The week before Christmas is not normally a time for political upheaval, but an exception has been made this year in Polokwane, South Africa. Unfortunately, reactions to the ANC national conference, which concluded this week with the selection of former vice-president Jacob Zuma as the party's new leader, have been alarmist and turned each of the two leading figures into caricatures. It has been Mbeki, the aloof and technocratically sound intellectual, against Zuma, the charismatic and dangerously flawed populist. But there is much more to it than that.
For the past 18 months there has been intense manoeuvring within the ANC. Behind the scenes, Mbeki called a number of wrong shots. In particular, in the wake of Zuma's dismissal from the vice-presidency last year, Mbeki's lieutenants advised him that he should immediately announce his choice of preferred successor. This would have pre-empted any Zuma comeback, as the ANC would have closed ranks around the president-to-be. But Mbeki hesitated, and momentum was lost.
There is a lot of truth in Zuma's accusations that Mbeki has twisted the rule of law to favour his cronies. When the national director of public prosecutions, Vusi Pikoli, was closing in on the national police commissioner with charges of corruption, Mbeki promptly suspended Pikoli and replaced him with Mokotedi Mpshe. This was the same Mpshe who, the day after Zuma won the ANC presidency, announced that it was highly probable that corruption charges would be reinstigated against him. There are indeed charges to answer, but the timing once again indicated an Mbeki effort to use law for political purposes.
Whether or not Zuma survives the new charges laid against him—and he has said he will stand down if convicted—he has been amazingly conciliatory towards the corporate sector; and there was much bargaining for several months before Tokyo Sexwale, a darling of the big bosses, threw his delegates and support behind Zuma. There are more than just words being said, and a deal of some sort had been made, with assurances that there would be, literally, business as usual.
Zuma has also been very outspoken about Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. He has accused Mbeki of leaving himself open to history's judgement by standing by as a dictator brought his country to ruin. If, in Harare, there was a temptation to avoid implementing the agreement between government and opposition that Mbeki had brokered (see my earlier article), on the grounds that Mbeki was now a lame duck, Zuma indicated that he had a settlement of the Zimbabwean issue firmly in mind—notwithstanding the traditional solidarity between his "liberation" wing of the ANC and Mugabe's own "liberationists."
In fact, the Zimbabwean agreement had been finalised on the very weekend of the Afro-European summit in Lisbon in early December, but curiously not—as had been expected—announced in public. The speculation was that Mugabe was anxious to see the lie of the land after the ANC conference. But the 3m Zimbabwean refugees on South African soil mean that Zuma has no choice but to extract this thorn in the side of the township flesh—for the refugees compete for the same menial jobs as the South African poor. In South Africa, they would have constituted an election issue too many for whoever had won Polokwane.
Immediately after Zuma's victory, the much-respected finance minister, Trevor Manuel, spoke out on Zuma's behalf. It wasn't an endorsement as such, more an indication that even a consummate practitioner of financial prudence such as Manuel was prepared to give the new man time to bed down, perhaps to see how well any deals brokered with people like Sexwale might be honoured.
But Mbeki's manoeuvre had worked. The announcement about the corruption charges diluted the celebrations in the Zuma camp, and immediately sparked off speculation over who would have to be plucked from the shadows to carry the ANC banner if Zuma was convicted. In a way, this was unfortunate. Whatever the result, Polokwane had been an exercise in democracy. No liberation party, including the ANC, had done anything so genuinely democratic before.
Zuma has tried his best to draw attention away from his own past mistakes. He has taken a public Aids test, which also served to highlight Mbeki's famous blind spot about HIV. Zuma has, as indicated above, come to some sort of agreement with Tokyo Sexwale, and there will be contact between Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa—another ANC veteran turned financial giant, whom many thought should have been president instead of Mbeki. In short, Zuma has gone out of his way to reassure his critics.
Having said that, he is a man of genuine flaws. He is not a technocrat, he doesn't understand economics, and doesn't fully appreciate law and justice. He lectured lawyers recently on their waste of time in defending murderers and rapists in court. He himself may shortly need to have his own day in court.
And if Mbeki used pernicious political manoeuvrings to attempt to set up Polokwane as best he could, Zuma's people used a lot of direct political bullying. This aspirant president of the richest and most powerful state in Africa can also behave like a small-town thug. He has a learning curve like nothing on earth.
Everyone is speculating about what will happen if the corruption charges stick. But what if they don't? The first set of charges fell because of technical failures in the prosecution case. This was not necessarily through incompetence; it is very hard to trace the laundering of corrupt funds sufficiently to make a case beyond reasonable doubt. Zuma might survive. If he does, he will go on to win the national presidential election in 2009. The world had better get used to the idea of working with him. If South Africa is to be the beacon of Africa, if it is to have a vibrant first-world economy, it simply cannot be a country where so many people live in poverty, are victims of crime, are subject to disease and cannot be sure of education. It is for these people Zuma claims to speak. He speaks for them because neither Mbeki nor the west spoke for them.
