ZULU POWER SET TO RULE KZN
Zuma’s appeal to ethnicity will turn the province into an MK and EFF domain
To understand what is happening in KwaZulu-Natal politics today you need to understand what happened in the province in 2009. Dynamics that echo what happened 15 years ago are playing out in the ANC’s precipitous loss of support in the province now. This matters because it may herald what KZN looks like after the May 29 election, and that it may, crucially, be heading to join the Western Cape in calling for more powers and independence from the centre.
The IFP “won” 49% of votes cast in the province in 1994. The IFP was dominant because it played the ethnic card. It claimed to be the party most closely aligned with the traditions and needs of the Zulu king and people. Mangosuthu Buthelezi not only acted as “traditional prime minister”, through his actions and bullying of the king he at some points seemed to fancy himself as the Zulu monarch.
When the ANC came to power in the province in 2004 — it won 47.5% of the vote — it chipped away at the IFP’s projection of itself as the sole representative of Zulus. It sought to demonstrate that being a national party did not automatically mean that it undermined or denigrated Zulus.
Then something happened. With
Jacob Zuma in legal trouble due to his friend Schabir Shaik being convicted for having bribed him, a new Zulu ethnic drum began sounding in the province. Non-Zulu ANC leaders were booed while Zuma’s supporters sported T-shirts emblazoned with the words “100% Zuluboy”. By the time Zuma defeated Thabo Mbeki at the ANC conference in December 2007, his path to power was decorated with a heavy dose of Zulu chauvinism. In many ways, he was more Zulu chauvinist than Buthelezi had been in the 1980s and early 1990s.
By the time the general election came around in 2009, Zuma was constantly associated with the Zulu monarchy, and he would pander to chauvinistic, tribalistic notions with utterances that started by ascribing patriarchal concepts to being Zulu. For example, at his rape trial in 2006 he claimed that “in Zulu culture” a man is obliged to sleep with a woman if she is sexually aroused.
About 1.3-million people voted for the ANC in KZN in 2004. In 2009 it almost doubled to 2.25-million votes. Zuma had played his Zulu card. He had outsmarted the IFP in doing so, and all but obliterated it. In 2014 the ANC’s support rose even further to 2.5-million voters while the IFP’s 1.8-million voters in 1994 dwindled to a miserable 393,000.
Zuma is treading the same path now. He speaks about “traditional values”, advocates corporal punishment and jailing of pregnant young women, wants a rethink of the constitutional rights of the LGBTQ+ community, and styles himself as a victim of a Western justice system aimed at annihilating “African justice”. No serious analyst believes any of these frivolous utterances will come to pass. However, in a KZN where Zulu nationalism holds sway, Zuma’s path is paved with voter gold. He will be rewarded by a constituency that falls for his victimhood and ethnic mobilisation.
It is not far-fetched to consider a scenario in which Zuma wins the most votes of anyone in KZN, and then together with the EFF (which is fawning over him like flies around a fresh turd), the IFP, the likes of Abantu Batho Congress and others, he forms a government in that province.
If your view is that the Western Cape has been a success (relatively) and should be given more powers to run itself, then you can’t deny KZN the same rights and concessions. This is not a fantasy. With the Provincial Powers Bill proposed by DA leader John Steenhuisen and officially tabled in May 2023 the DA-led Western Cape government seeks to get the national government to assign more powers in policing, management of the Cape Town port and rail, electricity generation and trade, to the province.
Those powers would go to Alan Winde or whoever is in charge of the province. Similarly, in a scenario where the MK Party forms a government in KZN, such powers would go to Zuma, or whoever the party assigns to the premiership.
It’s just a scenario.