Publication: Business Day Date: 2005-11-18 Reporter: Anthony Butler Reporter:

Mutually Assured Destruction

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date

2005-11-18

Reporter

 Anthony Butler

Web Link

www.bday.co.za

 

A contest between Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki for the presidency of the African National Congress (ANC) is something the liberation movement and the country most certainly do not need. Fortunately, it is probably not what we are going to get.

Mbeki’s critics portray him as a leader out to steal the ANC presidency, and then secure a third term as state president.

Commentators meanwhile claim that only the courts can keep Zuma out of the Union Buildings. Despite the widespread support for Mbeki’s actions against the former deputy state president, they argue the ANC is divided into two hostile camps, the larger of which will accept nothing less than Zuma’s ascension to the pinnacle of party and state power.

Mbeki has certainly shown a great aptitude for discrediting rivals, but what evidence is there for such ambitions? Enemies argue that he has prepared carefully to retain control of the ANC presidency at the 2007 ANC national conference. He launched “anticorruption” initiatives *1 whose real purpose, they claim, is to disable potential opponents.

From this perspective, Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi’s Project Consolidate, the auditor general’s investigation of municipal financial mismanagement, the National Intelligence Agency’s snooping on municipal agitators, and home affairs’ new anticorruption strategy, are all designed to undermine anti-Mbeki barons. Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi seems set to use the African Peer Review Mechanism to bolster the credibility of this campaign for “good governance”.

Meanwhile, internal ANC investigations will allegedly culminate in disciplinary exclusions of members, the suspension of “corrupt” activists, and the barring from conference of branches found not to be “properly constituted”. After this purging of the discontented, critics claim, it will be easy for an increasingly centralised candidate-selection machinery to send a herd of compliant cadres to parliament, where they can re-elect Mbeki for a further term in office.

No wonder Zuma’s supporters have saluted Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela for recognising that a lifetime presidency is a bad thing.

On closer investigation, however, the odds are very heavily stacked against both Zuma and Mbeki. It is not impossible that circumstances might conspire to produce a favourable and timely verdict for Zuma that allows him to move directly from jail to the presidency. Likewise Mbeki might stand again as ANC president, and later be chosen state president. But each is extremely unlikely. Zuma and Mbeki have burned too many bridges and neither embodies the consensual and accommodative character required to secure the support of a broad coalition within the ANC.

If these two titans are not in fact engaged in a genuine contest for the leadership of the ANC and the presidency, what is it that explains the scale and intensity of the conflict between their two supposed “great camps”?

The two leaders are locked in the embrace of mutually assured destruction. The only real case to be made for either man is that he is able to prevent the victory of the other; once one falls away, so too will the other.

Zuma’s campaign has little positive energy. It feeds on discontent with Mbeki’s perceived manipulation of party and state. For Congress of South African Trade Unions activists, this is an ideological morality tale about Mbeki’s capitulation to big business and “neoliberal” economic orthodoxy. For activists in KwaZulu Natal, it concerns a “plot” to bar any Zulu from the presidency while entrenching “Xhosa dominance”. Other Zuma disciples cannot tolerate Mbeki’s inability to perform the song-and-dance routines of populist democracy.

Despite strong regional support, Zuma is at the mercy of forces he cannot control. Many of his purported supporters are bolstering his candidacy primarily because they know he will not win.

Other credible challengers know they might easily fall victim to scandal — around oil sector corruption, foreign coups d’etats, underage sexual impropriety, or investigations by our diligent revenue service. They are using support for Zuma to reject the “politics of accusation” that might later threaten their own prospects, and to insist on the principle “innocent until proven guilty” that will safeguard their own political ambitions.

Meanwhile, Mbeki’s prospect of a further term as ANC president — and the associated patronage potential of his hangers-on and sycophants — depends on promoting the pretence that Zuma remains seriously in the game. And indeed, if newspaper coverage is anything to go by, Zuma’s supposed partisans have driven SA to the brink of catastrophe.

Patronage and corruption are spreading like wildfire across all three spheres of government. Local barons aligned with Zuma are “buying” ANC branches in order to gain control over municipal contracts. The seething masses meanwhile burn pictures of Mbeki, and clamour for their hero — JZ — to be propelled to the ANC presidency and beyond.

Only Mbeki, in this hysterical view, can avert populist tyranny. His wise counsel alone can steer the country through this turmoil, and properly constituted ANC branches must have the democratic right to retain him as ANC president. He should not be denied a democratic third incumbency by “term limits” prescribed by foreigners.

Mbeki has presumably encouraged such speculation about his intentions, in part to avoid becoming a “lame duck”. By retaining the option of his own candidacy, moreover, he is better placed at least to influence the succession. At some stage, however, the real terrain of the succession battle will become clearer.

This will not be a battle between two individuals dividing the ANC into giant camps. The state presidency — especially when held in conjunction with the ANC presidency — has become a pervasive and dangerous site of authority. No significant faction or individual is willing to see the office fall into the hands of others. It is for this reason that various fluid and unwieldy coalitions have been formed, war chests assembled, and a destabilising battle already joined that has spilled over into public institutions.

Zuma has no cards left to play. Mbeki’s last gambit, should he wish to play it, might be to break up the centralised presidential power that he created and to distribute authority more widely across the state and liberation movement.

Such a decentralisation of power might help prevent our politics becoming a winner-takes-all race for the conjoined presidencies of the ANC and the state. The state presidency could become a symbolic office to be occupied by a visionary national leader such as Nelson Mandela. Cabinet government could be reborn and include a prime minister’s office. The already powerful finance minister could become head of a super-cluster of economic departments that would serve as a real counterweight to any populist president.

Mbeki might then — if the party allowed him — retreat with old comrades like Joel Netshitenzhe to a bolstered ANC presidency, from which office he might be able to exert a residual influence over the executive branch of the state.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of Contemporary South Africa.

With acknowledgements to Anthony Butler and the Business Day.


*1  Not at his own instance. This was left to Fishers of Corrupt Men.

Mbeki's biggest present concern is what Zuma is going to say during and after his corruption trial.

In the third world, a present president's biggest concern is whether their successor will have them charged for corruption. There is therefore always a great incentive to have a successor with benign intentions towards their predecessor.