The posting has been light of light because of travel and a conference and the general need every so often to take a break. I will pick the pace back up soon. The Foreign Policy Association published my latest think piece last week, “South Africa’s Magnificent Catastrophe,” in which I make some tentative (and merely suggestive) comparisons between current South African politics and the state of United States politics in 1800.
At The Mail & Guardian Jean-Jacques Cornish has a feature in which he provides an overview of Africa’s 2007. I may as well also remind you of my own South Africa: Year in Review feature for the Foreign Policy Association and this blog.
What does the ANC have in store for it in 2008? The party will have the chance to paint its picture in its traditional “January 8″ statement at a gathering in Pretoria to honor the ANC’s 96th birthday next week. A day before the newly constituted National Executive Committee will meet. Two key issues will be Thabo Mbeki’s lame-duck status and the corruption charges hanging over Jacob Zuma’s head. Thabo Mbeki is not known for going down without a fight. And a Zuma conviction (or even a vigorous prosecutorial case) in the trial scheduled to begin in August will throw the succession doors open once again.
After months of speculation and prognostication and forecasting about what would transpire at Polokwane, over who would win and what would result, over the state of the ANC, South Africa has now entered a new phase in its political development. Jacob Zuma’s decisive victory over Thabo Mbeki, his ascension to the top post of the African National Congress, now appears to have created the conditions for months of speculation and prognostication and forecasting about what will transpire until the 2009 elections, over who will win in the future and what will result, over the state of the ANC.
Even as Zuma tries to calm fears over the corruption charges he likely faces in the coming weeks and months he also has to reassure the rest of the world that he is not about to embark on a punitive purging of the ANC. That is not to say that as a result of events in Polokwane there won’t be a shake-up of the ANC hierarchy. But the question, which Williams Gumede, respected observer of South African Politics and author of the book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, addresses in The Guardian, is whether or not the Zuma triumph will result in a break-up of the ANC. Gumede sounds a largely optimistic note:
For all its shortcomings, the process completed yesterday has been ultimately constructive. The achilles heel of most African liberation movements has been their failure to have competitive elections, either out of fear of division, or deference to the sitting leader. Importantly, both these stifling taboos have now been broken in the ANC. The election has been insufficient and stifled, but even the limited democratic space it has opened is a step forward. Zuma will almost certainly face tougher scrutiny and more urgent demands to deliver. And, critically, a precedent has been set: grassroots members can vote out unresponsive leaders.
2008 should be fascinating.
Well, that didn’t take long, did it? The African National Conference delegates who had gathered in Polokwane were barely settled back into their posh suburban homes near Cape Town and Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban, Port Elizabeth and Pietermaritzberg and all points in between when the news came across the wires. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has decided that there is enough evidence to pursue corruption charges against their new ANC president, Jacob Zuma.
So what does this mean? Well, it certainly means that the NPA has a peculiar sense of timing. Seeing how it is difficult to believe that new evidence has emerged in the last few days, or even weeks, why now? Why did this not happen weeks ago? Why not on the eve of the Polokwane meeting? Or why not until after the new year?
And the question lingering as a subtext to all of this is what role did Thabo Mbeki have, if any in all of these machinations? The historical adjective most applied to Mbeki is “Machiavellian.” Is this an example of Mbeki’s Machiavellian nature? What about Zuma? Has he accumulated enough power to have been able to manipulate the system to forestall charges until after his election as party presidency? To bring the charges early enough that he can beat them (assuming he can beat them — far from a foregone conclusion) early enough to allow him to recover for the national election that he surely sees as being in his pocket in 2009?
And what of the popular response? Among his most ardent followers the charges will almost surely appear to be a plot from the Mbeki faction and further evidence that their man is not only a hero, but also a martyr. In an odd way, these charges may well bolster Zuma’s populist bona fides even as they confirm his own Machiavellian streak among his opponents. But surely the charges will also arouse worry, maybe even shame, among some rank and file members of the still-divided ANC.
On more than one occasion I have tried to temper the importance of Polokwane by noting that with a long time to go before the 2009 elections there was lot of political football to be played. The possibility that the NPA would bring charges always ranked high among the potential tectonic shifts. Who suspected that the plates would crumple so soon after Zuma’s ascension to the party’s top post? So much for Zuma’s hoped-for new era of good feelings in ANC politics.
The ANC Conference in Polokwane is under way and it is quite clear that the theme of the meeting will be: division, division, division. But politics is drama, and so one of the themes emerging from Polokwane is a bit surprising: sympathy for a desultory Thabo Mbeki in light of all signs, including supernatural omens, pointing to Jacob Zuma’s seemingly inevitable ascension, with others scrambling to pick up crumbs. The voting will happen soon, but whatever is decided this week, there are a lot of dramas to be played out between now and early 2009. Do not expect South African politics this December to determine what those politics will look like next December.
