SADDLING UP
Peter Bruce returns and finds the race is still going
W here was I? Trying to re-enter South Africa’s demented news cycle after a long break is like timing your entry into a revolving door that’s just been given a violent wrench. About the only safe thing to declare now is that while the state capture project is still alive, we have at least passed Peak Gupta. The family have run out of road here and the people who helped them make and then move a fortune out of the country are in serious trouble.
That’s already a trite observation. The big story is whether President Jacob Zuma is still in control of his succession as leader of the ANC. Perhaps it always has been.
Anyone who declares they know what is going to happen at the party’s elective conference in mid-December is merely guessing.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of people guessing, like Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane, who has already declared the whole thing done and dusted; that Zuma will get what he wants.
Whatever that might be, however, not even Zwane would risk putting what is left of his name to. Ostensibly, the president wants his former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to succeed him. She would keep him out of jail.
But even that conjecture is wearing thin. NDZ, as she is now referred to, has an impressive political record at home and at the AU.
But she has run a dismal campaign and, try as she may, she cannot shake the fact that she was once married to Zuma. They have children together. It just has to be the core reason she is in the running, with Zuma’s support, in the first place.
But the president must know she is vulnerable. His deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, her main opponent, has also been an insipid campaigner, but such is the antipathy towards Zuma in his own party (let alone the country) that Ramaphosa is not only still in the race but may even be slightly ahead. I’m not so sure.
Zweli Mkhize, ANC treasurer-general and former premier of KwaZulu-Natal, has cleverly positioned himself as a reasonable alternative to both NDZ and Ramaphosa.
In the past week or so there’s been an effort to paint Mkhize as Zuma's “real” candidate; that NDZ is merely a stalking horse. Don’t be fooled. These rumours exist because Mkhize has become a serious proposition in his own right and he’d make an excellent leader of both party and state.
He and Zuma have known each other for decades but they are very different characters.
That said, Zuma is a formidable tactician. My sources tell me (and this may be what Zwane thinks he knows) that Zuma is planning on four fronts, any one of which could change as soon as circumstances do.
First is to ensure that Ramaphosa never holds a position in the ANC again. Second, Mkhize will be “recalled” to some elevated position in KwaZulu-Natal. Third, he wants no contest on who makes up the ANC’s top six. As a result, fourth, the big democratic moment in December would be openly contested when voting for a new national executive committee, rather than the top six position.
Whether Zuma can pull any of this trickery off remains to be seen. The other candidates and the current top six will have their own ideas — and the reinstatement of 783 counts of fraud against the president on Friday by the Supreme Court of Appeal judgment has weakened him.
For instance, according to his plan, Zuma himself gets somehow to remain in the new top six, supposedly to avoid the party and state having two centres of power. In 2008, Thabo Mbeki was toppled when he was out of office in the ANC — but still head of state. Zuma, who initially opposed Mbeki’s recall, doesn’t want that happening to him.
But in his mind, with Ramaphosa out and Mkhize back in Durban, Zuma is agnostic about who actually becomes president of the party. If not NDZ, then party chairwoman Baleka Mbete, who has all but stopped her campaign, becomes a real possibility.
Meanwhile, David Mabuza, the premier of Mpumalanga, seems to have become a kingmaker of sorts should the ANC’s elective conference actually take place.
Party membership in his province has rocketed (some reports suggest fraudulently) and if he has the clout commentators more expert than I say he has, he can position himself as a future president.
But if he hopes to one day inherit a functioning industrial democracy and not a hollow economic wreck, he must be brave. And he must remember that whatever solution the president may have in mind, it is always mainly going to be about Zuma himself and not the country. We’ll soon find out what Mabuza is made of.