Rivalry raises its head again
IT IS no secret that not all South African Cabinet ministers see eye to eye. The African National Congress (ANC) has always been a broad church from an ideological perspective, and since the triumph over apartheid, the practicalities of governance have tended to dissolve the glue holding it together.
Include the ANC’s alliance partners, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, in the mix — as President Jacob Zuma has had little choice but to do as a way to keep their support and his grip on power — and the centrifugal forces often seem on the verge of tearing the alliance apart.
It should be no surprise, then, when Cabinet ministers contradict one another on matters of style and interpretation of policy, or seem to be more concerned about avoiding being stabbed in the back by their colleagues than fending off attacks from the opposition. Indeed, a divided Cabinet pulling in several different directions simultaneously has been a hallmark of Mr Zuma’s first term, and this seems unlikely to change if he is given another.
The present spat between Planning Minister Trevor Manuel and Mr Zuma’s usual knee-jerk allies is a case in point. Under normal circumstances, Mr Manuel’s recent comment that government officials should stop blaming apartheid for failures in service delivery would have been uncontroversial. Service delivery is, after all, largely a function of skills and state capacity, which should be well under the government’s control by now.
Yet both Mr Zuma and ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe wasted little time in saying 300 years of colonialism and apartheid will take more than a mere 20 years to unravel, and Mr Manuel was accused by the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) of being a frustrated and disillusioned maverick who regards himself as a “super-minister”.
It is clear there is no substantive disagreement between Mr Manuel and his colleagues on this issue — just an increasingly bitter factional political rivalry, with opportunists such as Nehawu constantly on the lookout for clubs with which to beat their perceived ideological foes. The reality is that both sides are correct: the ill effects of apartheid will indeed be with us for generations, but that is no excuse for any state employee to rest on his laurels.