ANC may just prod the dogs of war

Those who live by the tenets of authoritarian Stalinism are in danger themselves of dying by that very same dogma. So Jacob Zuma should not have been surprised by what happened on Monday. Having pulled the tail of the tiger and got away with it for so long, though, perhaps he might have expected something less savage than the attack on him dealt out by ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula in announcing that Zuma would be suspended from the party.

Mbalula’s scathing character assassination could have come straight from the pages of the dictator’s playbook … and had echoes of the Soviet show trials under Joseph Stalin’s reign.

“Enemies of the state” would be identified as such, verbally flayed and then sent off to face the firing squad.

There might be no rifles awaiting Zuma, but the battering assault on him was aimed at nothing less than demolishing his legacy as a hero of the struggle.

How else can you interpret accusations that he was “opposing transformation”, was pursuing a “blatantly counter-revolutionary agenda” and was a “figurehead of counter-revolution”?

Ironically for Zuma, he used similar demonisation tactics on the then public enterprises minister, Barbara Hogan, when she refused to appoint the state capture network’s candidate Siyabonga Gama as head of Transnet.

She was declared to be against transformation in the ANC and to be against empowerment of black people.

But Mbalula went even further in his efforts to make Zuma a political polecat, by likening him to those reviled by the left as “capitalist running dogs”.

He said: “The people of South Africa and the ANC will not allow a Renamo/Unita project in our country to discredit democratic outcomes that do not favour them and use violence against the people as a bargaining tool. This is the fundamental danger of the JZ party project.”

The ANC’s words were carefully chosen, with both long-term and short-term objectives in mind.

In the short-term, its portrayal of Zuma is aimed at discrediting him in the eyes of potential voters both inside his KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) power base and further afield.

It is also well aware that few people will point out that, despite all his alleged state capture and looting of state funds shenanigans, there has been little consequence for Zuma – yet say you will vote against the ANC and they send the dogs after you.

There are some valid points in the ANC statement on Zuma, including its concern about him attacking the electoral pillars on which are democracy stands and its belief that Zuma’s MK movement “targets extremist instincts in our body politic and riles up a political base to foment social unrest”.

The 2021 insurrection, which had its epicentre in KZN, shows that these concerns are justified.

While the ANC’s tactic of smearing Zuma with the ultimate political crime of being traitor to “their” revolution does remind one that karma is not a margarine; we still see much potential danger in the campaign to demonise him.

Already feeling that he and his compatriots have been done down by the government – which emotion did not take much to detonate into the 2021 violence – Zuma and his comrades might feel that, if they are being called a Savimbi or a Dhlakama in a pejorative way, they may as well start living up to those epithets.

And there comes civil war.