Daily Dispatch

‘Tandemocracy’ on the horizon?

YESTERDAY Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma kick-started her campaign for the presidency of the ANC in a low key kind of way, knocking on doors in rural KwaZulu-Natal, handing out sanitary towels to schoolgirls.

It was a safe, politically savvy start, bonding with poor, soon-to-vote teenage girls, in her home province where ANC support has waned.

It was also out of the reach of city-based journalists who ask difficult questions.

For instance, yesterday they might have asked what Dlamini-Zuma made of Treasury’s proposal to bail-out SAA using government pension funds.

Such a move, if actioned, could, said the economist Dr Azar Jammine, “compel the government to print money to pay pensions, as has happened to the north of us”.

It’s unlikely Dlamini-Zuma would have wanted to face questions about that. But she did not quite manage to escape altogether the sort of controversy that comes with being President Jacob Zuma’s chosen successor and by association, the chief representative of Guptadom.

That’s because, from behind his keyboard in Johannesburg, eminent newspaper editor, Peter Bruce had dropped a bomb.

There was talk, he wrote, that if DlaminiZuma triumphed at the ANC’s electoral conference in December, Jacob Zuma would step down as head of state, she would become president and then … make him her deputy.

“It would avoid the Mbeki predicament: where Thabo Mbeki was leader of government but not the party and so was easily removed. Zuma still has work to do, so to speak. This would be a neat solution to the problems thrown up by two centres of power,” said Bruce.

A Zuma power duo at the helm of the country is a frightening proposition for so many reasons, not the least being the consolidation of all power into the hands of one family.

Worse, it may increase Jacob Zuma’s stay at the top level of government with an imploded ANC. Even worse it may open a path for him to return as president.

This is not a totally mad idea. It has already happened in Russia over the past few years under the uber securocrat and Zuma’s close ally, Vladimir Putin.

When constitutional term limits prevented Putin from standing for a third term as president in 2008, his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, immediately made him prime minister, allowing Putin to retain his primary position of influence for the next four years. Thus began what was referred to as a “tandemocracy”.

After that Putin bounced back into the presidency in 2013, by which time the constitution had been altered, extending the presidential term of office from four to six years. Russia under Putin is today a Mafia state. This was a term used by the South African Council of Churches secretary-general Malusi Mpumlwana yesterday when he released a report on corruption at the Regina Mundi Church in Soweto. “South Africa may just be a few inches from the throes of a Mafia state from which there may be no return – a recipe for a failed state,” he said.

This is the point to which Jacob Zuma has brought this nation. It is a reality DlaminiZuma would likely have been happy to avoid as she went canvassing on the hills of Nondweni.