Ten years after the axing that put Zuma on the path to power
Hailed as a game-changer, Mbeki’s dismissal of his deputy backfired spectacularly, setting set off a chain of events that led to his own fall, writes S’thembiso Msomi
ON this day a decade ago, President Thabo Mbeki stood before parliament to announce that he had fired Jacob Zuma as his deputy.
It was a historic moment, one that was to permanently change South African politics and in ways that no one could foresee.
Mbeki’s decision was not unexpected. For two full weeks ahead of the June 14 2005 announcement, there had been persistent calls for the president to act following a damning court judgment that implicated Zuma in his friend Schabir Shaik’s corruption trial.
When the guillotine fell on Zuma, it was greeted with what seemed like universal approval.
Mbeki, notorious for refusing to fire cabinet members accused of wrongdoing, was finally acting. And not against just anyone, but the deputy president and a man he had called a friend and comrade for three decades.
The elation was apparent in the Sunday Times newsroom. As staff watched Mbeki’s speech on TV, the editor at the time, Mondli Makhanya, declared: “It works! This country works.”
In the ANC, Mbeki’s decision seemed to enjoy overwhelming support, with even those who were not happy saying they accepted “the president’s prerogative to appoint or dis-appoint cabinet members”.
A day before that Tuesday morning, Mbeki had convened an extended ANC national working committee meeting attended by a who’s who of the governing party, Cosatu, the SACP and the youth and women’s leagues.
When he communicated his decision to that meeting, no one objected. According to one person who attended, Zuma supporters spent much of the time “looking at their shoes”.
Zuma appeared to be dead, politically speaking.
But two days after Mbeki’s parliamentary announcement, there were flickering signs of a Zuma resurrection as an angry mob at a Youth Day rally in Durban disrupted a speech by the premier at the time, Sbusiso Ndebele, demanding Zuma’s reinstatement.
The mini-riot was dismissed as something akin to a twitching corpse, but by the end of the month it had escalated into an open rebellion, with delegates at the ANC’s national general council telling Mbeki to his face that Zuma had been the victim of a political conspiracy aimed at preventing him from becoming the next head of state.
Zuma’s election campaign had started, and in the months and years that followed neither party nor state was spared as the Mbeki and Zuma camps embarked on allout warfare.
South Africa is still feeling the effects of the feud today, with al- most all the state’s security apparatus crippled by political interference and infighting.
The corruption-busting Scorpions — seen by Zuma supporters as Mbeki’s private army — were disbanded and replaced by the relatively toothless Hawks.
The National Prosecuting Authority, whose success in convicting Shaik on corruption charges precipitated Zuma’s axing, is in tatters; over the past decade, no one has lasted more than three years at the helm of the agency.
There has been similar instability in the police and its crime intelligence unit.
On a political level, the aftermath of June 14 2005 included Mbeki being removed from office — the first president in southern Africa to suffer this ignominy.
This, in turn, spawned the formation of COPE, which diverted more than a million votes from the ANC in 2009.
Up until that point, political pundits had assumed that a split in the ANC would happen along neat ideological lines, with the so-called left — in the form of Cosatu and the SACP — breaking away to fight the ANC on a socialist ticket.
Instead, there has been a messy political process in which personality clashes and leadership squabbles matter more than ideological differences.
Who would have thought in 2005, when the ANC Youth League campaigned so vigorously under the leadership of Fikile Mbalula for Zuma’s election to the presidency, that Julius Malema and other prominent members of the league would one day split to form the EFF and become the president’s nemeses?
That Mbalula— who at one stage was the lone ANC leadership voice publicly defending Zuma when the then ANC deputy president faced rape charges in court — would one day be kicked out of the president’s inner circle?
Not to mention the fate of Zwelinzima Vavi, the once powerful Cosatu general secretary who declared Zuma a “tsunami” and used the labour federation’s might to shore up Msholozi’s campaign at a time when it seemed destined to fail.
Depending on what happens at Cosatu’s special national congress next month and at its elective congress in November, Vavi could find himself leading yet another breakaway group during next year’s local government elections.
There are scores of others who took Zuma’s side after Mbeki fired him but who now find themselves in the political wilderness.
Political pundits often wonder what would have happened had Mbeki quietly dropped Zuma as deputy president at the end of his government’s first term in office, rather than doing so spectacularly in the middle of his second.
This, some pundits say, would have robbed Zuma of one of his campaign trump cards — sympathy from ANC members who thought it unfair to fire him on the basis of a court judgment in a case in which he was not an accused.
Simply dropping him from the cabinet at the end of the first term would have required no explanation and, hence, would have caused little controversy.
Ten years since his firing, Zuma in many ways finds himself in the same situation Mbeki was in at the time.
He may not have a deputy who is implicated in corruption, but, like Mbeki a decade ago, he has a massive ANC leadership succession headache.
Mbeki thought he was partly solving his succession headache in 2005 when he fired Zuma and made himself available for another term as party leader. His strategy backfired. Zuma appears to have learnt from Mbeki’s mistake, at least as far as trying to stand for a third term is concerned.
At the World Economic Forum last weekend, he was unambiguous in his condemnation of African leaders who overstay their welcome in power — suggesting he has no problem handing over the ANC reins in 2017 and stepping down as head of state in 2019.
But with indications of differences within the ANC over who should next lead the party, Zuma could be tempted to get involved by trying to swing the race in one direction or the other.
Yielding to the temptation would be a grave political mistake for himself and whoever he anoints if it spawns a movement such as the one that brought him to power and led to Mbeki’s ousting.
The best course for Zuma would be to stay out of it and allow democratic processes to produce a new leadership collective.
Hopefully, for the country, that new leadership collective would bring an end to what has been a decade of political instability and uncertainty.
Like Mbeki a decade ago, Zuma has a massive ANC leadership succession headache