The ascension of Jacob Zuma to the presidency of the African National Congress (ANC) is a phenomenon that continues to be seen as an exception to the rule. The explanations for Zuma’s triumph against the odds verge on the miraculous. Just how those odds were stacked against him makes for an interesting story. And in the nation’s collective psyche, Zuma stands as a lone hero who triumphed against a legion of enemies. I was not entirely surprised by Jacob Zuma’s ascension, however; the soil was fertile for the appearance of such a leader. More than that, I believe that if Jacob Zuma did not exist, the populists would have invented him.
The key to how Zuma made it to the ANC presidency, and then became president of the country, lies in understanding the legacy of former president Thabo Mbeki, and in the ongoing evolution of the ANC as a political party. If we look closely at Mbeki’s administration style, particularly the way in which the state started to relate to citizens and political parties, it becomes clear that a gap was created between the party and the institutions of government. And this gap conveniently accommodated the emerging Jacob Zuma cult. Zuma was packaged as an alternative to Mbeki; however, a closer look suggests that Jacob Zuma actually represents a particular way in which citizens are trying to relate to the people in power. And it is the antithesis of Thabo Mbeki’s approach to modernising the state and his relations with citizens. The idea of Zuma as an alternative was created in an attempt to normalise the frosty relationship between citizens and the formal institutions of government.
In 2006, during the personal legal woes that confronted Jacob Zuma after he was fired as deputy president of the country,1 I presented a paper at the third biennial conference of the South African Political Studies Association, held at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). The paper was titled ‘The ANC Leadership Crisis and the Age of Populism in Post-apartheid South Africa’. At the time, Zuma’s problems with the ANC appeared to be a straightforward case of an individual member of the party who had made a mistake by associating with an unsavoury character, namely, Schabir Shaik. Mbeki dealt with the problem by removing Zuma from government. That proved to be the beginning and not the end of the problem.
Zuma was facing corruption charges, which were subsequently followed by rape charges.2 Many South Africans believed this was the end of Zuma’s political career. But Zuma’s personal troubles distracted everyone’s attention from the political circumstances that reigned within the ANC and the country at that time. My argument was that the ANC was shifting towards a populist direction, and the country – at that time – was willing to embrace such a shift. This was, in my view, a moment when the party was searching for a political figurehead with whom people could identify, someone who represented a leadership style different from that of the autocratic Thabo Mbeki. This populist wave was not triggered or created by Jacob Zuma, but he would ride the wave to secure the presidency of the ANC and that of the country, and would later abandon the populist ticket once he became president, surrounding himself with a few trusted friends.
At the time, I argued that recent developments in the South African political landscape had raised questions about the political leadership emerging in the country – and only just a little over a decade after apartheid had ended. Since it came to power in 1994, the ruling ANC had largely defined the leadership fabric in the country, with its political project grounded on a moral appeal derived from the party’s role as a leader of both the liberation movement and the process of transformation. Recent events in South Africa, though, had left the ruling party on the defensive, and the ANC found it necessary to explain itself in terms of the leadership that it stood for. The need for introspection on the part of the ANC seems to have emerged after the dismissal of Jacob Zuma as deputy president in June 2005, due to his alleged involvement in corruption. Zuma was able to mobilise popular support among different ANC structures and within the trade unions, where the populist agenda was increasingly seen as an alternative to Mbeki’s style of leadership.
That was how I understood the political environment in which Jacob Zuma emerged, and how that environment rejected Thabo Mbeki. For me, it has never been about two individuals, but rather about how society and institutions shape their fate. Of course, their responses to circumstances would shape the particular way that Mbeki would exit and Zuma would enter South Africa’s political leadership. But personally, the two men had nothing to do with the main point, which was that it was becoming necessary for one form of leadership to take over from the other. At the time this explanation made sense to me. Eventually the same fate that troubled Mbeki would also trouble Zuma. The main difference between the two leaders in how they dealt with challenges within the party and society is that the one was able to learn from the mistakes of the other: Zuma had the privilege of learning from Mbeki’s mistakes. This explains why Zuma would hold on to power despite the numerous major problems he would encounter. Mbeki, on the other hand, had to write the script from scratch, and he got it wrong.
The framing of the conflict between Zuma and Mbeki is better understood in terms of both leadership style and expectations from the broader society and the party. When his supporters put Zuma forward as an alternative to Mbeki, the case was made that Zuma had a more open and consultative leadership approach.3 This comparison is rather inadequate, because, by that time, Zuma had not occupied any position where his leadership style might have revealed itself. In fact, his leadership style could only be traced back to his role within the exiled ANC during the liberation struggle as the head of counter-intelligence and various secret operations.4 Prior to his 1999 appointment as deputy president of the country, he served as Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Economic Affairs in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. A minor provincial appointment such as this does not license one to show the sort of leadership that would warrant comparison with a sitting president.
In addition, the position of deputy president is effectively a ceremonial one, unless the individual in that position is so driven that he or she attempts to make something out of it. The deputy’s actual responsibilities largely involve presiding over the reburial of struggle heroes’ remains, attending the funerals of dignitaries and possibly also convening not-so-interesting inter-ministerial committees, which usually fall apart after a few meetings. It is difficult, if not impossible, to recognise a leadership style from someone in this position, which made it convenient to compare Zuma’s virtually non-existent leadership style with Mbeki’s tight grip on power.
By then Mbeki’s leadership style had become apparent over the years, largely in the way he arranged state institutions. In 2000, in a play on Brian Pottinger’s book about PW Botha, The Imperial Presidency, political scientist Sean Jacobs5 was the first to describe Mbeki’s leadership style6 as an ‘imperial presidency’. Mbeki has subsequently written a series of letters attempting to dismiss the idea that he was obsessed with power. At least the former president is aware of the perception that he was aloof.
The idea that Mbeki’s administration was an ‘imperial presidency’ was derived from the way he organised the state bureaucracy. This, in turn, influenced how his political party (the ANC) and ordinary citizens would relate to the state. Assertions were made that Mbeki was a centrist, and that he preferred to concentrate power in a few government institutions that he could personally control. I bought into this idea at first. However, as I began to think it through back in 2006, it became clear that before Mbeki took over as president, following the collapse of the apartheid regime, South Africa had no coherent state bureaucracy. Under apartheid, South Africa had a highly centralised state system aimed at ensuring stability in the country, while pushing against any attempts to delegitimise the regime. The organisation of society centred on the use of the security apparatus, and government did not see itself as obligated to account to citizens. That configuration did not allow for the creation of the type of bureaucracy based on democratic principles, including the separation of powers between the executive, the judiciary and the legislature. Mbeki’s attempt to build a modern bureaucracy was the first concerted effort after apartheid.
President Nelson Mandela had attempted to lay the foundations for a state bureaucracy. But it was Mbeki who consolidated the bureaucracy and gave it a recognisable shape. His approach was not perfect, but it laid a solid basis for what we have today. Before I explain how Mbeki did that, it is important to stress the main point of this analysis: the manner in which Mbeki organised the state bureaucracy produced a situation where his own party grew more and more discontented. They