Zuma brinkmanship takes hold

The recent reports of Mbeki’s alleged misdemeanours in the Sunday Times, along with the elevated rhetoric from those in the Zuma camp over the last week, have surprised and rightly concerned many. Rumours of Mbeki’s involvement in the arms deal have been whispered and deliberated in the corridors of ANC power for some time now, but the timing of the “leak” of this report is in no way coincidental, and forms part of a wider campaign to force the country to accept the final option open to guarantee Zuma’s freedom.

Last week’s decision by the Constitutional Court to allow the damning documents seized from Zuma’s home and office saw Zuma’s last real chance for freedom spurned. So what is left for Zuma? The answer to that question has been coming for months now, certainly ever since Polokwane, and we are currently ringside at the final outcome. The last page of the Zuma playbook is a blanket amnesty for all those involved in the arms deal, thus ridding Zuma of his presidential shackles and damning Mbeki by implication.

Against this backdrop, one can more clearly understand the rhetoric that has been flying around in the media over the last week. Hear Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans’ Association’s assertions of “No Zuma, no country” and a mobilisation of long-defunct MK platoons; see the SACP’s Blade Nzimande stating that the Zuma case is “raising the political temperature, which is not good for our young democracy”; listen to ANC Youth League president Julius Malema saying that “Zuma must be president whether there is a court case or not”; or see ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, in his various thinly-veiled threats against the judiciary.

This is a clear lifting of the political atmosphere with one endgame in mind — to raise the spectre of a guilty verdict for Zuma leading to a breakdown in our democracy, and by proxy making a blanket amnesty the “safe” option. In essence, it is an extreme measure to make the unpalatable palatable. Unfortunately, it smacks a bit like terrorism, using the threat of a minority (research has illustrated that Zuma does not hold the support of the majority of the rank and file ANC membership as the president of South Africa, regardless of Polokwane’s position in the anti-Mbeki battleground) loud enough to present its cause as the view of the majority.

However, it is here where the voters of this country, and the ANC, find themselves in the post-Polokwane landscape, and where we see the acute vision of a party at war with itself. Much of the political environment of the last decade — and the next — is being condensed and packaged into a thousand small decisions that will be taken over the next few months, and it is undoubtedly a critical test of both our leading party, and of our nascent democracy.