Still a chance to rid SA of Zuma

ANC NEC could change course of nation’s history this weekend, writes JANET SMITH

SIX YEARS ago, President Jacob Zuma was safely in Davos, far from the noise erupting at home around an event which many South Africans thought could bring him down.

Not even a year into his presidency, the Sunday Times newspaper named him as the father of a baby born to Sonono Khoza, daughter of soccer supremo Irvin Khoza.

It caused a massive stir. Zuma had to apologise and pay damages to Khoza and his family. He had to say sorry to the party of which he was president and to the people of the country he served.

Although there were rumours Zuma had offered his apologies somewhat reluctantly and upon the advice, if not instruction, of senior ANC members, nothing happened to him. But in those days, Zuma still tended towards open attacks on the media and remaining true to that, he accused the Fourth Estate of wishing some existential harm on his newborn child.

The president lost his mojo around lawsuits against the media a couple of years later and withdrew claims worth tens, if not hundreds of thousands, including against The Star and cartoonist Zapiro. He had, however, already pocketed settlements from the press and was believed to have been part of the infamous attempts at limiting press freedom through a Media Appeals Tribunal and other suggested censorship mechanisms.

Fortunately, a robust constitution did not allow much of that bluster and threat to achieve anything but a concern about the president’s own capacity. This was also true of his affair with Khoza’s daughter, which troubled some within the ANC enough to think of him as a growing liability. There was even talk at that stage of how he should be prevented from seeking a second term.

Imagine if the visionaries or wise men and women in the senior leadership of the ANC had, indeed, stepped in at that moment and done exactly that: scuppered Zuma’s untrammellled ambitions. We might not have been in the nightmare we find ourselves as a nation today.

Yet they allowed him to seek reelection at Mangaung in 2012, clearing his path to the second term which has brought such disaster to the country.

Thing was, however, the ANC then managed to still claim convincing victories, not only in the 2011 local government elections, but also in the national poll in 2014.

Today, just under two years after that ballot was cast, the president is for the umpteenth time under scrutiny for apparent amorality, possible fraud and corruption and a profound lack of credibility as a leader.

He has helped split the ANC’s crucial alliance partnerships with Cosatu and the SACP and it is on his watch that the trade union federation lost a significant percentage of its member unions to more left-wing formations.

Enter the Guptas, for it is the president’s close relationship to the family from Saharanpur, India, which has significantly entrenched the left’s position that greed, corruption and money have stolen our liberation, that Zuma’s platitudes around the National Democratic Revolution are mere air and, most serious of all, that he has allowed the South African state to be captured.

But also to blame must be the ANC leaders who allowed this to happen, particularly those who blindly voted to support a president, who, some believe, gained party-level power through patronage back in 2007.

This week, we have heard from some former and current ANC MPs and cabinet ministers including Vytjie Mentor, Mcebisi Jonas, Barbara Hogan, Ngoako Ramathlodi and, by default, Fikile Mbalula, how the Gupta family has undermined the good that was forged nearly 20 years ago when the constitution was completed.

We think of how vocal former minister in the presidency Trevor Manuel became – once he had left government.

So, too, Kgalema Motlanthe, who is now lionised in many sectors of South African society.

Other ministers apparently pushed aside, like the able Yunus Carrim – who served as the minister of communications from 2013 to 2014, to be replaced by the controversial Faith Muthambi – and upright Ben Martins, would do well to speak up if some influence from the Guptas shadowed their tenures.

We should praise those few brave individuals like former cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils who put himself in the political line of fire by openly declaring his disgust at what had happened to the ANC under Zuma.

Certainly, we have heard from other veterans – including Ben Turok, Dennis Goldberg, Frank Chikane and Enoch Godongwana – but Kasrils stands almost alone as a former ANC leader in government in this act of defiance.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, an ANC MP, national executive council member and former ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) president, in 2010 told The Sunday Independent, Weekend Argus’s sister publication, the ANC under Zuma was “not my ANC” but has said little more.

Meanwhile the sheer embarrassment of what has become of the ANCWL and the ANC Youth League is increasing.

Instead of being bold enough to stand with the people of this country against the erosion of our democracy, the youth league, in particular, has instead stood with the president – not surprising, since its own leaders have shown no leadership at all.

Neither body is worthy of the tremendous achievements of its apartheid-era predecessors who may today barely recognise the party they believed would liberate South Africans from the chains of economic control.

The NEC meets this weekend in what might be its most important gathering since 2007, when the plot to unseat then-president Thabo Mbeki was unfolding.

Zuma’s words at the Polokwane elective conference in 2007 reverberate.

He conjured up the ANC’s legendary second national consultative conference in Kabwe, Zambia, held in June 1985, which relayed a message from Robben Island from Nelson Mandela in which he reminded them “unity is the rock upon which the movement was founded”.

It was at that juncture that cadres demanded the democratic accountability of the party’s leadership.

In the same spirit, today’s loyal members should be doing the same at the NEC meeting this weekend, looking to change the course of the country’s future. Zupta, after all, must fall.