboks’ epochal home triumph in 1995. That South Africa has successfully hosted the event before, the country’s status as a global rugby power, the tie-in with 1995, the fact that South Africa shares a time zone with European nation (which thus makes it appealing from a television perspective), and the 2010 FIFA World Cup being held in South Africa all would seem to point to reasons for optimism that the bid will succeed.

Finally, a new season of Super 14 rugby is well under way.

In order to rationalize and expand upon the Foreign Policy Association’s coverage of Africa, the FPA has started a new blog with roots extending from the South Africa Blog. The Africa Blog will cover both continentwide issues as well as regional and country concerns. I will be the senior editor/blogger at the Africa blog while continuing my work here at the South Africa Blog.

The change will allow this blog to emphasize South African issues more specifically while still giving both the FPA and me a voice on larger African affairs. The biggest change will likely come in the fact that within the next few days I will shift coverage of Zimbabwe to the Africa blog. I hope that you will read and engage with both blogs.

I have been silent on the fiasco going on at the University of the Free State largely because some stories almost write their own commentary. Mix Afrikaner racism with white and black college students and the possibility of a combustible mix will be present. The Mail & Guardian’s “Thought leader” has had a couple of worthwhile pieces if you are in search of commentary, including pieces by Christi Van der Westhuizen and Michael Trapido.

The outrage is warranted and necessary and anyone who downplays what happened at the Universiteit van die Vrystaat is either hopelessly blind as to South Africa’s lingering racist history or is simply a fool. And we ought not to suffer either gladly. Nonetheless, we should not be surprised precisely because of the country’s racist legacy. And Afrikaners, not all of whom are racist by any measure, nonetheless have a great deal to account for when it comes to the country’s racist past. If events such as those at UFS manages to remind South Africans of the reality of race, then it will have served a purpose, which is not to say that it was necessary or good, but rather than from the terrible comes the hope for redemption.

Recently elsewhere I wrote about the passing of George Fredrickson, emphasizing the role he played in my own intellectual development. Here is his New York Times obituary.

Another leading South African historian, Stanley Trapido, who left South Africa after the Sharpevile Massacre in 1960 and became a lecturer at Oxford, also died recently. You can find his obituary (written by respected South African historian Charles van Onselen) in The Guardian here.

Hamba kahle, gentlemen.

(Crossposted at dcat.)

Two interesting developments in the Zimbabwe election campaign. The first is that it appears that many of Simba Makoni’s supporters are hedging their bets, quietly supporting the upstart candidate while avowing their loyalty to Zanu-PF and thus implicitly, it would seem, to Robert Mugabe. One can sympathize with the inclination — crossing Mugabe almost always comes at a cost — and yet during a time when Makoni and his supporters are taking a great deal of risk and revealing tremendous courage, it would be nice if some of Zimbabwe’s most prominent members of the political class could do the same. It is this sort of fecklessness that will help Mugabe secure the presidency again by hook or by crook, violence or theft.

The second story is equally telling. Zimbabwe’s economy has gone to hell over the last few years with nary a helping hand from Mugabe and Zanu-PF for any but the smallest, most well-connected cadre of loyalists.  But suddenly Mugabe is demanding faster food imports, particularly of maize, in light of the country’s food emergency, which the president seems a bit late in discovering. It was not all that long ago that Zimbabwe was the region’s breadbasket. Nonetheless, Mugabe’s nakedly self-interested reaction does bring about one question: If the old man wins re-election, which only a fool or an optimist would bet against, could Makoni’s challenge have awakened in him a realization that he is not bulletproof? Or are these merely the temporal machinations of a despot interested only in consolidating power? I would bet on the latter, but assuming that Mugabe is going to find a way to win, we all had better hope against hope for the former.

South Africans, like people the world over, are beginning to take a great deal of interest in the primary campaigns taking place in the United States. According to a story on NPR (Click on the link to hear the full report.):

South Africans have been consumed with crippling nationwide power outages and other issues closer to home, such as a much-condemned racial incident involving four white students and some black university employees. But when asked about the U.S. presidential race, the name they seem most familiar with is that of Barack Obama.

This brief report does not portray the election, or South African views of it, with a great deal of depth. It is a man-on-the-street series of brief interviews. Nnetheless, it is probably not a bit surprising that South Africans a) Do not have much regard for the Republicans, and b) Support Obama in light of his African roots. However, Bill Clinton was a popular figure in many parts of the continent, and one wonders if that does not redound to Hillary’s benefit. In the end, South Africans will almost certainly be rooting from afar for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.