The proposal to shackle the media with a tribunal also represents a potentially sinister development. In the Mail & Guardian (30 July 2010), Michael Trapido asked: ‘Are we to be told in Mugabe-like fashion when millions are on the brink of starvation that colonialism and apartheid are responsible while a handful of fat cats live like Donald Trump? Is the government seriously expecting the media to condone their hiding of information?’ For John Kane-Berman (Business Day, 16 August 2010), the proposed media tribunal is essentially an attempt to reduce the media to the status of an instrument of the ANC’s ‘national democratic revolution’.
Justice Malala (Times Live, 30 August 2010), a fierce critic, argues that ‘the ANC … has the weakest, greediest, most corrupt and compromised leadership since its birth ninety-eight years ago. These so-called leaders want to shut down the medium that exposes their corruption, looting and hypocrisy’. Equally strident is Rhoda Kadalie (Business Day, 31 August 2010) who bemoans a crisis of governance under the ANC: ‘Whether it is children killed through reckless driving, corrupt MPs, an unruly SABC, Sisulu or irregular mining deals, they all point to one thing – a creeping anarchic state where things fall apart because the centre is out of control’. The view of much of the media was effectively captured by Lee Hall who, in an open letter to President Zuma (Mail & Guardian, 2 October 2010), argued that: ‘The African National Congress have signally failed their own people. They have failed the country. And they have failed Africa. It is time now for them either to mend their ways, or else to go – before the Zanufication of South Africa becomes irreversible.’
KEY DIFFERENCES: The experience of liberation
Despite the force and accuracy of at least some of the above commentaries, taken collectively they appear crude, one-dimensional and overstated. South Africa is not Zimbabwe, although we might add the caveat that Zanufication is a process rather than an event and that Zimbabwe was not always as it appears today. The process gives Zanufication a gradual, incremental character, with the symptoms identified above embedding themselves over time, if left unchallenged. Therefore the more appropriate question is not ‘has South Africa become the new Zimbabwe?’ but, rather, ‘in what direction are things moving and do they appear to place South Africa on a Zimbabweanstyle trajectory?’
According to his biographer, Mark Gevisser (2007: 433), Mbeki was almost alone among the ANC leadership in his admiration for Zanu in the independence elections of 1980. In general, the ANC was dismayed by the Zanu victory. It had close links to Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) and the ANC’s armed wing had fought with Zipra (the armed wing of Zapu) in the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns in the 1960s. After independence, relations between the Zanu government and the ANC were sensitive, and a number of ANC operatives were detained during the 1983 Matabeleland massacres which cost some 20 000 civilian lives. These massacres provided an early indication of Zanu’s authoritarian character and its preference for transacting politics through violence. A badly mauled Zapu was forced into a government of national unity as a junior partner. Although it is tempting to see this as a precursor of the current arrangement with the MDC, the earlier agreement was the product of Zanu coercion and it was able to dictate terms to a broken-backed Zapu. By contrast, the contemporary agreement, although it was the product of Zanu intransigence in refusing to accept electoral defeat, was essentially driven by external forces, particularly the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The GPA was constructed in the face of strong Zanu hostility, even being viewed as an affront to its dignity, thus the reluctance – in some cases, outright refusal – to implement fully its provisions.
If the social character of Zimbabwe is different from that of South Africa, so too are its experiences of white domination. In the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans were peasants and almost half of Rhodesia’s territory was tribal trust land. This contrasts with the scattered and miniscule thirteen per cent of land reserved for black Africans in apartheid South Africa, and the difference is the secret behind the relative success of the Zimbabwean guerrilla struggle, especially in the Eastern Highlands, whereas the guerrilla struggle in South Africa seldom moved beyond the armed propaganda phase.
The epicentre of the South African struggle was the township (both urban and rural), the university campus, the factory shop floor, the faith community and the popular and underground publications, and this set it apart from most Third World liberation struggles in the twentieth century. South Africa developed its anti-apartheid struggle though the wide-ranging democratic movement, the United Democratic Front (UDF) which linked trade unions, civic society organisations, the churches, and women’s movements into a formidable force with deep popular roots. This has no counterpart in Zimbabwe’s struggle for liberation. It is true that after 1994 the UDF was disbanded, but its legacy has been a powerful civil society and a widespread commitment to pluralism, factors which constitute a powerful antidote to Zanufication. South Africa is not, of course, immune to the ruling party stagnation and bureaucratisation we have seen in Zimbabwe or, for that matter, and in a somewhat different context, in the communist parties of the former Soviet bloc. But after independence in Zimbabwe, the mass base of the liberation struggle was demobilised. Many fighters returned to the countryside while the leaders became cabinet ministers and generals. Raymond Suttner (2010) has eloquently charted the tendency by ANC leaders to use the mass movement as a ‘battering ram’ rather than a partner (particularly evident during the negotiated transition) and the tendency towards centralisation and aloofness which became so striking under Mbeki was evident even when Mandela was leader. This has inevitably led to dismay and demoralisation among the rank and file. Mbeki’s own emphatic defeat by Zuma in the election for the party presidency in 2007, however, confirmed that this demoralisation and demobilisation was much less advanced in the ANC, and that the party grassroots still maintained a vibrancy and assertiveness – and a capacity to overturn elite machinations – which has all but disappeared in Zanu PF.
The strength of South African civil society is evident in the activities of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) on HIV/AIDS, South Africans for a Basic Income Grant, and the Anti-Privatisation Forum, as well as the annual strikes by workers against the effects of privatisation. These organisations are new social movements which have introduced new concepts of citizenship and collective action, and most of them operate at the local level. The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, or SECC, for example, has campaigned for access to affordable services in that township. The SECC has its roots in the ANC – its leader, Trevor Ngwane, is a charismatic figure who was expelled from the ruling party for opposing restructuring plans for Johannesburg. The SECC has sought to invigorate not only veteran activists and ordinary people, but also young people. It seeks to emulate the ANC’s own traditions of defiance by leading marches to councillors and the mayor’s house, often cutting off the latter’s electricity supply (Egan and Wafer, 2004). The chapter by Buccus and Hicks elsewhere in this volume adds further evidence to our argument in regard to the resilience of South Africa’s NGO sector.
The TAC put together the first successful, national-level social movement and fights, as part of the wider Social Justice Coalition, for cheaper anti-retroviral drugs, and to eliminate the stigma associated with being HIV positive. It used the court system effectively and maintains (at times controversially) relations with the ruling ANC, as well as with key elements within the municipal and provincial health bureaucracies. In addition, the TAC has built a movement that includes AIDS sufferers as well as a cross-racial membership and leadership and good ties with the trade union movement (Jacobs, 2008).
THE ANC AND ZANU PF
The ANC was established in 1912 and is Africa’s oldest liberation movement. Its commitment to democracy and nonracialism is more powerful than that of Zanu PF, and the Freedom Charter which was endorsed by the ANC in 1955 at the Congress of the People