South Africa

The corruption charges against Jacob Zuma either have legal merit or they do not. If the charges are baseless, they should be dropped. If there is a legal foundation to move forward, the process should play out.

This seeming truism comes to mind in light of the Friday protests by eThekwini ANC members who marched on Durban police stations demanding that the charges against Zuma be dropped and South African Communist Party (SACP) concerns that the trial will do damage to South Africa politically and financially.  There is at least some merit to the idea that a trial could have serious destabilizing effects on South African politics in the short run. But so too would dropping the charges for reasons unrelated to the legal merit of those charges and would merely replace one angry population for another.

An independent judiciary is the hallmark of any liberal democracy. As fraught as a Zuma trial might seem, far worse would be creating the impression that members of the country’s elite are above the law. The charges must go forward unless over the course of the legal process members of the judiciary decide not to pursue them any further because they doubt the legal merits of the case.

Springbok fans can step off the ledge. At least for today. The Tri Nations has been undoubtedly disappointing this year, especially given the promise going in and the win at the House of Pain in July. But today the green and gold crushed the Wallabies 53-8 at Coca Cola Park in Johannesburg. Jongi Nokwe scored four tries, including a first-half hat trick to lead the Springboks in a Man of the Match performance. Both the margin of victory and Nokwe’s four tries were all-time Springbok records against the Australians.

This probably will not stanch the grumbling about Peter de Villiers’ coaching, team selection, or anything else. But give the man time. A post-World Cup hangover coupled with a coaching change probably meant there would be growing pains. De Villiers deserves a chance to put his imprint on the Springbok program. They will be fine, as will he.

The rather tepid performances of South Africa’s Olympians appears to have sent the country’s sporting fandom and chattering classes into another of its periodic crises of confidence (with finger pointing!). South Africa’s fans and media are the stage parents of the sporting world. They build   excessively high expectations for their teams, and then they crush those teams when they do not achieve those excessive expectations. Yes, the Olympics did not turn out as South Africans had hoped. But the sky is not falling on the country’s athletes. (That said, what a disappointment the Springboks have been after starting their Tri Nations campaign with so much promise.)

South African History Online has a feature on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the United Democratic Front (UDF). With the African National Congress, Pan-Africanist Congress, and other organizations banned the UDF filled an essential void and fueled the anti-Apartheid opposition in the tumultuous 1980s. Largely locally focused, the UDF confronted apartheid as much by confronting local problems as through national campaigns. SAHO thus brings to light a vitally important but often misunderstood aspect of the struggle.

Bill Keller recently reviewed John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation in The New York Times. Keller’s review is glowing. I worry a bit that the book will be somewhat deterministic. The 1995 World Cup marked a nice moment for South Africa, and a profoundly powerful symbolic one at that, but South Africa’s democratic transition probably did not rise and fall based on Mandela’s willingness to embrace the Springboks. I am working on an article on rugby, race, and nationalism in South Africa since 1994 and so have more than a passing interest in receiving my copy of Carlin’s book.

The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is not only largely irrelevant in South African political life, it is an anachronism. Borne of the apartheid era, Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s movement (which always was, as much as anything, a tribute to the glories of Mangosuthu Buthelezi) represented an ethnically driven party committed to Zulu nationalism that did not come close to garnering the support of a majority of the country’s Zulus. It has always been a regionally-based party with national pretensions. The IFP ultimately represented a ploy, equal parts savvy and cynical, to triangulate between the National party and the African National Congress in order to maximize self interest that Buthlezi was able to convince a small group of nationalists that they shared. Perhaps in another part of Africa at another time Buthelezi’s machinations would have worked. But not in South Africa in the mid-1990s, and certainly not in South Africa today.

Although he would hardly agree with my perhaps intemperate (which is not to say inaccurate) assessment, it is clear that even Buthelezi is beginning to wonder about the project he conceived and nurtured. On Friday night in a speech before the IFP’s 33rd Congress Buthelezi wondered why South Africans would bother to vote for his party. This frank admission hardly means that Buthelezi has resigned himself to ANC rule, but rather that he realizes that his party’s own performance in recent years has given South Africans little reason to support it.

One of the answers is likely that South Africa needs fewer political parties, which would allow those opposition parties that continue to exist to have a better chance of mobilizing enough voters to be more than a mere nuisance to the ANC. The most logical step still seems to me to be a COSATU-SACP breakaway faction from the ANC followed by the dissolution of a number of the smaller parties, which might either join with that new left-leaning party with the Democratic Alliance embracing some of the parties that embrace a more center-right approach. There would still (alas?) be room for one more right wing party. But the more fractured the opposition parties are, right or left, the less likelihood they will have of ever challenging the ANC. Such a political transformation might also be good for the ruling party inasmuch as it would not longer have to hold together an increasingly fractured alliance.

In The Star Ufrieda Ho shows how many argue that Eskom’s proposed rationing recommendations will hit the poor disproportionately:

A 10 percent power cut for a Sandton man means his air-conditioner gathers dust; for the Soweto man it means he spends his nights in darkness.

This is skewed equity Eskom-style, says environmental activist Bobby Peek.

The affluent have to cut back on luxuries. The poor have already cut to the bone. There are few luxuries. Asking them to further do without simply exacerbates the gap between those who have and those who don’t.

In a recent article in The Mail & Guardian Michael Georgy makes the case that the deadlock in Zimbabwe represents yet another failure for Thabo Mbeki, another sign of his waning credibility and fading influence at home and abroad.

The case seems pretty strong. Yet something about this argument does not strike me as being quite right or quite fair. Certainly Mbeki deserves plenty of blame for letting the Zimbabwe sore fester for as long as it has without taking stronger action, without pushing for a resolution sooner, without taking more seriously his mandate to broker peace on the behalf of SADC, without ever, to this day, truly condemning Robert Mugabe or at minimum what mugabe allowed to happen to his country. And as a consequence things have gotten to where they are, for which Thabo Mbeki is one of many actors who deserves his share of the blame.

But at the same time, Mbeki is in no position to force an agreement right now. Cliches about horses and water and forcing them to drink come to mind. I  suppose that were a deal to come that the world could celebrate Mbeki would bask in the credit, and as a consequence he has to deal with the backlash. But there are situations where credit might be due success even if equal blame is not due failure. Many of us knew that these negotiations would only go as far as Robert Mugabe would allow them to go. And so they have. For this, at least, it is hard for me to blame Thabo Mbeki.

In the wake of the xenophobic violence that engulfed Gauteng earlier this year the government set up camps for those foreigners displaced by the chaos. Those camps were set to close on 15 August, but a group of foreign nationals has brought an application for relief to the Constitutional Court to keep the camps open. The court will meet tomorrow to hear that application. What they decide will be crucial to the well being of a vulnerable population in South Africa.

It appears that the curious case of Cape Judge John Hlophe might reach its resolution soon one way or the other. Hlophe has been accused of trying to influence judges on the Constitutional Court to rule favorably for Jacob Zuma in one of the stages of the ANC President’s corruption case. Hlophe has applied to the Witwatersrand Local Division asking that the court have the Constitutional Court’s actions ruled invalid. That hearing, the first of its kind in the country’s history, was to take place today.

If the court grants Hlophe’s application, this sordid little incident will represent little more than a footnote in South Africa’s always lively political history. But if Hlophe suffers defeat his case will almost certainly provide part of a chaotic backdrop against which Zuma’s political hopes will play out.