My friend Ayanda Mdluli has written a thoughtful and elegantly argued piece under the heading “Chess, not checkers: inside the King’s Gambit of SA politics.”
I read it with the respect due to a serious commentator attempting to impose coherence on the chaotic manoeuvres that currently dominate our public life. However, I disagree with him fundamentally, at almost every level of what he advances, and I write this as a critical counterpoint.
What he interprets as high strategy, as cold realpolitik and intentional vulnerability in the service of positional advantage, I experience as something far more familiar, far more base and aggressive: the same old self-interest dressed up in the false sophistication of so-called chess metaphors. It is the politics of the stomach, of self-aggrandisement and self-enrichment by a small elite, not the politics of principle.
I write this very much from my personal perspective, as someone who has always believed that the only politics worth pursuing are conviction politics. I speak from the historical perspective of my own experience in politics over more than fifty years — through prison, in my own case, and exile, in the case of many of my fellow liberation fighters. I have watched, participated in, and been shaped by the long arc from the underground struggle, through the negotiations, through the early years of democracy, and into the present disillusionment. Some moves that various commentators once celebrated as brilliant tactics eventually backfired, with devastating consequences for the majority of our people.
When I look back at the politics of the African National Congress after it returned from exile and entered engagement with the National Party, I am struck by the particular axis of elites that developed, as represented by the relationship between Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer.
The many compromises made in those years were presented with the apparent intention of ensuring a relatively peaceful transition of formal political power into the hands of the black majority. National and international political commentators and analysts — among them Allister Sparks, Patti Waldmeir in Anatomy of a Miracle, John Carlin, and liberal voices such as Ken Owen and Stanley Uys — celebrated Mandela’s strategy and the concessions the ANC made, particularly through the Ramaphosa-Meyer channel, as clever politics and sophisticated statecraft that would eventually deliver the best possible outcome for South Africa. They portrayed the negotiations as a masterclass in pragmatic compromise.
I followed these developments closely. At one point I myself believed that certain of these compromises could serve as a strategic bridgehead. The thinking was that once the former liberation movement held state power, it would be able to use the space created by those compromises to advance further fundamental change. But how wrong I was. When the opportunity did exist during the Thabo Mbeki administration, when the ANC indeed commanded a two-thirds majority, the politics of self-enrichment and elite self-absorption had already gone so far that the party was entirely incapable of using that majority to bring about the fundamental economic transformation that was both possible and necessary.
It refused to effect the required constitutional changes, including the amendment of Section 25, that would have made possible a concerted and radical programme of expropriation of land without compensation. By then the ANC leadership was already so sold out, their stomachs so filled with the self-enrichment they had obtained from white monopoly capital to which they had become beholden, that they were not prepared to make any significant move towards fundamental transformation. The idea that the compromises of the negotiations had provided a bridgehead that could later be converted into radical economic change proved to be an illusion. They were neither prepared nor capable of doing so, because it had become all about self-enrichment and self-interest.
I also remind myself of those who backed Cyril Ramaphosa and helped shape the person he became, namely the Oppenheimers and the Menells. It was the Oppenheimers who assisted him in the early period of the National Union of Mineworkers, and it was Irene Menell who ensured that Ramaphosa was included as a director of the Urban Foundation. They had their plans. And Ramaphosa was more than available to sell his soul for the financial benefits that he was gaining from these engagements.
During the negotiations, I often overheard Ramaphosa less occupied with the substance of the talks themselves than with negotiating his own self-advancement and future wealth. He was using the platform of the CODESA negotiations, and the critical role he played, to secure compromises that would ultimately benefit him and advance his own economic position. That pattern of elite self-interest, already visible then, has defined much of what followed.
An early and telling signal of this trajectory was the landmark meeting on 13 September 1985 at Mfuwe Lodge in Zambia. There, ANC leaders including Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki sat down with white captains of industry led by Gavin Relly of Anglo American, together with Zac de Beer (also of Anglo American and Southern Life), Tony Bloom of the Premier Group, Hugh Murray of Leadership SA, Tertius Myburgh of the Sunday Times, Harald Pakendorf of Die Vaderland, and Pieter Sorour of the South African Foundation.
These were clearly the representatives of white monopoly capital, with only one interest in mind: to maintain the economic status quo in South Africa. The ANC settled for that. There were those commentators who described it as clever politics — again, the politics of the King’s Gambit. But it was in fact nothing but sell-out politics.
