Enigma of pact by two divorcees
• Taciturn Dlamini-Zuma’s ambition to become ANC leader lets her buy into the president’s narrative
Rarely would a woman conspire with a man she has divorced, but this might be precisely what Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is doing.
The relationship between Dlamini-Zuma and President Jacob Zuma is not a private matter but one of great political significance. It looks as though she is cooking up a plot with her former husband — is something else happening?
They were married in 1982 when Dlamini-Zuma was 33 years old, in exile and working as a paediatrician in Swaziland. They got divorced about 16 years later, in June 1998, reportedly due to irreconcilable differences. Might these differences have included their political and moral orientations? They evidently agree on enough to act on a plan for her to become the president of the ANC, and of SA.
But what is the deal between them? What have they decided and how will it be achieved?
Some of this can only be gleaned through speculation and interpreting events, facial expressions and body language, given that The Taciturn One refuses all public communication — as if talking, especially to the media, would be a transgression of some principle. She thus goes about her campaigning — by definition engaging with the electorate and the media — not engaging with either.
Dlamini-Zuma spends time at Zuma’s Nkandla homestead, which he built using taxpayers’ money. We know from the report of the former public protector that she has spent time at the Guptas’ Saxonwold home, the base of the project to capture the state. So, they must spend some time together. What do they talk about when they are alone with each other?
How did the plan for her to succeed him come about? Was there open discussion about holding on to power?
Did she say, “Baba, I want to be president?” What was his reply? Did he immediately grasp the advantages to himself, and play along enthusiastically? Did she anticipate the advantages to both of them when she made the suggestion?
Perhaps, to the horror of feminists, he would have fed her cues and led her into thinking it was all her idea — master manipulator that he is?
Are we supposed to believe that they discuss the demerits of white monopoly capital and not Zuma’s fate should 783 charges of corruption be reinstated against him?
Can we imagine him saying: “Nkosi, don’t you want to be top dog, so you can get me off some of these smallanyanas that the media and clever blacks are blowing up out of all proportion?” It is more likely that the deal between them was struck in roundabout ways using euphemisms, with talk of “party unity”, “crisis”, “our people”, “the enemy within” and “we have to do something about this”.
Dlamini-Zuma would certainly know how Zuma would expect to benefit from her presidency: a pardon from his looming charges, the possibility of keeping ill-gotten wealth, as well as the possibility of escaping further charges for all the wrongs he has committed since becoming president — in short, state capture.
If she accepted such a deal, has Dlamini-Zuma already decided that she will pardon Zuma, or has she only promised that she will? Has she made a choice to condone corruption and to begin her term already steeped in it?
Her acceptance of such a deal would have been influenced by the kind of relationship they have and by the balance of power between them, which appears to have gone through reversals and counter-reversals. Dlamini-Zuma was in her 20s an independent woman, bold and prominent enough to have been elected deputy president of the South African Student Organisation, the Black Consciousness Movement’s flagship student body.
She probably had a modernist streak, having studied and graduated from leading universities in the UK, and after serving on the ANC’s gender advisory committee during the political negotiations in the early 1990s.
But, when she married Zuma he already had two wives, so she was fully aware that she was entering into a union with someone who could be described as a Zulu patriarch and definitely, as a traditionalist.
She recently said that those who question Zuma are disrespectful of him and of African tradition, so it appears she accepts his authority and subscribes to a traditional world view. But, she was independent enough to decide to divorce Zuma in 1998.
At the time, she was minister of health in the Nelson Mandela administration, and arguably senior to Zuma, then KwaZuluNatal MEC for economic affairs.
Zuma soon caught up with her, becoming deputy president when Thabo Mbeki acceded to the presidency in 1999. A decade later, he was the president and her boss, appointing her home affairs minister.
But does she need her former husband to become president? Could she not make her pitch without him?
Zuma rules the party through his dominance of the ANC’s national executive committee; he decides which candidate will get the support of his party apparatus. Dlamini-Zuma has accepted all the help Zuma has been able to mobilise.
She is supported by a set of dubious Zuma campers, including some of the premier leaguers, Youth and Women’s League members, the MK Veterans and, crucially, the supremely dubious Guptas.
The Guptas’ ANN7 channel has become her cheerleader, where people such as disgraced ANC spokesman Carl Niehaus laud her in frenzied, hyperbolic and almost religious terms.
She has never given the slightest indication that she registers the moral issues that rain down on her campaign because of her associations. She has spoken out against corruption, but has said nothing about Zuma’s corruption, about Nkandla, or about the failure of crucial institutions such as the prosecuting authorities to act. She has made no pronouncements against state capture — she can’t without undercutting her campaign to lead the ANC.
It would appear then, that Dlamini-Zuma has made a pact with Zuma, based on his need to resolve his legal and economic troubles, and on her vaulting political ambition.
She has essentially agreed to let the Guptas take over the state, as long as Zuma and his family are given a large share of the spoils, and she has enthusiastically endorsed the “narrative” that they are engaging in radical transformation.
She is quite prepared to overlook Zuma’s outrageous transgressions as long as he can deliver the presidency of the ANC to her, a pact they have concluded equally cynically.
No surprises here. Sometimes, the reality is exactly what one sees.