From the volume of abuse and political fibs being chucked about with abandon, you’d be forgiven for thinking there was a general election taking place in South Africa at present, rather than in the United Kingdom. At least in Britain Labour politicians savage Conservatives, and the Tories return the compliment, while both are now worried enough to also turn their fire on the Liberal Democrats.
However, in South Africa, the African National Congress, with its huge majority, pretty much has the electoral field to itself. So instead the comrades turn inward and lay into each other – venomously. While paying lip service to party discipline and unity it is common today for ANC leaders to label each other liars, frauds, crooks, fools and worse.
If the opposition Democratic Alliance were equally uninhibited in invective against the ruling party, its members would soon be dismissed as “racists” or “counter-revolutionaries”. Sometimes it seems as if some ANC politicians can’t make a public statement without consulting a thesaurus for swarms
of tautologous insults to hurl at their own comrades.
Who needs a “loyal opposition” when you have such toxically disloyal allies?
One of the most galumphing clichés of our time – particularly among academics, but also much loved by ANC hacks – is the formulation “a contested space”. Currently, however, it seems that what is being most aggressively contested no longer concern ideas or policies – such as the overwhelming question as how to narrow the gap between rich and poor – but petty infighting for position and crude jockeying for access to state resources.
As you survey the administrative landscape of South Africa, from the running of parastatals to the operation of ministries and provincial governments, there appear to be very few spaces left which are not bitterly contested. Suspensions and firing, followed by interminable and costly legal challenges, seem to be the accepted practice of the day. The controversial new National Director of Public Prosecutions, Jacob Zuma loyalist Menzi Simelane, has wasted no time in interfering in all aspects of the prosecutorial system.
Such actions are seldom concerned with incompetence or corruption. Too often they are about vying for power within the ANC or bolstering a particular faction.
This contagious contestation includes our spy agencies. They snoop on each other and leak tapes and information to favoured senior politicians involved in intra-ANC spats. “Intelligence agencies intercepted conversations of a state official, whose calls to his own minister and to the president were being intercepted”, pointed out the former minister of intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, six months ago. In a remark that has gone almost entirely unnoticed, he concluded incredulously: “The country is asleep.”
With such an uninhibited free-for-all within the ANC, it is inevitable that there should also be increasing speculation about Zuma’s security of tenure as President. Unattributed voices within the ANC have recently been quoted as pointing out that just as his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, was dumped unceremoniously by the party, so Zuma must not assume that he will automatically have sufficient backing to stand for a second term.
Given this noxious, cutthroat atmosphere, where we have witnessed both spy versus spy and “comrade” pitted against supposed comrade, it is hardly surprising that there is a rising element of thuggery, even gangsterism. Opportunism is rampant.
Currently, the most openly contested political “space” is that of ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. The ANC Youth League has been openly canvassing for their former leader, Fikile Mbalula, now deputy police minister, to replace Mantashe in 2012. But during unsettled periods, when the sticky tentacles of ruthless party intrigue reach into almost every crevice, the line between public and private tends to shrink.
In 2008, in the run-up to the ANC Western Cape provincial elective conference, for example, opponents of local ANC secretary Mcebsi Skwatsha claimed that he had rigged the conference, potentially disenfranchising up to 40 per cent of potential delegates. Yet when the ANC sent Fikile Mbalula to investigate these claims, he was met at Cape Town Airport by Skwatsha and disgraced MP Tony Yengeni and whisked off to a township.
There, to his astonishment, Mbalula discovered that he was scheduled, aged 38, to be circumcised. Mbalula reportedly tried to run away. The ingcibi who performed this operation, Maduna Nqabeni, told reporters that he actually lost his own mobile phone in the ensuing struggle to overpower Mbalula. Afterwards, Fikile Mbalula was sequestered for the traditional period for a male initiate – and was thus unable to report directly on any vote rigging. Skwatsha was duly elected unopposed as provincial ANC chairperson.
The question has not yet been answered: was this a case of tradition or thuggery?
That the vote rigging claims were substantially true, however, were confirmed last year by labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana, delegated by the ANC to sort out the mess. In an unusual public apology, Mdladlana admitted that the regional ANC had allowed itself “to be torn apart by factionalism, abuse of power, patronage and greed”. The moral? When absolutely everything is up for grabs, anything can become “contested space” – even, it seems, a politician’s foreskin.
