Political earthquake caused South Africa’s ‘Zunami’

The election of Jacob Zuma as leader of the African National Congress at the movement’s 52nd National Conference, held in mid-December in Polokwane, caused minor shockwaves worldwide.

Zuma’s trouncing of incumbent Thabo Mbeki for the presidency of the ANC prompted nervousness particularly among international big business and investors about events in South Africa.

Ever ready to divest at the prospect of a leftward turn or signs of instability, multinational corporations are unsure what the changes in the ANC herald.

The same goes for many other South Africa watchers.

What lies behind the apparent personality struggles? Media coverage of the run up to Polokwane left the impression that little else was at stake.

We need to go back a bit to get some perspective.

Zuma was sacked as Deputy President of the country by President Mbeki in 2005 following oblique allegations that Zuma was involved in financial fraud.

His name had been mentioned by the judge in the trial of his financial advisor Schabir Shaik, who was found guilty of fraud and is now serving a hefty jail sentence.

Not long after, the Scorpions – the elite crime-fighting unit that acts independently from the national police service – raided Zuma’s home and confiscated masses of documents.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) then instigated charges against financial corruption against Zuma. But the case was thrown out by the Durban High Court because the NPA lacked enough evidence to present a final indictment.

Shortly after, Zuma was again on trial, this time for rape. The indictment and evidence were uncertain enough for Zuma to be acquitted.

But the misogyny declaimed by Zuma’s supporters against the plaintiff, who is HIV positive, and Zuma’s own apparent cavalier attitude to the whole issue provoked serious concerns among sectors of society fighting for women’s rights and to tackle the country’s staggeringly high rape and domestic violence levels.

To make matters worse, Zuma, who was head of the National Aids Council, had admitted to having unprotected sex with the HIV positive plaintiff and said that he’d showered afterwards to lessen the risk of infection.

Following his acquittal, he made a public apology for his behaviour. But the dubious circumstances of the case were never satisfactorily laid to rest.

In the meantime Zuma was increasingly identified as a possible successor to President Mbeki, both as leader of the ANC and – intuitively but not necessarily – following from that, as leader of the country.

The failure of the NPA to come up with anything tangible in its investigations on Zuma’s financial dealings, but its insistence on keeping a high profile on its investigations of Zuma, aroused allegations of a smear campaign.

Many of Zuma’s supporters have found the whole conduct of allegations against him to be the stuff of conspiracy. There was a conspicuous lack of hard evidence in all the legal actions taken against Zuma.

The piling of charges against him in a timeframe of several years, plus the numerous and bizarre pre-announcements of the NPA to the media of its fresh corruption charges against Zuma, were seen by some as proof of a concerted effort to scotch his credibility.

Against the backdrop of Zuma’s ups and downs and his constant ridicule in the mass media as a bumbling idiot, the ANC was preparing for its 52 national conference, at which a new leadership and policy line would be chosen.

This, and not Zuma’s problematic image, was the real substance of the political choices facing the ANC as both a party and a mass movement.

To see why, we have to go back again to the early years of the country’s young democracy.

The shifts in policy away from the commitments outlined by the ANC when in exile to those shaped when it became the country’s ruling party are essentially ones that have sought to fit in with the neo-liberal course of economic globalisation.

This was most clearly demonstrated in 1996. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), which sought a proactive approach to tackling poverty, inequality and unemployment, was unceremoniously replaced by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR).

GEAR talked the neo-liberal talk: “a faster fiscal deficit reduction programme… a reduction in tariffs…tax incentives to stimulate investment…flexibility within the collective bargaining system… a growth rate of 6 per cent per annum and job creation of 400,000 by the year 2000.”

This is classic monetarist stuff. Things like tax cuts to stimulate investment inevitably detracted from the social spending that the more poverty-reducing RDP had posited.

Over the years, GEAR had the effect of all other such heavily pro-capital monetarist projects.

Poverty has not been alleviated but has grown; overall unemployment has not been cut but has risen. The sectors of society that have profited most are big business, which in South Africa has remained overwhelmingly in white ownership, with little of the Black Economic Empowerment that GEAR’s architects forecast.

GEAR’s market-driven growth plan and the top-down delivery of economic change it envisaged are wholly out of sync with the crisis of underdevelopment that plagues South Africa.

Like ruling elites in most Western countries, the ANC government under Mbeki sought to occupy the ‘centre ground’ of the liberal-capitalist political space. Doing so naturally put South Africa in a favourable position among the G8, WTO, EU and OECD mainstreams.

Increasingly since 1996, critics within the broader ANC movement saw the ANC government as reneging on the pledges that had been basis of its appeal and its triumph over apartheid’s racial capitalism and white minority rule.

After all, the basis of the ANC’s original mass appeal against apartheid and the developments since 1948 was the Freedom Charter, adopted in1955.

The Freedom Charter envisaged a South Africa enjoying some redistributed wealth to achieve housing, health and education for all and the riches of the country under the ownership of the people.

Much of the criticism of the trajectory of the ANC over the last decade has come from its alliance partners, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The alliance provides much of the ANC’s grass-roots political ballast.