Don’t miss Mark Gevisser’s concise, insightful assessment in The New York Times of the succession struggle and the state of South African politics.
But whatever happens, the fissure in the A.N.C. brings a long-overdue logic to South African politics. Since the early 1990s, the left and center have been held together by the skein of a joint struggle for freedom — and, of course, the allure of power. One of the best possible legacies of the current political turmoil would be the collapse of the de facto one-party state — and its replacement by a real choice for South African voters.
Here Gevisser echoes something I’ve been arguing for a while about the way South African politics are likely to break in years to come:
I have said it for years. The dominance of the African National Congress will not wane as the result of a challenge from the right. The days of the National Party and its inconsequential successors is past. There is room and a need for true conservatism (which I will then heartily oppose) in South Africa, but it cannot rise from the ashes of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) or the Nats, new, old, gereformeerde or otherwise. The challenge, then will come from the left. More accurately it will come as the result of a break in the tripartite alliance that makes up the ANC — the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). I am certainly not an original thinker on this point, but these are observations I have been making since 1997 so I feel some sense that my construction of the discussion, at least, is my own.
[. . .]
It is in recognition of this that the ANC has bent over backward to accomodate, or at least pay lip service to the SACP and to the socialist-sympathetic unions of COSATU. Plus the ANC has always known that keeping these groups in the fold maximized their own power. But times are changing. This relationship that for so long has been fruitful is wearing out its usefulness. It may finally be time for a change.
[. . .]
South Africa has a parliamentary legislature that the ANC has dominated since 1994. I surmise that even after a break of the alliance the ANC will continue to do so. But its support levels will surely drop to or below where they were after the 1994 elections when the Nats and Inkatha Freedom Party, the one defunct the other irrelevant, drew support. This is to my mind a good thing. The ANC with too much support, which translates to too much power, frightens me. I’d like to think that South Africa is different from other African states, its leaders more sage, its democracy more stable, its juduciary and military more independent. But power is power, and when too much of it is consolodated for too long, such power becomes dangerous. Such a break would be especially good if it could be amicable — if COSATU and SACP can maintain an alliance on a large number of issues while pursuing their own course where there is divergence.
This is all by way of description — what I see happening — rather than prediction, though I have long held that in the long run the alliance would be untenable if the partners ultimately chose to care about more than simply maintaining their grip on the levers of control. It is a dynamic well worth watching in the weeks, months and years to come. [. . .] (From June 2006)
It is quite possible that the unintended consequence of the current ANC succession struggle will be to create a total reordering of South African politics. The irony will be that the break may come as the result of the schism between two former allies and friends, Mbeki and Zuma, and the drive for power among the mainstream elements of the party’s power nexus.
In today’s Polokwane update, three larger-than-life figures feature prominently: Jacob Zuma is a “pop star to the poor” despite (because of?) the accusations that have been levied against him. Thabo Mbeki is “on a knife’s edge” as he faces the very real prospect of losing power. And Winnie Madikizela Mandela, herself both a heroine to the poor and the source of more than a little controversy over the years, has tried to insert herself into the proceedings by proposing a deal in which Mbeki would maintain control of the ANC and would in turn promise both not to charge Zuma and to ensure that Zuma succeeds Mbaki as the country’s president in 2009. Beyond the fact that it is difficult to determine what Mbeki would get from having Zuma, now clearly his tormenter, ascend to the presidency, it appears that Madikizela’s plan does not pass constitutional muster. But give Winnie credit. She seems to have set the template for being the phoenix of South African politics, forcing herself into at least quasi-relevance by virtue of the force of her personality and her capacity to leverage her popularity, and Zuma seems to have inherited her blueprint.
Just an FYI: An Economist correspondent from New Zealand has been posting a daily diary from South Africa this week. He introduces himself:
JUST to clear up any misconceptions: I am not, and have never been, The Economist’s South Africa correspondent. The extent to which I am not may soon become obvious: still, this point is best made at the outset, as someone else’s reputation is at stake here.
Neither am I just a tourist, though: I’m here to carry out research on behalf of The Economist’s guide to Johannesburg, which I have edited, from London, for a couple of years now. Past users may be relieved to know that I don’t actually write the guide—the aforementioned correspondent takes that role. But that with which you work, it is perhaps wise to know, and if nothing else, my employer’s august name tends to open doors that might otherwise stay shut.
There are a few useful insights, some views that an outsider probably finds insightful but are fairly banal, and some fairly jejune commentary, but the whole thing is worth a quick read as travelogue.