Long walk to cronyism
Copinage en Afrique du Sud (réf. au livre de Nelson Mandela Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom; Un long chemin vers la liberté)
En Afrique du Sud, l’ANC soutient encore Jacob Zuma.
Le mois dernier, en Afrique du Sud, un vote au Parlement ayant valeur de test sur l’unité de l’ANC, le parti présidentiel, a eu lieu. Jacob Zuma, le chef de l’État, bien que mêlé à de nombreux scandales, a survécu à cette nouvelle motion de défiance. Si celle-ci avait été votée, il aurait dû démissionner. L’hebdomadaire britannique The Economist estime que cela aurait été une bonne chose.
The most striking thing about the vote over whether to sack Jacob Zuma was the claims his supporters did not make. During the debate, in South Africa’s parliament on August 8th, no one said: “Let’s keep Mr Zuma as our president because he has done such a splendid job of running the country.” Some MPs from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) did not mention him by name at all, so embarrassing has his record become. Instead, they accused the opposition of all manner of skulduggery and, of course, racism.
2. The defence minister likened the motion of no confidence in Mr Zuma to a coup. The arts minister called the opposition parties that supported the motion “Mickey Mouse organisations”. Shortly after Mr Zuma narrowly survived the vote, his police minister described those who failed to back his boss as “suicide-bombers”.
3. Mmusi Maimane, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the largest (and most liberal) opposition group, spoke with more conviction. He called Mr Zuma a “corrupt and broken president” and quoted ANC grandees, including two former presidents of South Africa, who had called either explicitly or implicitly for parliament to throw him out. He even suggested that Nelson Mandela, were he still alive, would have voted to ditch the president. Julius Malema, the leader of the other big opposition party, the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters, was even more forthright in his contempt for Mr Zuma.
A NARROW VICTORY
4. Yet when the votes were tallied, the great survivor clung to power: the opposition fell 24 votes short of the 201 needed to remove him. His supporters celebrated by dancing and singing songs from the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s old racist regime, which ended in 1994. There have been several previous attempts in parliament to oust Mr Zuma, but this was the most significant yet because it was the first in which MPs were allowed to vote in secret. The Constitutional Court had argued, in effect, that this was the only way ANC MPs could oppose the president without fear of reprisals. But in the end, party loyalty and Mr Zuma’s considerable powers of patronage kept him in the job.
5. Nonetheless, the vote was a stark warning for the ANC. Mr Zuma mustered only 198 MPs in his defence, a woeful result for the head of a party with 249 out of 400 seats in parliament. After accounting for absentees, it seems that a fifth of ANC MPs either abstained or voted against their president.
6. It is not hard to see why. Mr Zuma faces 783 charges of corruption, which he denies; his next court hearing is this month. A report from the public protector, an ombudsman, has accused Mr Zuma and the Guptas, a family of Indian businesspeople, of orchestrating “state capture”. And the president’s son, Duduzane, may be called to answer questions before a parliamentary committee that is investigating allegations of graft at state-owned companies involving some of Mr Zuma’s key allies.
7. Before the vote Mr Zuma’s former minister of tourism, Derek Hanekom, spoke for many disgruntled ANC members, not to mention the country as a whole, when he complained of “massive looting and corruption”. Such is the cronyism and mismanagement of the Zuma administration that South Africa has dipped into recession, its debt has been downgraded to junk and unemployment is a whopping 28% (or 36% if one includes those who have given up looking for work). The economy contracted at an annualised rate of 0.7% in the first quarter, even as the population swells by 1.6% a year. Meanwhile, Mr Zuma’s cronies have grown staggeringly and ostentatiously rich.
A BETTER LIFE FOR SOME
8. Although they lost, the opposition parties hope that the vote will bind the ANC ever more closely in the eyes of voters to an unpopular president. This, they predict, will give them a better chance in national elections in 2019, especially if Mr Zuma manages to anoint his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as the next leader of the ANC (and thus in all likelihood its presidential candidate). That decision will be made at an ANC conference in December. Mr Zuma is thought to favour his former spouse in the hope that she will shield him from prosecution. The Democratic Alliance, which did well in local elections last year, thinks she would be easier to beat than someone with a different surname.
9. If the opposition feels any private glee that the ANC is destroying itself, it is surely tempered by sadness. Few can be happy that Africa’s oldest liberation movement and a once-proud torchbearer of democracy has fallen so low. Even fewer relish the prospect of South Africa enduring another two years under Mr Zuma. The president has ignored court orders, fired his most competent ministers, mismanaged public funds and somehow got away with it. As for the people who believed the ANC’s promise of “a better life for all”, they will have to wait.