That encounter, celebrated at the time as a breakthrough in communication, was in reality the beginning of a process in which the liberation movement began to reassure capital that its fundamental interests would be protected. We must look back at the entire period of transition as the fundamental undoing of the African National Congress and the selling out of the true ideals of the liberation struggle. It was the selling out of the hope for economic freedom and radical economic transformation in our lifetime.
Fellow conviction politicians saw this clearly at the time and opposed it. Mama Helen Joseph, Chris Hani, Harry Gwala, Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and others understood that what was being presented as shrewd chess was in reality the abandonment of the revolutionary content of the struggle. Their fundamental and correct arguments were contradicted and overruled by those who preferred to believe that the game was chess and that the King’s Gambit would eventually deliver the kingdom.
Oliver Tambo himself repeatedly told us, in many of his speeches and lectures and on Radio Freedom, that there would be no liberation in South Africa as long as fundamental economic transformation did not take place. He always spoke about how racism and economic exploitation dovetail, and that both must be addressed in a combined and ideologically sound manner. One of my political mentors, Dr Beyers Naudé, saw the danger with prophetic clarity. On his deathbed, when Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela came to see him, he made it plain that he believed they were making fundamental errors of selling out and sipping from the same cup with the devil.
He expressed deep disappointment and sent them away with the warning that they would regret what they were doing. Mama Helen Joseph insisted until her last breath, on Christmas Day 1992, that the path being taken was a betrayal. Chris Hani and Harry Gwala voiced fundamental criticisms of the CODESA process and of the excessive compromises that diluted the revolutionary programme. Even Joe Slovo, once regarded as a conviction communist, became associated with unacceptable compromises such as the sunset clauses.
These were not abstract theoretical disagreements. They were arguments about whether the liberation movement would settle for political office while leaving the economic structure of colonial and apartheid dispossession largely intact. History has delivered its verdict. The “clever” compromises of the early 1990s produced a black political elite that could share in the spoils while the majority remained landless, unemployed, and excluded from meaningful ownership of the economy. That is not strategy. That is the original sin from which so much subsequent decay has flowed.
Now let us turn carefully to the three contemporary moves that Ayanda analyses, and to the larger metaphor he constructs.
The first is the appointment of Duduzane Zuma as first deputy president of the MK Party, and the remarks he made at the BizNews conference in the Drakensberg. My own view of that appointment is strongly negative. Duduzane Zuma is nothing but a spoiled brat, full of self-entitlement, only busy advancing his own self-interest. He has never had a single ideologically principled bone in his body, and he never will. This appointment has nothing to do with principled politics. It has everything to do with the self-interest of Jacob Zuma and the determination to keep the party — which has become the goose laying golden eggs for him and his circle under family control.
Duduzane’s declaration that he is “a capitalist at heart” was the equivalent of telling the deeply conservative business interests assembled at the BizNews conference that they have nothing fundamental to fear that the MK Party under his leadership will not in any fundamental way challenge the structures of ownership and accumulation that continue to exclude the black majority and benefit the white monopoly capitalist establishment.
It was exactly the same message the African National Congress leadership began delivering to capital at that 1985 Zambia meeting, and in subsequent private engagements. We know the eventual outcome of that kind of politics: enrichment of a narrow elite and the continued impoverishment of the people in whose name the struggle was fought.
The second move is President Ramaphosa’s statement at his public lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Ayanda reads it as diplomatic inoculation ahead of the SADC Summit and Ramaphosa’s assumption of the chair. I do not see Cyril Ramaphosa as a deep strategist. I see an opportunist who plays to the gallery of the moment. What he ought to have acknowledged is that the greatest single driver of tension around fellow Africans in South Africa is the South African state’s own catastrophic mismanagement of immigration and the registration of people who enter the country.
The Department of Home Affairs has been a site of systemic corruption and administrative collapse for years. Soft-soaping that failure while striking statesmanlike poses for a regional audience is not chess. It is hypocritical, self-serving evasion of responsibility, dressed in the language of so-called continental solidarity.
The third and most revealing move is the engagement between March and March, led by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, and AfriForum under Kallie Kriel. This has nothing to do with principle and everything to do with self-interest and a prior selling out to imperial and white supremacist networks. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma is a product of United States soft-power programmes, including the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program, which has long been used to identify and cultivate influential voices inside target countries.
