We must refuse to be captives of Zuma’s political games

Perhaps it is the most fitting end to a politically underwhelming year that often teetered towards the absurd. A former president, and the immediate past leader of the ruling party, announcing that he will vote for a yet to be officially launched opposition party because he has realised that “this is not the South Africa I fought for”.

When exactly he realised this is unclear. Was it in the early 1990s, when he and other leaders in the national liberation movement negotiated a political settlement with the apartheid regime — a settlement that many of his supporters now reject as a sell-out pact that only served to perpetuate economic dominance by a racial minority?

Or was it during those years in government — first as economic development MEC, then for six years as deputy president and, much later, as head of state for almost nine years?

What exactly did he do better in those 20 years in government, compared to the current crop of leaders, to bring about the “South Africa I fought for”?

Are we meant to believe that the national liberation train went off the rails only when he was removed from office? That, before then, South Africa was truly on its way to post-apartheid prosperity where skin colour wasn’t the most critical factor in who gets to do menial labour or reside in the best suburbs?

And then there is the complaint about the current lot in power. The Ramaphosa ANC, as he calls it, has betrayed all the values of the liberation struggle and is selling the country to the capitalist class.

But if President Cyril Ramaphosa is a Trojan horse for a sinister bourgeois plot to cripple “the national democratic revolution ” from within, who helped pull the horse to the very centre where it could do the most damage?

Whatever one may think of Ramaphosa and his leadership style, the truth is that he may never have made president were it not for the desperation of the Jacob Zuma camp in the ANC when they realised that his then deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe, was planning to challenge him for the ANC presidency at the party’s 2012 national conference.

Once Zuma and his inner circle — the so-called Premier League — made Ramaphosa deputy president, the path to the main job became clear for him.

So Zuma should be the last person to complain about Ramaphosa and the current ANC leadership. They are all a consequence of what some intellectuals have termed the Zumafication of South African politics.

It is now almost 20 years since Zuma’s legal troubles first engulfed the South African political dialogue, almost pushing everything else to the periphery.

In 2004, as the country moved towards its third democratic general election, the talk dominating the headlines was whether then president Thabo Mbeki would reappoint Zuma as his deputy after the polls given the damaging evidence in the courts about his relationship with Schabir Shaik and how that was linked to arms deal-related corruption.

Mbeki reappointed him, only to fire him a year later after the courts found Shaik guilty and implicated Zuma. Since then, Zuma and his troubles have taken centre stage.

Even though he was ultimately removed from political office in 2018 after his preferred slate’s loss at the ANC 2017 elective conference, Zuma’s name has continued to dominate. The state capture commission, the biggest political development of the past six years, was largely about him.

ANC intellectual Joel Netshitenzhe warned the party at the start of the Zuma tsunami those many years ago that:

“A defective leadership not only holds back the attainment of national objectives, it also presents a difficult conundrum for the movement, in that to rationalise its bad choices the ANC has to lower itself to embrace those defects. Steadily, these defects of the individual leaders become, by default, the collective property of the organisation, its own blind spots and its subliminal attributes in the public imagination.”

The reality is that, despite much talk of “renewal ” after the man’s removal from office in 2018, the ANC has struggled to raise the bar above the low levels it dragged itself down to during the Zuma years.

As a consequence, given the ANC’s sheer dominance of the political scene, the country too is struggling to rise above those levels again.

As we enter a new year, one in which as citizens we will have an opportunity to have our voices heard through the ballot, the greatest gift we can give to ourselves is to refuse to be perpetual captives of Zuma’s political games.