South Africa’s Zimbabwe moment
erment has deracialised parts of the economy, this has been a shallow process, involving politically connected elites. In the main, there is no direct control over the trillions of rands sitting on balance sheets, which could be invested — and this investment strike is likely to continue.
A Zuma regime will drive more capital offshore either legally or illicitly, and a hollowing out of the economy will aggravate the regime’s legitimacy.
South Africa’s intelligentsia, professional and organic, are generally critical about the state of affairs. A whole genre of literature has proliferated in just over 20 years of ANC rule with titles such as: Unmasked: Why the ANC Failed to Govern (Khulu Mbatha), Recovering Democracy in South Africa (Raymond Suttner), We Have Now Begun Our Descent: How to Stop South Africa Losing its Way (Justice Malala), How Long Will South Africa Survive? (RW Johnson) and Turning Point: South Africa at a Crossroads (Theuns Eloff), among others.
Black and white intellectuals capture the zeitgeist of our times. But inter-subjective conversations about what we have become and where we are going have also captured the national imagination.
The ANC-led tripartite alliance has been both a strength and a constraint on the party. As a crystallisation of social forces across all classes, strata and popular forces, it has provided deep roots for the ANC.
But its interlocking and overlapping relationships have also worked against the ANC. For instance, the undermining of trade union federation Cosatu as an independent worker voice has led to enormous realignments, particularly in the wake of the Marikana massacres and the development of new trade unions, including the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union and the new labour federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions.
Workers in Cosatu clearly did not put their weight behind the ANC in the recent local government elections.
As for the South African Communist Party (SACP), it has moved from being a principled and strategic force of the left to being one of Zuma’s staunchest allies, opening up a big space to the left of the ANC.
For the ANC more directly, the overlapping of membership with Cosatu and the SACP also means a turn against Zuma could also mean a massive rupture inside the ANC. Although these forces are beginning to shrug off their loyalty to Zuma and are calling for him to step down, they are not going far enough to push back the web of kleptocratic rule, anchored in the conflation of the ANC and the state. Zuma might be pressured to go but the rot inside the ANC–state nexus is deep.
Finally, civil society, although not homogenous or progressive in all quarters, has been the hotbed of progressive forces.
Post-apartheid, South Africa has been through two cycles of resistance and has thrown up important movements such as the Treatment Action Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement, the Anti-privatisation Forum and now, more recently, the Right2Know Campaign, the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, the Inyanda National Land Movement, various nongovernmental organisations and campaigns involved in defending constitutional rights , the #FeesMustFall movement and many more.
Former finance minister Pravin Gordhan was correct in stating publicly that “South Africa has a long history of mass mobilisation”, and residues of these live on in civil society.
The world has also taught South Africa about nonviolent civil resistance. From Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Solidarity in Poland, the People’s Power Movement in the Philippines, the unemployed and homeless in Europe, the Occupy movement in the United States and many others, they have given South Africans an appreciation of nonviolent mass power as a strategy to transform society.
Since Ahmed Kathrada’s funeral and the sharing of the letter he wrote calling for Zuma to resign, this message has been gaining widespread support across society.
Memorial services for Kathrada, occupations outside the treasury, shutdowns and marches, including to the Union Buildings, are now all coming to the fore in the best spirit of who we are — in the spirit of Madiba and Kathrada.
Zuma has placed the ANC and the state on a collision course with society. His forces will play various moves but there will be mass counter moves in coming months, and very likely even into the general election in 2019, if he does not resign.
The ANC is also likely to be destroyed by Zuma if it does not act against him now.
In many ways, although our Zimbabwe moment has arrived, we are also back in the 1980s, fighting a regime with the same moral and political outrage that won us our democracy.
South Africa will not be Zimbabwe as long as we refuse to submit.