As a crafty operator, Zuma is in league of his own

Iam loath to say it, but in 30 years of democracy in SA the most talented political player to emerge by a country mile is Jacob Zuma. He alone has mined down to the tectonic plates deep under SA’s social formation and shifted them to produce a politics that brings him power. Nobody else has come close to doing that. He is in a league of his own.

The story began, famously, in 2005, when Thabo Mbeki fired Zuma as deputy president, thinking he had cast him permanently into the wilderness. What Zuma did instead was head for the provinces and build the ANC around an insurgency against Mbeki. True, he did so largely in his home province, KwaZulu-Natal, but he found allies to do the same in the Free State and Mpumalanga.

What he did, essentially, was mobilise a disgruntled provincial middle class across a swathe of central and northeastern SA to take control of the ANC to collectively accumulate wealth through its offices. It took a granular, intuitive understanding of this discontent to see the possibility, plus the formidable skill required to mould it into a political force.

The thing about SA is that it is such a divided place, our ignorance about one another so complete, that people in the metropolitan centres had no idea what Zuma was doing. Even once his project became visible, people didn’t understand it. State capture had begun before the penny dropped.

After a decade of destruction Zuma was narrowly defeated in the ANC presidential election of late 2017 and ejected from the SA presidency early the following year.

For a time, it looked as if his successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, had in his quiet and cautious way skilfully bested the radical economic transformation faction that had formed around Zuma. But in the three-and-ahalf years after Zuma’s ejection were two warning signals that he was not yet spent.

The first was the Phala Phala scandal, which erupted only because Zuma still commanded loyalty in SA’s security services. A senior police officer in Ramaphosa’s protection unit whispered about the debacle to Zuma’s ally, former state security director-general Arthur Fraser. So the news spilled out.

But the far bigger warning signal was the violence of July 2021, a sophisticated project involving a mastery of several terrains. It mobilised disgruntled truck drivers, migrant worker leaders and former and current security service personnel across three provinces. It also mobilised deep old knowledge of how to organise violence; for the places in which it occurred traced precisely the zones of civil war of the 1990s from the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands to the hostels of central Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni.

Looking back now, that violence of July 2021 has significance, for it left a memory trace and a set of networked connections. Who would have thought that these connections would be remobilised, not for another round of violence but to form a political party?

Once again, few people in metropolitan SA knew what was happening. Throughout January I spoke to several senior ANC people in Johannesburg who were hardly concerned about the newly formed Umkhonto we Sizwe Party. It was only when byelection results from KwaZuluNatal started coming in that people looked up in shock.

Now, three months after the MK party’s formation, two major polls are giving it 11% and 13% of the overall vote. Its support traces, if not precisely then fairly closely, the contours of the July violence.

To be sure, we do not know that MK will get 11% or 13% of the vote. The methodology of at least one of the two polls is pretty puzzling, and its figures don’t quite add up.

But there is an even chance that come the end of May Zuma will have shrunk ANC support enough to shake Ramaphosa’s presidency, and require the governing party to either seek a major coalition partner or to try to run a minority government. Either way, SA will have entered a new era.

To emerge once from the shadows and change everything is impressive enough. Zuma may just do it twice.