The public embrace of AfriForum — an organisation that has internationalised the discredited “white genocide” narrative and has worked to undermine South Africa’s standing — is not a clever tactical learning exercise. It is a wholesale political sell-out. The same pattern appears in Jacob Zuma’s own engagements with AfriForum, and in the manner in which he sold out long-standing solidarity with the people of Western Sahara by prioritising Moroccan colonial interests. This was done for nothing more than money. Nothing else.
Ayanda tries to elevate these manoeuvres by invoking historical parallels — Marcus Garvey’s meeting with the Ku Klux Klan, Malcolm X’s contacts with white supremacists — and by arguing that government failure creates the conditions for unlikely alliances. The comparisons are forced.
Those earlier meetings, whatever their tactical rationale at the time, proved politically corrosive precisely because they were not rooted in a clear ideological programme for the transformation of power relations. The same is true here. There is no long-term political strategy aimed at fundamental change in the service of the people.
There is none from Duduzane Zuma, none from Jacob Zuma, none from Cyril Ramaphosa, and none from the March and March leadership. What drives these actors is the same force that captured sections of the ANC leadership after 1994: the promise of shares, of wealth, of personal advancement, of becoming millionaires and billionaires through accommodation with the existing economic order. That is what produced the current ANC elite. That is what is now producing parallel elites in other formations.
I therefore disagree fundamentally with Ayanda’s attempt to cast these selfish, self-centred and myopic approaches as strategic politics, let alone as chess. The chess metaphor is a forced sophistication that seeks to lend intellectual respectability to what is, in essence, the politics of the stomach.
What we are witnessing is a straightforward, brutal gamble with the lives and futures of the people of South Africa, for the sake of self-interest and self-enrichment by small elites — the elite of the Zuma family within the MK Party, the elite that Ramaphosa represents within the long sell-out of the ANC, and the elite linkages being forged between certain black populist voices and the white supremacist networks of AfriForum and Solidarity.
None of this provides answers for the future of South Africa. The only answer lies in principled politics — politics of conviction. It requires standing by the non-negotiable demand for fundamental economic transformation: the return of the land through expropriation without compensation, the democratic ownership of the mines and strategic industries, the breaking of white monopoly capital and its imperialist handlers, and the refusal to sip from the same cup with those who continue to structure the economy against the majority. It requires a clear understanding of South Africa’s position within the broader context of African unity and Pan-Africanism. These principles — the return of the land, radical economic transformation, and a genuine Pan-African orientation — are best articulated in the conviction politics and ideologically principled programme of the Economic Freedom Fighters.
It requires rejecting the false sophistication of the so-called King’s Gambit and returning to the hard and unglamorous work of organising the people around a clear ideological programme of fundamental radical economic transformation.
This is the same old elite bargain, repeated with different faces. Those who still possess an ideological bone in their bodies must refuse it. History will not absolve those who trade the substance of liberation for the temporary comforts of office and enrichment. It will, however, remember those who kept the faith with the original demands of our liberation struggle, who understood that economic transformation and the fight against racism cannot be separated.
They dovetail, and only once fundamental radical economic transformation has taken place, bringing liberation, will we also be able to finally escape the scourge of racism. Racism and economic exploitation live like parasites on each other, and will continue to do so for as long as we play so-called clever King’s Gambit politics instead of doing the basics right.
And the basics are to be clear about our ideological principles, which I believe should be grounded in Fanonist Marxist thought. Such a grounding insists that genuine liberation requires the complete dismantling of the colonial and neo-colonial structures of economic exploitation and racial domination. It rejects the illusion that political office alone constitutes freedom.
It demands the radical restructuring of ownership, the return of the land, and the destruction of the economic foundations that continue to sustain racial hierarchy. It further insists that we must refuse the creation of a new black elite that simply replaces the old white one while leaving the fundamental relations of ownership and power intact. Only a thoroughgoing transformation that addresses both the material and psychological dimensions of colonial domination can produce real emancipation.
The convictions we carry out on a day-to-day basis in the mobilisation of our people for fundamental radical economic transformation must therefore be rooted in this understanding, if they are truly to bring economic liberation in our lifetime. Anything else is just so much selling out.
