All of these failings, and others, do not detract from the fact that Mbeki did a sterling job in consolidating state bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that is the envy of many countries on the continent and elsewhere. But with this process came unintended consequences, which created fertile ground for Jacob Zuma to emerge as an alternative to Mbeki. The latter’s attempt to clinch a third term as the president of the party made Zuma even more attractive as a leader.
On a more complex level, it is difficult to build a modern bureaucracy in a situation where the majority of the people are still desperately poor. If attempts are made to build a modern Western-style state bureaucracy amid gross inequality and disturbing poverty levels,14 that bureaucracy will be seen as attempting to shield the state from the influence of the voters, particularly the economically destitute voters who need direct contact with the state as a distributor of opportunities and resources. It has been argued convincingly that poor countries will most likely not be able to sustain democracy.15 This is because of the burden of poverty and inequality on democracy. In a country where the majority of citizens are poor, they would demand rapid response from democratic institutions. This also means that they would find government bureaucracy to be inaccessible; hence they will be more willing to turn away from democracy.
This impasse, which commonly affects newer democracies, often results in difficulties where the founding political party has to transform itself from dispensing the rhetoric of serving the people and bringing government to the people to being a modern party functioning within the limits of a full-fledged bureaucracy. By its nature, bureaucracy requires delegation, and essentially lacks the direct point of contact that newly liberated citizens often yearn for. Bureaucracy and the politics of representation will always be alienating for citizens such as South Africans, the majority of whom have been distant from government except when it policed their affairs under apartheid.
As a founding party of South Africa’s democratic dispensation, the ANC has confronted this challenge in an interesting way. The party naturally became alienated from the general populace, as it presided over a bureaucratic and institutional framework requiring that those in government were not in direct contact with voters. This has resulted in the ANC finding it difficult to manage its own transition from being a mass-based liberation movement to a political party in charge of the modern state.
The ANC is finding it difficult to manage the transition. The party is being forced to transform from a rhetorical mass political movement to a modern political party. And the ANC in power is in charge of state resources – and responsible for those who might not even have voted for it. The pace and tenacity with which state bureaucracy intensified under Mbeki’s two terms as president made it increasingly uncomfortable for the party to live up to the challenges of the day. The ANC naturally felt left out of state affairs during Mbeki’s term, which widened the gap between the ANC and government. An opportunity existed for the emergence of a leadership that would bring government back under the party’s thumb. The floor was open to calls for populism, which rested on a listening leader who would not only respond more to the party’s demands on government, but was also expected to tame government and subject its functioning to the party’s whims.
It did not take much effort to brand the consolidation of state bureaucracy as a Thabo Mbeki project. The idea of ‘anyone but Mbeki’ emerged, notably mobilised by Cosatu and the SACP, the two formations that did not enjoy privilege in accessing the state machinery, including the ANC leadership in government. The practical implication of a stronger and solid bureaucracy in a modern democracy is that it usually reduces the influence of labour on state policy. Cosatu and the SACP, being the bastions of organised labour, were not given sufficient space during the consolidation of bureaucracy under Mbeki. So it was Cosatu and the SACP that attempted a reformulation of the anti-bureaucracy stance as an alternative to Mbeki’s leadership. Clumsily yet successfully, they mobilised the call for Zuma to emerge as a leader who would restore the position of the party in relation to the state – a leader who would effectively bring government back to the people.
Conveniently, Jacob Zuma was packaged as a victim of the excessive manipulation of state apparatus against an individual who connected with the people. Zuma was expected not to intensify the bureaucratisation of the state and its institutions, but to roll it back and customise it in a way that the broader ‘masses’, who brought him to power, would have a say in how government functions. The idea of an alternative gained momentum to the extent where it was only defined in relation to what it was not, and not what it actually entailed. It was a matter of a quick political machination to occupy the political space that was making itself readily available.
When Jacob Zuma emerged as an alternative to Mbeki, no efforts were made to demonstrate what he actually stood for. The focus was largely on what he would not be – and he would not be Mbeki. By then it was my strong belief that ‘if Jacob Zuma did not exist, the populists would have invented him’. His emergence as the alternative had little to do with personal acumen. Instead he was framed in an idealist manner.
The reality has been that the populist euphoria that brought Zuma to power could not sustain him once he reached the Union Buildings. As president, he had to implement certain decisions that affirmed state bureaucracy, just as Mbeki had done. The main difference between Zuma and Mbeki in relation to the bureaucracy is that Mbeki played a fundamental role in engineering the state bureaucracy and paid a price for this, while Zuma only had to maintain and strengthen the bureaucracy that was already in place, and to use it carefully to ensure his political survival.
While Zuma may differ with Mbeki in terms of rhetoric, the two men’s actions as statesmen and presidents follow the familiar bureaucratic trail constructed by Mbeki. The lesson from Zuma’s rise to power is that populism is good when it comes to replacing leaders, but not in sustaining leadership. Having come to power by surfing the populist wave, Zuma could not run the state by the same means. Further, by having to follow the bureaucracy of government, Zuma found himself in a situation where he could not claim to balance the relationship between the party and government.
At some point, too much concern with the party would render him an ineffective and unfocused president. On the other hand, too much focus on government affairs would result in the party drifting away and the development of a vacuum at party leadership level – the same vacuum that created an opening for Zuma as a populist candidate. He is the first president of the country who had to fight for a second term as the president of the ANC in government, because the ANC was getting accustomed to replacing leadership whimsically. But Zuma also reflected how leadership has learned to manipulate the internal processes of the party and the institutions of the state to remain in power, irrespective of how party members feel. If indeed Zuma was to be the man of the people, with an unassailable connection to the broader masses outside and inside his party, he would not have had to make a case for his retention as the president of the ANC during the party’s 2012 elective conference in Mangaung.
President Nelson Mandela did not have an interest in a second term either as party president or as president of the country. Had Mandela intended to continue for a second term, it would have been secured without a squabble within the ANC. President Thabo Mbeki also marched into his second term of the presidency without having to contest it. But Zuma had to make a case for the second term by getting internal party approval. His presidency came at a time when the ANC was constantly reviewing how it relates to government. This is not a stable environment, even though it is part of a working democracy. Jacob Zuma’s presidency has not been the most stable. Internal party squabbles have intensified since his triumph at Polokwane in 2007. Perhaps all this has much to do with South Africa’s political evolution, and Zuma’s leadership just happens to find itself within