RALPH MATHEKGA
WHEN
ZUMA
GOES
Tafelberg
This book is dedicated to
my parents, Solomon and Constance Mathekga, for always encouraging me to make my case whenever I feel I have a case to make.
Foreword by Justice Malala
The past and the present are not contested. With the 1994 democratic breakthrough we started off relatively well and have now reached a cul-de-sac. The real question is this: what now? What does the future hold? It would seem that in the hurly-burly of our present political impasse we have forgotten how to raise our eyes to the future and begin to interrogate what the South Africa of our children will look like.
South African political discourse has been in the grip of the Jacob Zuma phenomenon since May 2005, when he was fired by then president Thabo Mbeki. We have been in the grip of the ‘Zunami’, the politics of performance instead of policy, the rise of populism with nary a thought of the actual work of government and the empowerment of people.
Zuma has become the central figure of our politics. His personal and political scandals are numerous; his gaffes are legendary; his grip on power absolute; his survival skills a thing of wonder. His political demise has been predicted thousands of times by pundits across the globe. His continued presence proves them all wrong.
The man has become a mirage, his face on the front pages of newspapers and the headlines of television news bulletins, yet he is still a closed book to the people he leads. To the citizens of South Africa, the question ‘Who is Jacob Zuma?’ still resonates.
We may never really know. What Ralph Mathekga aims to achieve is to take the political football we are toying with and yank us towards the real game: our future needs to be addressed now, and addressed seriously.
This is because that future is being written now. As the South African political landscape unfolds, serious damage is being done to the key to our future: the institutions of democracy. Cast your eye to the courts, which have been labelled ‘reactionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’. The Zuma administration chose to disobey a court order ruling that South Africa should respect its international obligations by arresting the Sudanese strongman, Omar al-Bashir, and sending him to face trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Cast your eye over the Hawks, the supposedly independent crime-fighting unit that was set up to investigate high-profile serious crimes. The Hawks replaced the much-admired Scorpions, the independent unit that investigated and put together the 783 counts of fraud, racketeering and corruption that Zuma has evaded since 2005. The Hawks are now led by an apartheid-era policeman who was found by the Pretoria High Court to have lied under oath.
There are many other examples. Remember that Zuma survived an impeachment vote in April 2016 after the Constitutional Court said he failed in his duty to uphold, defend and protect the Constitution by ignoring the Public Protector’s recommendation that he repay some of the R246 million in state funds spent on renovating his home.
Then think about his effect on the respect and integrity of state institutions. In December 2015, he did untold damage to the currency and the National Treasury when he fired the respected Finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, and replaced him with a hapless unknown junior MP. Trust built up over years in the stability of South Africa’s financial institutions evaporated, and that mistrust remains among domestic and international investors.
This is what we know. This is what we have seen happen before our eyes. So what do the next ten years look like? How do we get on an upward trajectory? For anyone interested in the future of South Africa, this is the gaping hole in our political discourse. Our conversation has nothing concrete that shows us the damage wrought by the Zuma years and how we fix the problems the next generation is saddled with.
Ralph Mathekga has become one of South Africa’s most respected political analysts because he is obsessed with the future. In the Cold War years, he would have been one of the sages of the South African political landscape, for very few people can read our tea leaves as astutely and as effectively as he does. He gets the future right by reading the past and present correctly.
In this valuable book, Mathekga casts his eye forwards and begins to fill the void at the heart of our political discourse: how do we fix the damage of the Zuma years? What do those who will follow us need to do to set the country on what scenario planner Clem Sunter characterises as the high road to a brighter future?
The questions are tough and the answers are not easy to find. However, we, as a nation, cannot afford to look away and fiddle as our roof burns. We have to look the questions in the eye – hard. We have to do some very serious introspection.
Mathekga takes a hard look at our past, present and future, and, in his usual, unflinching style, takes our hand and begins to show us the path out of our current quagmire. This is an urgent and necessary book.
Justice Malala
Johannesburg, August 2016
Prologue
The good analyst does not take sides; it is not his duty to judge, for he is obliged to explain and provide a wider perspective. In order to explain developments and the actors who are at the forefront of developments, all of the actors should be accorded the same level of respect. Some actors may seem too shallow and lacking in sophistication to merit focused analysis. But it is the duty of an analyst to explain how these actors fit into the greater scheme of things.
History teaches us that people who have a major impact on the world are sometimes initially dismissed as lacking in sophistication and/or clear goals. But once that person finds himself in the middle of destruction, or in the driver’s seat of a massive campaign to change the world, the spotlight falls on them while people wonder how that person managed to get into such a position of power. That is when the pundits try to make sense of that political actor’s story, and try to understand why he was ignored in the first place. Years ago, Jacob Zuma was dismissed by many as a pariah, a man with no formal education and therefore incapable of committing to anything that could have an impact on society. Yet he will go down in history as one of the most controversial presidents in South African history, a man whose methods have been misunderstood and often oversimplified.
In this book, I aim to avoid simplifying Zuma. I want to understand the logic of his methods, and how that logic is reflected in his party, the African National Congress (ANC), and in society in general. There is a sense that the ANC would prefer to move away from the Zuma years, to write off its losses, and to completely extricate itself from the man. But this will not explain how the party produced Zuma, and what his impact has been on the party. If indeed the ANC were allowed to conveniently turn the page on Zuma, the nation would be left to ask whether another Zuma might eventually emerge within the ANC. It is only through a searching analysis of how Zuma emerged within the ANC in particular, and in South Africa in general, that we can come to a full understanding of what might lie ahead.
Perhaps Zuma is not an outlier; perhaps he is a necessary stage in the development of our country. He represents a particular stage in the development of the system. In order to understand what he represents, he should be looked at in comparison, and it has to be a fair comparison. There should be no judgment in carrying out this analysis. Whether one is right or wrong, in trying to understand what will happen when Zuma goes, it is important to start from the point of view that he is a product of South African society. One way or another, South Africa has to account for how Zuma emerged from within the ANC, and from within our society. This exercise is a necessary step in attempting to understand what will happen when Zuma goes. The problem might not be Zuma himself; the problem might be the common sense of the nation that trusted him to lead. The question is: can this nation be trusted not to repeat the same mistake?
ONE