SOUTH Africa’s minister of transport Jeff Radebe said recently that his party, the African National Congress, was “the parliament of the people”. This gives a strong clue as to what has gone wrong with the former liberation movement. As with many other post-independence parties in Africa, there is a fatal confusion been party and state. Jacob Zuma will be our new President. He will also inherit this potentially fatal flaw. How he addresses that crisis will determine whether the Zuma era renews the mass-based credentials of the ANC or condemns it to becoming yet another callous kleptocracy.
The signs so far are not good. The ANC’s faction fighting has been mostly about personalities rather than policy; less about how to redress our huge inequalities – many of which have worsened since the end of apartheid – and far more about power grabs. An alarming personality cult, amounting to worship, has been built up around Jacob Zuma. Now the key question is: can President Zuma rise above this – above a toxic ethnic chauvinism trailing in his charismatic wake? Will he restrain the vengeful threats of his most intransigent loyalists against supporters of former President Thabo Mbeki? Above all, does Zuma have the courage to appoint talented people to high positions rather than merely reward those – many of them blatant opportunists – who helped him to escape corruption charges?
The problem created by the ANC seeing itself as the country’s real parliament is that almost inevitably the party has turned upon itself in a fratricidal struggle. The heaviest fire is not for opposition parties but “the enemy within”.
Until a few months ago, the ANC was ripping itself apart in the ferocious battle between rival factions loyal to Mbeki and those supporting his foe, Zuma. The ANC then ran a barnstorming (and expensive) election campaign. However, even in the last weeks, many leaders were more intent on settling scores with former comrades. Some even stooped to old colonial slurs. The most vituperative was ANC campaign manager Fikile Mbalula who, in the last week of the election, wrote an open letter which charged that Thabo Mbeki, his boss until very recently, had led us towards a “banana republic”.
Obviously most people believe he is way off the mark, or why would anyone have voted for ANC? After all, as a result of his fury against his own colleagues, what the party’s own campaign manager alleged is, astonishingly, that, for the past decade, the ANC almost succeeded in creating a banana republic. It was not the most street-wise election pitch.
Yet, as so often in politics, senior ANC politicians such as Fikile Mbalula didn’t emit a squeak of dissent while Thabo Mbeki, a disastrous President, was leading South Africa down a very deadly path – with his AIDS denialism, plus our ruinous, corrupt arms dealings. Zuma in particular, when Deputy President under Mbeki, had absolutely nothing to say about these outrages. Worse, Zuma himself was deeply implicated in both.
But, as soon as they turfed out Mbeki and his sycophants, Zuma and his bloc came over all self-righteous: as courageous as opening fire after an armistice has been declared. In fact, their vengeance mostly reveals how far to the right some leaders on the so-called left of the ANC alliance have drifted. This month alone, Zuma, Blade Nzimande and Buti Manamela have all ranted against “witches” (usually within their own ranks). So much for progressive politics. Zuma is a former member of the Communist Party, Nzimande is currently its general secretary and Manamela its youth leader.
Manamela even attacked the looks of Helen Zille, leader of the official opposition Democratic Alliance. He denounced her as “ugly Zille”. Manamela’s sexist attitude is not only extremely ugly, it is also fundamentally reactionary – especially when he froths about “witches” (in a country where, in some rural areas, women are still killed if so identified).
Many of these “comrades” still like to quote Marxist holy writ. But, of course, they do so entirely selectively. Famously Lenin declared that without literacy, “there can only be rumour, gossip, fairy-tales and prejudices, but no politics”. The fact is, however, that uneducated people are usually perfectly sensible about the reality of their own lives, and are frequently far more decent and progressive than blustering, careerist politicians. Instead it is “communists” such as Nzimande and Manamela who, in this election, have churned out what Lenin denounced as “rumour, gossip, fairy-tales and prejudices.”
WHAT, in such circumstances, is the meaning of the Marxist term “dialectics”? A superb book of essays by historian Tony Judt, entitled Reappraisals, provides a handy definition.
The Spanish writer Jorge Semprún was interred in Buchenwald concentration camp, records Judt, where a veteran fellow communist revealed the secret. It’ll be worth recalling this when, like their predecessors under Mbeki, South African Communist Party ministers in a Zuma government begin to perform convoluted ideological somersaults. Dialectics, Judt, explains, “is the art and technique of always landing on your feet”.
