Quiet before political storm
THE year is young. Johannesburg is still quiet. The news cycle is abysmal. Some houses got damaged in Protea Glen by a tornado the other day. Building standards have been the topic of the week on the radio. Why not tornadoes?
Then there’s the small matter of who is running the country.
There’s one hell of a fight going on under cover of the “holiday” period for control of the ANC and its government.
Basically, it centres on how, and how quickly, to remove President Jacob Zuma from office.
Messages and emissaries from all sides meet and call each other constantly.
A series of events is about to begin that will starkly reveal the state we’re in and give us a hint of what this year is going to feel like.
On Saturday, SACP leaders are due to meet and boy, are they pissed off.
The SACP was largely cut out of the new ANC national executive committee (NEC) elected at the national conference just before Christmas.
They will want to go their own way, as they did in a local election around Sasolburg a month ago.
If that were to become permanent, the tripartite alliance of the ANC, the SACP and the union umbrella, Cosatu, would officially break. But will the communists go all the way? I doubt it. Cyril Ramaphosa, deputy head of state and now president of the ANC, is desperate to repair relations with the SACP, which has supported his campaign to lead the ANC.
A Ramaphosa cabinet list currently being optimistically circulated has SACP leader Blade Nzimande back in the cabinet in his old job at higher education and training.
I’ll tell you more about that list in a moment, but let’s stick first with known events upcoming.
Four days after the SACP meets, the new ANC NEC meets for the first time, in East London.
The initial supposition was that it would immediately hold a discussion on whether to recall Zuma from the Union Buildings, as the then NEC did to Thabo Mbeki in 2008.
Although the ANC race between Ramaphosa and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma was extremely close, experts in these things say Ramaphosa could assemble enough votes to secure a recall.
In fact, my sources tell me, there was a tacit understanding anyway between the two camps that Zuma would need to go quickly and that whoever won the party leadership would need to lead the country into the general election next year.
Even Zuma, it is said, saw the logic of that, particularly if Dlamini-Zuma, his former wife and mother of four of his children, had won. Ramaphosa not so much.
But things have become quite complex, apparently.
Zuma is flatly refusing to consider resignation and he could simply ignore a recall by the NEC.
The new ANC leadership desperately doesn’t want him making the state of the nation address in parliament in February and it doesn’t want Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba presenting a new budget a few days after Zuma has spoken.
But constitutionally, Zuma is perfectly entitled to occupy the Union Buildings and run the government.
When he was recalled, Mbeki obeyed out of what, with hindsight, looks like a distorted fealty to the ANC. Zuma won’t.
Also, the top six officials elected last month are divided not so much into the old pre-conference camps but by new pressures, making it harder to surround Zuma with pressure to go.
Ace Magashule, the ANC leader in the Free State who was elected ANC secretary-general, is said to want to do both jobs at once.
The introduction of provincial politicians into the top six is kind of new.
They have different anxieties – mainly, for both Magashule and Mpumalanga premier DD Mabuza, elected deputy president, elevation into the party leadership means leaving behind the very provincial power bases that put them in the leadership in the first place.
There’ll soon be new leaders, with their new followers, in both provinces.
So in a way both Magashule and Mabuza are isolated.
Mabuza appears to be the more sanguine about it, but for Ramaphosa it’s a good thing.
Both will initially need him for their political security. Deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte can also be counted on from now as a Ramaphosa backer so the top six is barely divided at all for the moment.
Magashule is an uncomfortable outsider.
Three days after the NEC meeting, Ramaphosa makes his first January 8 statement (January 8 is the ANC birthday and the leader traditionally addresses a large crowd somewhere. This time it’ll also be in East London but on the 13th).
It will be an opportunity to give his own state of the nation address.
He will have to reassure markets that the policy tide is indeed going to turn, and reassure an expectant party and a wider public that a judicial commission led by someone appointed by the chief justice and not Zuma will happen. People will want a date. There are rumours the DlaminiZuma camp might try to boycott the statement address, but it is hard to see why.
There are two ways to get rid of Zuma that he can’t ignore.
Parliament may just have to grin and bear the embarrassment of being addressed again by Zuma when the institution opens in February, but it could then quickly get its revenge by passing a vote of no confidence in him.
He and the cabinet would immediately have to resign. The budget might have to be delayed. Impeachment, which deprives him of a pension or security in retirement, needs a bigger majority.
The other way, which allows Zuma to leave office with the grace he feels he deserves, is to call an early general election.
The people around Zuma rather like this idea and believe, probably correctly, that the opposition is in no condition to stand up to Ramaphosa and that the ANC would win with a comfortable parliamentary majority.
Zuma’s critics in the party say it’s a crazy idea. The ANC is divided and bankrupt, and it would almost certainly lose Gauteng.
That has never worried Zuma.
Still, Zuma “standing firm” is probably a bit of political theatre.
He is not, he insists, going to be humiliated, but court action against him has tied him up in knots.
He will always try to delay, but even these tactics are now beginning to cost him personally.
He will be looking for a deal of sorts to keep out of court but Ramaphosa will protect himself once he becomes president by establishing a commission of inquiry into state capture with wide powers and a big budget.
Whatever the consequences for people caught up in the scandal, Ramaphosa will be able to wash his hands of them. By the second week of February as well, just as all of this comes to a head, Ramaphosa has been ordered by the courts (appealed by Zuma, which he’ll lose) to replace Shaun Abrahams as head of the NPA.
That will be a critical moment for Zuma and must figure large in his calculations.
Ramaphosa, though, is a conciliator by instinct.
The cabinet “list” doing the rounds has him as president and Mabuza as deputy.
Zweli Mkhize is finance minister, Senzo Mchunu gets energy and Enoch Godongwana gets economic development.
Lindiwe Sisulu becomes foreign minister, Ebrahim Rasool gets mineral resources and Pravin Gordhan comes back – but, cruelly, to public enterprises.
Derek Hanekom gets tourism back, Ebrahim Patel goes to transport and Rob Davies stays at trade and industry.
Jackson Mthembu gets communications, Jeff Radebe police and Bheki Cele state security. But there are critics in there too. Dlamini-Zuma gets social development (ha ha), Fikile Mbalula goes back to sport, David Mahlobo gets environment and Gigaba goes back to home affairs.
There’ll be many more such lists, no doubt, and many more reports that Zuma is refusing to talk.
From next week the politics heats up again though, so enjoy the quiet while it lasts.