Cry, The Beloved Party

As published in the East African (February 9 - 15, 2013):

South Africa is a country coming out of a very uncertain, and very untidy, adolescence. In the nineteen years it has been free, it has shown the world the lasting value of reconciliation, when fronted by a leader of such unimpeachable credentials as Nelson Mandela. It had (and the past tense is deliberate here) shown that a nation could emerge from a very difficult, and immensely contradictory, set of circumstances and make of itself what seemed to be a fairly united country.

However, the gradual passing of Nelson Mandela’s generation from the political scene meant that South Africa had to seek a path to normalcy, when the dividends of global goodwill could gradually be spent. The past decade has seen a familiar trajectory in South African politics, especially when looked at through a broader African lens. A widely admired liberation movement has found itself unable to navigate the shoals of life as a ruling party, as long-concealed contradictions revealed themselves in unseemly fights for power. But even as the most cynical among us gleefully pointed to the unravelling of the African National Congress, we couldn’t help but be disturbed by the decay of a movement in which we had, despite our doubts, hoped would be the exception that would signify a change of the rules. We had prayed that South African politics would reflect a maturity of the African polity (at least a part of it), and would be the vanguard of an African renaissance.

But it was the brutal, and uncouth, removal from power of Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor as South African President which signified that the ANC was as venal in its internal workings as KANU in its worst years. A party which claimed a nearly century-old history, and which demanded the souls of its adherents, had eaten one of its young. And Mbeki was not just a loyal movement cadre – one who had admittedly risen to the highest ranks of the institution. He was royalty, bearing a name only slightly less revered than Mandela and Tambo. His father, Govan Mbeki, was a committed leftist who was one of the leading lights of the struggle in the darkest years. The commitment was such that the family effectively subsumed its humanity into the service of the struggle.

While it was assumed that Thabo Mbeki’s long years of exile and quiet diplomacy meant that the Presidency (of both the ANC and the state) were the just reward, there were dark whispers that he had risen to the Presidency out of turn.

The events of 2008 happened over the course of a momentous week, although they had been building for years. On Saturday morning, the 20th of September 2008, the ANC National Executive Committee decided to ‘recall’ Thabo Mbeki from his ‘deployment’ as head of state. By Thursday, the 25th of September, Mbeki was gone – replaced by another of the movement’s loyal servants, Kgalema Motlanthe, who would serve in a caretaker role.

Given the momentousness, and symbolism, of Mbeki’s removal, the publication of two books about the issue is welcome. One is by the Reverend Frank Chikane, the Director General (Permanent Secretary) in the Presidency, whose tenure had started in the Mandela presidency. The second is a much wider study of power politics in the country, and whose title – ‘Who Rules South Africa’ – promises a partial answer to a question that vexes many, from neo-Communists to the denizens of the ski slopes of Davos.

‘Eight Days in September’, with its movie-worthy title and its author’s impeccable credentials, would have been one of the rare things – a book written by an insider about events so recent as to be still raw. However, Rev Chikane misses several tricks. The first is not of his own making: the proximity to the present day of the events described means that many of the details are still classified, and the Rev. Chikane is too loyal a civil servant to break the law in the service of historical record. But the other errors are purely of his own commission.

The Reverend Chikane’s sins of commission are legion. The primary one, and the source of all the sins that follow, is the blind loyalty to both the man – Mbeki – and to the fiction that the ANC is still the ideologically pure institution where ideas matter more than individuals. Thus he wears blinders to Mbeki’s obvious governance mistakes, and the failure to cultivate the party’s base. The Mbeki who emerges from the pages is an ultimately just, ultimately patient, ultimately wise leader, who sacrifices his lifelong work for the sake of the nation. That may be partly true, but the good reverend does not bother to cast a more critical eye on his former boss.

The second sin is the belief that Africa is still stuck in the battles of the 1960s. There is an attempt to cast Mbeki as the ideological heir to Kwame Nkrumah – without the realisation that Nkrumah’s star fell to earth decades ago.

But the ultimate failure of the book as the seminal account of Mbeki’s removal is that it is so narrowly focussed that you would have to be South African – and a keen follower of the country’s politics – for it to make sense. There is no attempt to situate the events of that fateful month to the wider ANC – and South African – situation. The assumption is that the reader will be acquainted with the different actors and events which played a key role in Mbeki’s removal.

