Amid a series of lengthy back-and-forths in court between Zuma and state prosecutors, the ANC held its 52nd national conference in Polokwane in December 2007. Despite the controversies swirling around Zuma, party members still thought it wise to elect him as party president, and a coterie of his most ardent supporters to other top positions. This led to the recall of Mbeki as South African president in September 2008, with Kgalema Motlanthe replacing him as placeholder president until the 2009 general elections, when Zuma would ascend to the national presidency.
In early 2009, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) removed the final obstacle on Zuma’s path to the presidency when it dropped all 783 counts against him. The decision was taken after prosecutors had obtained a set of ‘spy tapes’ that allegedly contained evidence of a political conspiracy against Zuma.18 The decision to drop the charges was taken despite the fact that no judge or anyone outside the top echelons of the prosecuting authority had ever listened to the tape recordings. Soon after, on 9 May 2009, Zuma was sworn in as president.
The ascent to power of a deeply compromised group of leaders turned the stream of corruption into a torrent. The seemingly endless list of politicians and officials who took to plundering state resources include several of Zuma’s own ministers.
In early December 2013, the then Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, found that communications minister Dina Pule had ‘persistently lied’ and conducted herself ‘unethically’ after she had used state funds to give her boyfriend a R6 million government tender. In the same week, Madonsela also found Zuma’s then agriculture minister, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, guilty of maladministration as well as improper and unethical conduct in the irregular awarding of a R800 million fisheries tender.
Another star in this firmament is the minister of social development, Bathabile Dlamini. She grew up in Nkandla, seat of Jacob Zuma’s infamous private compound in rural KwaZulu-Natal. She later helped to build the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) in that province. In 2006, Dlamini was one of 14 ANC MPs convicted of fraud in the ‘Travelgate’ scandal, and lost her position as an MP. However, at the 52nd National Conference of the ANC in December 2007, she was elected to the ANC’s national executive committee and national working committee, allegedly because she campaigned for Zuma’s election as ANC president. She was appointed as deputy minister of social development in May 2009, as minister of social development in November 2010, and became president of the ANCWL in 2015.
In 2017, Dlamini brought the country’s welfare system to the brink of collapse when she failed to put in place a plan to pay social grants after a corrupt R10 billion contract with a private company had been nullified by the Constitutional Court. Instead, Dlamini obfuscated, and forced the court to extend the corrupt contract for another year.
In March 2017, Cosatu called on her to resign, failing which it would mobilise a ‘massive countrywide worker protest’ aimed at forcing her to vacate her position.19 Later the same week, Corruption Watch joined a growing list of organisations and individuals calling for her dismissal. Despite this, Dlamini remained in Zuma’s cabinet, allegedly because she supported Zuma’s ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, in her bid for the ANC and eventually the national presidency. Indeed, in November 2017, Dlamini announced that the ANCWL had ‘nominated’ Dlamini-Zuma as its preferred candidate for the ANC presidency.
The list goes on. Land reform minister Gugile Nkwinti was accused of handing a R97 million farm meant for land redistribution to a friend; Pule’s successor as communications minister, Faith Muthambi, lied to the SABC board about the appointment of the deranged Hlaudi Motsoeneng (a Zuma pick) to head the public broadcaster; mining minister Mosebenzi Zwane allegedly flew to Switzerland to facilitate a mining deal on behalf of the Gupta family; and small business minister Lindiwe Zulu was linked to a R631 million tender that was improperly awarded for the construction of toilets in the Amathole district municipality in the Eastern Cape.
Then there were the scandals surrounding Jacob Zuma himself. They include the aforementioned 783 corruption counts, which still need to be thoroughly investigated. There is also the Nkandla fiasco, with the Constitutional Court ruling in 2016 that Zuma had violated his oath of office when he defied an order from the Public Protector to pay back a portion of the R246 million in public funds spent in upgrading his private palace at Nkandla in impoverished rural KwaZulu-Natal. Although Public Protector Thuli Madonsela only ruled that Zuma should pay back a relatively small portion of the total costs, her report on Nkandla revealed a disturbing string of irregularities.
Zuma also treated one of South Africa’s most sensitive military installations, Waterkloof Air Force Base in Pretoria, as his personal taxi rank when he allegedly arranged clearance for his partners in crime, the Guptas, to land a passenger jet at the base. Police then escorted the Guptas and hundreds of guests to a family wedding at Sun City.
In mid-2017, a trove of leaked emails from the heart of the Gupta empire added fuel to the fire. During months of exposés in the media, the emails provided evidence of the ‘shadow state’ that Zuma and his wealthy benefactors had constructed since his ascent to power. Some of the more startling emails revealed how the Guptas had helped the Zuma family to obtain residency and multi-million-rand properties in the United Arab Emirates.20 The cache also revealed how their relationship with Zuma helped the Guptas to seize informal control of state-owned enterprises like Eskom and Transnet.21
Zuma’s anointment as party leader at Polokwane and the growing trail of scandals in the wake of this decision is the logical culmination of the corruption cancer that had metastasised and grown in the party ever since it came to power in 1994. Zuma and his patronage network did not create the culture of corruption in the ANC – but they perfected it and made it their own after Zuma became president in 2009.
Although the most visible, corruption is not the only long-term cause of the ANC’s decline. Despite laudable efforts in the 1990s to help South Africa escape a debt trap, and further halting progress in the early 2000s, the ANC has also recently presided over an economic implosion. Economic underperformance, particularly since 2009, has led to a steady increase in poverty and unemployment, consistently identified in Afrobarometer surveys as the single most important issue facing South African society.
Between 1994 and 2006, the economy grew at an average of 3.5 per cent a year. Since then, the annual average has dropped to less than 2 per cent, falling to 0.3 per cent in 2016. And in late 2016 and early 2017, the ANC plunged South Africa into its second recession in a decade when GDP growth declined during two successive quarters. Since the country’s population is increasing by 1.5 per cent a year, the simple reality of this economic collapse is that, during the past decade, South Africans have rapidly become poorer.
The ANC government’s destruction of the economy is reflected in the unemployment rate. After slowly falling during the early years of democracy, in the decade since 2008, the percentage of people without work has rapidly increased (Figure 4), reaching its highest level in 14 years in 2017. Even in terms of a narrow definition of unemployment, which excludes people who have given up on trying to find work, almost three in every ten adults of working age could not find a job. In 2017, more than half of South Africans were living below the poverty line, on an income of R779 or less a month.22
Source: Statistics South Africa.
In early 2017, poor economic growth, uncertainty about the ANC’s economic policies, and fears about escalating corruption prompted the international credit ratings agencies Fitch as well as Standard & Poor’s to cut the country’s rand-denominated sovereign debt rating to sub-investment grade – commonly known as junk status. For the first time since the turn of the century, South Africa was no longer regarded as a safe destination for international investors.
The ratings downgrade is one of the key reasons why the ANC will probably not