Zuma unravels the good work done in KZN
Former president Jacob Zuma has done much to integrate the province of KwaZulu-Natal into national political life over the past three decades. Now he is threatening to undo his lifetime’s key achievement.
During the democratic transition, violent conflict between IFP- and ANC-aligned groups almost descended into civil war. After the ANC was unbanned Zuma was defeated by Cyril Ramaphosa for the position of secretary-general at the ANC’s Durban conference.
He was subsequently sent by then president Nelson Mandela to ameliorate ANC-IFP violence in his home province, at which he proved remarkably adept.
Zuma then switched to national politics, rising to party chair in 1994 and then to deputy president in 1997. Two years later he was deputy president of the country under Thabo Mbeki.
Though Mbeki evidently believed he could dispense with Zuma at will, this proved to be a miscalculation. Zuma mobilised in KwaZulu-Natal, bringing hundreds of thousands of new members — many of them admittedly ghosts or zombies
— to the provincial party, swelling delegate numbers and sweeping aside Mbeki at the 2007 Polokwane conference.
Zuma’s rise to the ANC presidency catalysed a huge increase in KwaZulu-Natalbased votes for the ANC in the elections that followed, and the province became an indispensable buttress to the liberation movement’s otherwise waning national electoral dominance.
On Zuma’s coattails a swathe of politicians and businesspeople from KwaZuluNatal rose to prominent positions in the cabinet, the senior public service, parastatal boards and BEE consortia.
Despite driving this remarkable transformation of KwaZulu-Natal’s position in national political life, Zuma has since destroyed all that he had accomplished.
His power had been cemented in part by his continued courting of traditional leaders in his province, with various bogus land rights acts cobbled together to secure their allegiance. These later proved costly.
Moreover, by allowing explicit ethnic mobilisation by his supporters in times of crisis, he also presided over a resurgence of ethnic tension, something the ANC had strived for decades to minimise. Such ethnic mobilisation played a major role in triggering the appalling xenophobic violence that has since plagued much of the country.
After his humiliating eviction from office in 2018 under threat of being ousted by his own party, Zuma agitated against what he saw as his politically motivated harassment by prosecutorial authorities. Despite the extremely slow pace of investigation — something critics have seen as deliberate — Zuma forced the hand of the authorities by acting in contempt of the Zondo commission of inquiry.
His needless jailing created fertile ground for criminal mafias and political sympathisers to incite a riotcum-shopping spree in July 2021 that inflicted more than 300 deaths and tens of billions of rand in damages.
The entrenchment of traditional leaders’ power in trust lands close to the economic hub of Durban resulted in poorly managed informal settlements, flagrant breaches of environmental regulations, degrading water quality and polluted rivers, estuaries and beaches.
In conjunction with climate change-induced weather patterns that have brought coastal storms and inland flooding that has killed hundreds, the beautiful province is being turned into a multifaceted environmental catastrophe.
Now Zuma has launched the uMkhonto weSizwe party. Borrowing the name of the military wing of the ANC and the SA Communist Party is surely a deliberate act designed to elicit a response from the electoral commission.
Zuma’s associates say they will respond to this by initiating a repeat of the violent unrest of 2021. KwaZulu-Natal’s once beloved son is rapidly becoming the province’s worst enemy.