Which is why Plaut’s book (which he co-wrote with Paul Holden) is so welcome. Here are the missing gaps. Mbeki’s removal was engineered by the man who now rules South Africa – Jacob Zuma. But his ill-discipline, in his personal, political and financial affairs, has meant that he has become a caricature. And that caricature – of the man who has sex with an HIV-positive woman young enough to be his daughter, and whose prophylactic was then a shower – obscures just how much peril the South African political system was in the middle part of the last decade. The various court cases brought against Zuma – for rape, corruption and others – collided with a certain inevitability about his rise to the very top. And the means used to engage in the fight between the two men are the stuff of political horror – use of the country’s intelligence services; dark mutterings about coups and counter-coups; and damning, yet counterfeit, e-mails.

‘Who Rules South Africa’ plots the undulating contours of the ANC in its latter years. Martin Plaut, a South African who made his name in the British media (he’s a long-time Africa editor at the BBC) and Paul Holden, an observer of South African politics, take the wide view.

The key events in September 2008 are put in their proper context, and the fallout brought to the present day.

The ANC is a strange beast in 21st-century Africa – it’s a wealthy, powerful and politically safe ruling party, yet it retains the fiction that its ‘cadres’ are at the full service of the party. What this is supposed to mean in practical terms is that individual ambition is verboten in what’s supposed to be the most ambitious of all careers. The even bigger fiction is that individual input, especially at the highest offices in the land, has little impact on ANC, and thus government, policy. The theory is that policy bubbles up from below – with its beginnings at the local branches. The policy is then supposed to be interrogated as it moves progressively higher in the organisation, culminating in well thought-out, and thoroughly well-argued, programme of action.

The reality, though, as Plaut and Holden show, is that personality is at the very heart of what ails the ANC. Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma represented the two wings of the ruling party. The first was the cerebral, intellectual wing of the party – the one that was prepared in 1996 to break with decades of doctrine and develop the GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) programme, which effectively negated the party’s redistributive policies of the 1950s ANC. The second wing was the one which still saw itself as the guardian of the people, and represented in the populist, earthy Zuma.

Some analysts say that the party is ripe for a breakup, and Plaut and Holden go into a significant amount of detail on how the ANC’s ruling partners (the Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions – COSATU) have increasingly been critical of the party and its weaknesses. However, even after the ouster of Mbeki left a deep well of dissatisfaction within the party, the breakaway Congress of the People (COPE), which hoped to draw from that well, barely made a dent in the 2009 elections.

But if anyone thought that Mbeki’s defenestration would lead to a papering over of the party’s divisions, they were in for a rude shock. One of Zuma’s most ardent (and loudest) supporters was the head of the Youth League, Julius Malema. But helping to kick out the most powerful man in the land gave the lad a taste of blood, and he went after his mentor, Zuma. He called for ‘generational change’ in the party, and began positioning himself for power at the party’s conference in the municipality of Mangaung in December 2012. But Zuma struck first and firmly put the too-big-for-his-britches youngster in his place. But Zuma’s rebuke to Malema in September 2010 was not enough, and the latter’s attempts to insert himself into regional power politics (threatening the ruling elite in neighbouring Botswana with regime change) led to a denouement, and Malema was expelled from the party in November 2011.

‘Who Rules South Africa’ was written before the Mangaung conference (and is, in some ways, a primer to the meeting). It thus misses out on the biggest outcome of the convention – the comeback of the ANC’s long-lost son, Cyril Ramaphosa. He was recalled from political retirement and voted in as Zuma’s deputy at the ANC. He is the embodiment of what many wish for the ANC – a man who is as comfortable in the boardrooms of the world’s leading mining companies as he is in the mine shafts. Many accounts say that he was Nelson Mandela’s choice to be his successor, but he was outmanoeuvred by a wilier Thabo Mbeki. He chose – or was ‘deployed’ to – business (and some say he petulantly turned down an offer to be Foreign Minister) and achieved spectacular success.

Ramaphosa’s re-entry into the cauldron of ANC politics may come as a relief to some (the New York Times dubbed him ‘the Best Leader South Africa Has Not Yet Had’), but some wonder whether life in the fat lane has not made him lose touch with the masses. His involvement with a massacre in the settlement of Marikana in August 2012 (he sits on the board of the company that owns the mine, Lonmin, and sent an e-mail that casts him in bad light) disqualifies him in the eyes of some, but many argue that Zuma should appoint him de facto Prime Minister. Then, come the 2017 ANC conference and the 2019 Presidential election, Ramaphosa will finally take up the mantle denied to him twenty years before.

And at that time, maybe, the party, and the country, will have come to terms with the contradictions currently threatening to tear it apart. But even such an optimistic outlook may be failing to take into account certain unknowns. The country’s economy has slowed down significantly, primarily owing to the global economic crisis, as well as the crisis in the mining sector. And no one can discount the prospect of a populist, rejuvenated Julius Malema making a noisy, disruptive comeback, to yank the party back to what he feels is the soul from which it has departed.