Southern Africa Report (Johannesburg)
25 May 2011
With the bruising local government election out of the way, and a renewed mandate from a barely-altered base, the African National Congress (ANC) this week returns its full attention to its gladiatorial succession race.
The party’s national executive committee (NEC) meets on Friday (27 May 2011) to review the 18 May poll. The gathering will give the first indication of how vulnerable – if at all – President Jacob Zuma is to efforts to oust him at the party’s 53rd elective conference in December 2012.
Since the virtual collapse of the Zuma coalition which catapulted him to the party presidency in 2007 (and the national presidency in 2009), Zuma has found himself on the defensive. Ambitious figures in the ANC’s NEC, its national working committee, its leagues (women and youth) and others in its alliance with the Cosatu trade unions and the South African Communist Party (SACP), constantly snipe at his heels.
The ANC succession dogfight has become the most reliable filter through which to assess both the Zuma administration and the ANC. Constant bickering weakens Zuma as South African president, as he has had to adopt an almost permanently defensive stance inside the ANC.
How has this happened? And why has the coalition of ANC factions that deposed Thabo Mbeki, headed by a president who stood triumphantly astride the party at last year’s national general council (NGC), weakened so quickly?
In part the answer lies in the reality, which predates Zuma, that patronage rather than ideology is the key driver of internal politics inside today’s ANC. The succession cannot be assessed from the perspective of left-right tension: even in the broad coalition ranged against Mbeki in 2007, it was possible to discern some ideology-based coherence. This may have been due to the fact that for a decade their common nemesis imposed a right-leaning policy hegemony on the ANC, and even the patronage networks supported by Mbeki’s ANC reflected this ideological bent.
President Jacob Zuma casting his vote in his hometown in Inkandla, KwaZulu-Natal earlier, amid much excitement and jubilation from the locals in the area.
Patronage under Zuma has no such parameters. The absence of ideological boundaries accounts for the fluidity of the actors and the arbitrariness of the issues in dispute during recent succession-linked public squabbles that have brought the Polokwane alliance to its knees. Cosatu – or sections of it supportive of general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi’s ambitions – have made Zuma-linked corruption their rallying cry.
The ANC Youth League has found its hitherto misplaced Marxist textbooks, becoming the new standard-bearers for nationalisation and uncompensated land expropriation. In this they have curiously found no allies in the SACP, which for its part has uncomfortably found itself perceived as siding with the Gupta family, Zuma’s increasingly widely unpopular financial underwriters.
Opposition to Zuma has not consolidated into a coherent faction, but comprises a swirling, confused and frequently realigning mess, still without an agreed champion. When policy debates emerge in the ANC, they are little more than proxy fights over the 2012 succession.
The Youth League does not genuinely believe its own nationalisation rhetoric, not with its leadership heavily involved in state tenders and other spinoffs of comprador capitalism, notably in mining and construction.
Another symptom of the ANC’s malady is the mushrooming of its rapacious provincial elites, inextricably tied to economic interests in their localities. Their presence has all but supplanted the influence on ANC policy and strategy of key ANC constituencies – the urban working class, civic organisations and other mass-based interest groups, who latterly find themselves on the periphery of ANC structures and high-stakes politics.
It is likely that whoever replaces Zuma – either in 2012 or 2017 – will face the same perpetual succession dogfights, driven by the same relentless hunger for state-led largesse. It is no longer alarmist to suggest that the ANC is in a permanent state of discord, and its presidents will grow weaker with each succession.
The Youth League’s brazen willingness to take on Zuma anywhere, anytime and on any issue is clear evidence of this gradual weakening of the party’s presidency. Despite seeming defeat at the NGC of their nationalisation call, the Youth League under president Julius Malema has regrouped and, if anything, ratcheted up its public fight with the president and the government over this issue and land expropriation – in recent weeks doing significant collateral damage to the ANC’s election campaign.
The league is preparing to escalate the fight to the ANC’s national policy conference next year, after ramming its proposals through next month’s Youth League conference, when Malema stands to be re- elected. The league hopes to capitalise on the anticipated victory ahead of the policy conference, when new policies will be discussed and presented for final adoption as the ANC’s elective conference in December 2012.