In June 2007 the ANC held a national policy conference. This was attended by 2,000 delegates. It was the main event of substance in the run up to the big gathering of the 52nd National Conference, to be held six months later.

Policy conferences often don’t receive much media attention because they are not about electing leaderships. But when we consider the ANC such conferences are the meat and potatoes of what’s to come. Their aim is to set out the proposals that will be decided on by the National Conference.

The preparation of the policy conference involved all sections of the ANC – branches, zones, regions and provinces, plus SACP and COSATU partners, plus wide areas of public opinion including NGOs and intellectuals.

This wide-ranging consultative character of the ANC’s democratic reach has few parallels anywhere in the world among political formations.

The recommendations produced by this nationwide consultation contained an explicit consensus for the consolidation of a progressive, national democratic state.

This envisages more robust efforts to build a developmental state that actively intervenes in the economy and affirms the building of a strong state-owned sector.

The policy conference endorsed this perspective. But it was clear from its many recommendations that the South African developmental state cannot be top-down and authoritarian.

Instead, it needs to strengthen and be strengthened by a broad popular movement. And this must involve assertive legislatures and participatory governance.

In this context, the conference asserted that industrial policy must contribute to changing the current path of growth from one that is import led and capital intensive to one that is labour intensive.

Macro-economic policy needs to be aligned sustainably to such an industrial policy. Local economic development needs to be invigorated to develop and be developed by such policies.

Cooperatives need to be established and spatial development better planned so that rural and peri-urban areas are no longer neglected.

A major cross-cutting theme of the recommendations was the near unanimity about the failure of land reform.

The market-led ‘willing-seller willing-buyer’ approach has led to just 4% of transfers of agricultural land to its original owners among black communities. The target of 30% by 2014 looks distant.

But the recommendations made clear that land reform must be integrated into an agrarian, agro-industrial and national food strategy. These in turn have to be part and parcel of a new economic growth path.

The preparations for the big event of the 52nd National Conference were thus heavily policy-oriented ones. In this light, the question of leaders and the personalities involved were something of a sideshow.

As a popular figure and an ANC leader who had held much decisive responsibility when the organisation operated from exile and underground within South Africa, Jacob Zuma has been seen as more representative of and in touch with the movement’s grassroots aspirations than Mbeki.

Much to the despair of political pundits, Zuma has been upfront in stating that his only policy is that agreed upon by the ANC collective.

Mbeki, on the other hand, has been criticised for ignoring the rank and file collective in favour of policy formulation by the inner circle of cabinet and advisors.

This more than anything is the reason why Zuma won the ANC’s top job at the 52nd National Conference this December. The Conference drew 4,000 delegates representing 600,00 ANC members from many thousands of local branches.

But the point about all the acrimonious debate and position jostling, the volleys of allegations and accusations that have been so one-sidedly inflated in the media is only superficially about pro-Zuma or pro-Mbeki clashes.

Scratch beneath the surface of hyperbole and sensationalism and it is clear that what’s at stake is political direction.

This was shown at the National Conference by the fact that it was not only the top position of the ANC that changed (2,329 votes to Zuma, 1,505 to Mbeki) but that the entire leadership was renewed by large majority votes.

SACP deputy leader and ANC MP Jeremy Cronin, writing in the Mail&Guardian 30 November, summed up the climate of expectation that was to gain tangible expression at the National Conference:

The challenge at Polokwane will be to insist on a different style of leadership – but not for its own sake. A change in leadership style must lay the basis for a more united and collective ANC, grounded in grass-roots work within communities…. We need to get back to focusing on the politics of the people – the challenges of poverty, unemployment and deepening inequality.

The Polokwane event affirmed the need for change advanced by the ANC policy conference six months before.

It took a range of policy decisions that could signal a return to a more progressive course of reconstruction. The coming months will tell whether these will be incorporated into the government’s work

‘The people have taken back the party’, exclaimed a headline in the Sunday Independent. ‘Zunami rules’ trumpeted the Sowetan. ‘We should rejoice at Zuma’s victory’, was the heading of a long analysis in the Sunday Times.

This latter piece said that the message from Polokwane is “a timely reminder to those in senior positions that they do not have an inalienable right to rule. Instead, power resides with ordinary members of the organisation.”

Just after Christmas, the National Prosecuting Authority announced that it has re-charged Jacob Zuma with fraud. For good measure it has added money laundering, racketeering and tax evasion to the charge sheet. The NPA has proposed a trial date in August 2008.

The spokesperson of the ANC Presidency office warned against any “state or political manipulation” behind re-charging Zuma and the new deputy President of the ANC Kgalema Motlanthe said that the length of time the NPA has taken in investigating Zuma was “suspect”.

But whatever the fortunes of the new ANC President, whether the NPA really has a case, whether any perceived conspiracy can be proven, one thing is clear.

The political course agreed at Polokwane and the reassertion of the ANC as a party and movement of the left are the momentum of efforts to reorient South Africa’s transition. The gathering turmoil around Jacob Zuma’s situation may mirror but will not define this.

Mark Waller, Pretoria, 30 December