Waterloo Wednesday for Zuma
IN MORE than a century, no single member, cadre or leader of the ANC has received as much forgiveness from the organisation as President Jacob Zuma. No single leader of the ANC has brought the glorious movement into disrepute as much as Zuma.
No single leader of the ANC has dared Africa’s oldest liberation movement to take action against him; and no leader of the ANC has ever betrayed the organisation and the people as Zuma has done with the Guptas, for personal gain.
In a nutshell, this “selfless revolutionary leader” sold his country to the highest bidder. This is nothing short of treason.
History will surely record that it was on this Wednesday, February 7, in Cape Town, just a day before the officially-scheduled 2018 State of the Nation address (Sona), that the ANC took the long-awaited decision to remove Zuma as president.
This special NEC meeting was convened for the sole reason of dealing with the recalcitrance of a cadre who had grown bigger than the organisation that had deployed him to the highest office in the land. The Cape Town NEC meeting takes place against the backdrop of tectonic shifts inside and outside of South Africa’s most-loved political party.
Just six weeks earlier, Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa sat alone on stage and cried after his election as president of the ANC on December 18 in Nasrec, Joburg.
Ramaphosa had a good reason to shed a tear. He had fought and won in one of the ANC’s most ferocious presidential campaigns in history.
Yanked from the comforts of the corporate boardroom in 2012 to lend credibility and legitimacy to a scandal-prone and discredited Zuma campaign for his second term, the former secretary-general of the party accepted the invitation to run as Zuma’s partner. Elected deputy president in Mangaung, he had a legitimate expectation to succeed Zuma according to ANC tradition. Ramaphosa was to learn not too long after Mangaung that Zuma had his own ideas.
Not trusting Ramaphosa, the man from Nkandla hatched his plan of ruling from the grave by proclaiming to the nation that he thought the time was ripe for a woman president to lead the ANC.
Little did we suspect at the time that he was eyeing his former wife. The Hollywood-style 2017 ANC presidential contest pitted the party’s deputy president Ramaphosa against former AU Commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
Instead of supporting his deputy as per tradition, Zuma marshalled all his forces, both in the party and in the state, to defeat the person who should naturally be succeeding him.
This explains why the hardened former union leader cried at Nasrec, as reality sunk in on what he had triumphed over.
The president of the ANC and South Africa had done everything possible to prevent him from ascending to the pinnacle of the 106-year-old people’s organisation.
It is this wounded Ramaphosa who will be presenting the traditional political overview of the NEC meeting in Cape Town.
He is a Ramaphosa who is smarting from another bout of a Zuma humiliation, after Zuma showed the Top 6 the middle finger on Sunday when they pleaded with him to step down from his high office.
Ramaphosa is under siege and faces the dreary prospect of being dubbed a powerless ANC president if he doesn’t demonstrate to all and sundry that the ANC is the strategic centre, and that he is the tzar of that centre.
Just last month Ramaphosa was the man of the moment, charming the ANC rank and file as the new leader, suggesting to all South Africans that things were about to change, and assuring the international community, especially in Davos, that South Africa was open for business.
The Buffalo was cheered all over as it charged at Eskom and put the state investigative and prosecutorial agencies on notice, leading to new-found enthusiasm in the Hawks and the National Prosecuting Authority. Ramaphosa’s January honeymoon was brought to a sudden halt when the ANC’s newly elected secretariat of Ace Magashule and Jesse Duarte, of the defeated NDZ campaign, openly undermined his authority by contradicting their new leader on every question regarding the possible departure of Zuma.
This was nothing short of rebellion against the new president of the party.
Magashule went on the offensive, insinuating that his new president was a puppet of white monopoly capital, and even advised parents not to allow their children to eat at McDonald’s. Shockingly, he even exhorted his defeated NDZ faction in KwaZulu-Natal to start working for 2022 by dramatically declaring “only five years comrades; only five years”.
So Ramaphosa will be in a mean mood in Cape Town. He is in such a tight corner that he is naturally dangerous; the man whose “New Deal” is supposed to save the economy finds himself undermined by his comrades in the party, clandestinely led by the former party president and state president of the republic. Just like before he upped the ante in his presidential campaign, Ramaphosa is once more accused of weakness and not having the balls to assert himself as the undisputed leader of the ANC and South Africa.
For those who have forgotten, it’s this man who in 1987, at 35, fearlessly took on the might of the apartheid state and the mining industry in the then biggest and longest strike in South African history. Of course many years in air-conditioned boardrooms take their toll on anyone.
To buffalo Ramaphosa, my advice is simple: you have been charging long enough and the moment has arrived to gore the stubborn elephant and liberate both the ANC and the country from the current curse. To Nxamalala, take heart: your Napoleon Bonaparte moment has arrived. Cape Town is your Waterloo.