The ANC’s election campaign was an example of how pervasive the succession has become for the ANC. Zuma’s detractors repeatedly tried to upstage him on the campaign trail, which he joined late as a result of government commitments, either by openly attacking his leadership or by making it clear that the ANC under their control would handle matters differently. The hyperbolic warnings by Cosatu’s Vavi on the spectre of “President Zille” (a reference to opposition leader Helen Zille) did the ANC no favours during the campaign.
And the Youth League also played to the gallery during an equality court hearing into Malema’s insistence on singing anti-apartheid struggle song “Dubul’ ibhunu” (Kill the boer) – turning Malema into the poster boy of liberation iconography, while painting Zuma as a sell-out to imperialism for supporting the UN’s no-fly zone resolution on Libya.
But going for Zuma publicly is one thing; galvanising the machine in the ANC to oust him after one term is another. Those who have written Zuma’s political obituary in the past have learned that his political nous is well honed. His reorganisation of government, which was offset by the Cabinet re-shuffle, demonstrated his political savvy.
Antipathy towards Zuma is far broader that those immediately surrounding Malema and Vavi. But his opponents suffer from a deficit of ideological coherence and organisational synergy. And they lack a candidate with the necessary support and gravitas to take him on in next year’s ANC presidential elections. There are many pretenders to the throne, but only a few names have actually been thrown in to the hat: ANC (and national) Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale and ANC treasurer-general Mathews Phosa. Motlanthe has the pedigree and potential support in the provinces, but is reluctant to go up against the incumbent. He has so far spurned efforts to lure him into the fray. Sexwale simply doesn’t have the cross-over appeal within the ANC-led alliance and the leagues. Phosa is universally mistrusted by all the factions and will come into play only as an adjunct to the main players.
The only scenario in which Motlanthe could step up to the plate is one in which he is called upon by powerbrokers to “save” the ANC from the excesses of the Zuma presidency. Zuma’s messy personal life, which raised the alarm very early in his term, and his susceptibility to personal scandal (he fathered a love child with a divorcee early in 2010) are variables that could come bring Motlanthe into play.
A second problem for Zuma’s opponents is the lack of overall support for the candidacy of Fikile Mbalula to replace current ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. His Youth League backers are insistent on his presence on the leadership slate for any anti-Zuma coalition. Mbalula, who has become the face of the anti-Zuma drive in the ANC, is battling to convince the ANC’s powerful Gauteng province to throw their weight behind his campaign. The league’s argument that Mbalula is a perfect example of the generational mix required to keep the ANC leadership in tune and in touch with the electorate does not resonate with senior ANC powerbrokers in the provinces, many of whom regard themselves as preferable candidates for Mantashe’s position.
Although the ANC formally frowns on candidate slates (a list of preferred candidates from a set of positions), they have become the glue that binds factions seeking to control the party. Anti-Zuma groupings have so far been unable to agree on candidates for the key president and secretary-general positions. Extensive horse-trading will be necessary before an anti-Zuma slate is able to satisfy the range of personal, political and economic interests now converging against Zuma.
It will be useful in the months ahead to track new connections made across the ANC’s provinces and the Tripartite Alliance. In most cases the associations will be choreographed as principled, ideological alliances; in reality thinly-disguised ambition, self-interest and patronage will be the actual drivers behind the patina of public spin.
Currently the most likely scenario is that Zuma remains in charge of the ANC after 2012, although weakened. In this scenario he will serve his second term largely as a ceremonial head with little or no room to manoeuvre, captive to those who managed to encircle him in the party – and replaced in 2014 as the country’s president.
But Zuma has triumphed in equally trying circumstances in the past. If he manages to hold the centre and rebuild his relationships sufficiently, he will win in 2012 and ensure that he remains head of state in 2014. If he does so, he will be in a position of strength to negotiate the terms of his eventual exit when he steps down in 2017, and to pick his own successor and determine his own legacy.
AllAfrica – All the Time
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Ruling Party Gladiators Enter Arena