WHY WE SUPPORTED DLAMINI-ZUMA

COME 2017, the choice between who to lead the ANC beyond Jacob Zuma – Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Cyril Ramaphosa – was never an authentic one of existential ideological difference in terms of class consciousness.

Neither represented the cause of radical economic transformation and land redress as a personal conviction.

Neither could automatically claim that the black pro-poor constituency Zuma came to represent would endorse them. Zuma may have sensed this too, and therefore made a public overture in support of Dlamini-Zuma.

The campaign choice the ANC afforded us was between two people measurable in who purports to be closer to the ideals of the masses, and that closer assessment was informed by their willingness to publicly associate with the people’s cause at the behest of being ridiculed by a mainstream media who long ago made their choices on what democracy should depict.

There is, therefore, a mistruth going around that assumes that those of us, and this includes the authors as well as many others, were firstly Jacob Zuma people and secondly NDZ people. Let us clear this up. Our association with, and acceptance of, a Zuma leadership of the ANC was purely informed by a common dictate of the will of the masses, that in a sense forced Zuma into the space of adopting radical economic transformation and true land redress as his flagship legacy.

Our support of Zuma was determined by his association with the people’s cause. We can assert we never signed up anywhere to defend Zuma as “his people”; we equally so would never have had any appetite to sign up to defend Dr Dlamini-Zuma.

There are, therefore, no Jacob Zuma or Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma people, but people who from long ago have questioned the ANC in an outfoxed negotiated settlement and its androgynous outcomes of entrenched white privilege and a new breed of black elite who are in political office, but actually answers to white interest.

Thus, we independently volunteered to support Dlamini-Zuma’s campaign because she too in her campaign to ANC high office, dared to adopt what can easily be dubbed the ideals of a people’s campaign.

Did we ostensibly and fundamentally believe Dlamini-Zuma embodies the cause? No, we knew she was a politician and part of the ANC elite, who was pragmatic enough to read the mood of South Africa.

For the record, there are no “NDZ people”, but those who supported her campaign to the extent that she identified with the people’s cause. That cause has no singular leader, nor does it have an elitist as its face, and it will continue beyond any and all ANC politicians.

Our support of the NDZ campaign was from the start with the expressed hope that the tidal-wave of rapid economic transformation and land demands, would carry her to political and ideological pro-working class and pro-poor spaces, where she plausibly would never have swum by herself, and therefore, resulting in the people’s cause being the winner. In that sense the NDZ campaign for us was a means to an end.

We never had any illusions about Dlamini-Zuma the politician. We respect her as we do of all. We as authors thus have never personalised our support of NDZ with a caveat of any entitlement since we from the start knew the candidate.

For the record, there are no ‘NDZ’ people, but those who supported her campaign to the extent that she identified with the people’s cause