The Z factor: Is the real Jacob Zuma emerging?

Jolly. Jovial. Man of the people. This is how presidential hopeful Jacob Zuma has been projecting himself to South Africans. Here and there reality interfered – rape trial, corruption charges – but Zuma kept up the singing and dancing.

When asked about policy issues, he would hide behind the usual “ANC collective” excuse: a mere individual can’t decide; the collective does the decision-making. When he did make statements (about economic policy and affirmative action), they were qualified or repudiated later by other ANC leaders.

These are the difficulties of an alliance built not on principles but on extreme aversion in Leader A (Thabo Mbeki) and support for Leader B (Zuma) because he shares that aversion. This is not to say the factions in the Zuma camp do not have principles. They do but these have been put on the backburner while they fight for dominance against each other and the new electoral threat, the Congress of the People.

Zuma owes each one of those people in his camp – each one who helped him to victory in Polokwane, who helped to smash the Scorpions, to put pressure on the judiciary, to get Parliament behind him, to mobilise economic resources behind him and so on. What will be left of Zuma when he has served each their pound of flesh?

Zuma has to deliver. What he has to offer is populism. Here I am not referring to democratic pressure which is regularly dismissed as populism by conservatives in this society. I am referring to his attempts to be all things to all people. A capitalist for the capitalists, a unionist for the workers, a traditionalist for certain reactionary Afrikaners, a patriarchal chauvinist to ethnic traditionalists.

Except that the last couple of incarnations may be the real thing. There have been a few danger signs along the way: his sexist statements during the rape trial, his warmongering signature song “Awuleth’ umshini wam”, the homophobic utterances. But since he has embarked on his election performances (which is what they are) we are getting a clearer picture of the real Zuma, our next president (if the ANC gets its way).

From right-wing fantasy flights (send pregnant teenagers and school dropouts to disciplinary camps) to attacks on the Constitution (the “human rights culture” should not stand in the way of the police, criminals get bail too easily, let’s discard the “innocent until proven guilty” principle. This principle may apparently be claimed by him and no one else.)

And there’s the hate speech – the constant references to his political enemies as “snakes” in a country where we have had several ethnically and racially motivated attacks just in this past year.

We should pay attention. This is the real Zuma and, given the support of the majority of factions in the ANC for him, this is the real ANC of the moment. Maybe we should not be too surprised. It is not far removed from the one that some warned about in the so-called ANC dissident literature of the 1980s when the ANC was in exile and Zuma was sharpening his political teeth.

Political scientist Tom Lodge wrote in 1991 in South African Review 6 (eds. G Moss and I Obery and published by Ravan Press) about two strands of writing on the ANC in exile. The academic writing of the time portrayed the ANC as an ideologically coherent, disciplined and rule-bound organisation built on moral integrity.

In stark contrast there was the “dissident literature” of the time where unnamed insiders and former participants in an Umkhonto weSizwe mutiny supplied information on the ANC to the publications Africa Confidential and Searchlight South Africa.

While the academic writing acknowledged that power in the exiled ANC was authoritarian in character, the dissident literature explained what that meant in practice.

According to these accounts, power in the ANC in exile was personal rather than bureaucratic. This translated into interdepartmental feuds among administrative heads – security vs military; military vs diplomatic and so on. Such feuds might have had strategic implications but they arose from people jockeying for political paramountcy. The administrative heads staffed their sections with protégés and, as a result “the organisation’s essential inner dynamics derive[d] from webs of personal loyalties”.

Leadership positions meant dispensing patronage through tight control over who got access to resources. The competition between leaders generated serious tensions which were sharpened by personal animosities and ethnic jealousies between Zulus and Xhosas, according to the dissident accounts.

Power was exercised arbitrarily, especially by Mbokhodo, the ANC’s security arm. (Mbokhodo means “the stone that crushes”.) And then: “authority [in the ANC] is corrupt, and this is manifest in venality, crime and sexual exploitation”, according to the dissidents.

While one should consider these accounts with some scepticism, given that they emanated from aggrieved persons, the picture that emerges sounds all too familiar when compared with the infighting and factionalist power-mongering inside the ANC over the past few years.

Guess who was the head of security in those years? Our one-and-only Zuma.

As an illustration of the dynamics, Lodge relays the chilling tale of Thami Zulu which was reported in the British media in 1991. Zulu was the head of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) in Natal in the 1980s. The apartheid security police infiltrated the ANC in Swaziland, which led to the assassinations of leaders and arrests of guerrillas.

Acting over the heads of MK, Mbokhodo then detained Zulu and other activists from Natal. MK commander Joe Modise and MK head of staff Chris Hani tried on several occasions to secure Zulu’s release but failed. When Mbokhodo finally let him go in November 1989, he died five days later. The autopsy showed he had been poisoned with pesticide.

Then Lodge wrote: “Both The Guardian and Africa Confidential attributed Zulu’s fall to institutional animosity between Mbokhodo and Umkhonto and the personal rivalry of Jacob Zuma, then heading security, who had apparently resented both Zulu’s ascendancy and Umkhonto’s chief of staff Chris Hani, whose protégé Zulu had been.”

This tale raises several questions, among others whether the SACP would currently support Zuma if this had indeed happened, given the link with former SACP general secretary Chris Hani. It is also noticeable that in the ANC’s official communications on its website, little information exists about Mbokhodo. In Umrabulo 14 it is mentioned in connection with the setting up of the ANC’s notorious Quattro camp.

In the post-rainbow era we are finally grappling with the less savoury continuities from the past – including ideas and practices which are contrary to our foundational social contract, the Constitution.

As we have witnessed in the past few months, the ANC’s internal dynamics can destabilise the country. We cannot allow the content of our democracy to be determined by dangerous personalities engaged in power-mongering with no regard to the well-being of the people they are supposed to serve.