Zuma victory creates two centres of power in South Africa

By Mark Ashurst in Polokwane

 Thabo Mbeki’s favourite play is Coriolanus, the tale of a visionary but arrogant noble unseated by a rowdy people. At the ANC’s 52^nd national conference in Polokwane, South African president was ousted as party leader in similar style – by a vengeful crowd of former confidants, the spurned, and the trampled. Jubilant delegates waved him goodbye from the conference floor.

For new ANC leader Jacob Zuma, it was a dramatic and – until this year – unlikely victory. A longtime confidant of his rival, Zuma spent time as a political prisoner on Robben Island with late Govan Mbeki – a relationship which may have been closer than that between Govan and his own son Thabo, far away in exile. Although Zuma woo-ed the troublesome Inkatha Freedom Party with some success in the 1990s, his chief qualification for becoming South Africa’s deputy-president in 1999 was unqualified loyalty and an avowed lack of ambition to succeed his boss.

Mbeki is likely to continue as president of the country until 2009, but the overt hostility of Zuma’s supporters at Polokwane shocked veterans of ANC conferences. Despite evident failures – on Aids, in Zimbabwe, and now in losing his own party – Mbeki has been the driving force behind Africa’s most successful  post-independence government. The economy has grown for a record 33 successive quarters, the longest boom in its history. Taxes have fallen, while public spending and the capacity of government and municipalities has been much enlarged. After a long period of job-shedding, about 1.6 million new jobs were created in the past five years.

For most delegates at Polokwane, however, such statistics ring hollow. Most endured long and sleepless bus rides to reach the huge conference tent at the University of Limpopo, where the gleaming limousines and SUVs of ANC bureaucrats and businessmen contrasted starkly with the rural poverty beyond the perimeter fence. A BBC news bulletin broadcast on the opening day of the conference included clips from a children’s funeral in Soweto, and a soundbyte from Mshini Wami, the Zulu struggle song which translates as Pass me my machine gun.

These are familiar elements in a familiar kind of story about South Africa. It is a story of capitalism and death. Corporations are strong, but inequality is rising. Between a third and a quarter of the population are unemployed. The AIDS pandemic is the world’s worst, compounded by Mbeki’s stubborn reluctance to galvanise a robust national response. Mshini Wami, Zuma’s spontaneous victory cry when he was acquitted last year on a charge of raping a family friend, has become a campaigning anthem for his supporters. At Polokwane, the chorus brought a shaking Mbeki close to tears.

Zuma has yet to stand trial, but South Africa’s constitution bars a convicted criminal from parliament. If found guilty, Zuma says he would resign his ANC position. But the conference did not consider how to select a new ANC presidential candidate for national elections in 2009, when Mbeki must retire. Zuma’s prospects of becoming head of state will depend on the National Prosecuting Authority – and, no doubt, on  Mbeki’s nerve. If the case against Zuma stands up in court, even on a lesser charge of tax evasion, a constitutional crisis looms.

In a gesture of solidarity, both men arrived holding hands at a cocktail party for members of the top ANC hierarchy in Polokwane. But the party has been polarised by a deep rift between Mbeki and the ANC’s allies in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Neither see any merit in the government’s hard-won budget surplus when people are poor, although their redistributive instincts do not yet amount to a coherent agenda. Instead, while Mbeki ignored attacks on his economic policy, Zuma has emerged as a focus for the disenchanted.

Not that the new ANC leader has endorsed the views of Mbeki’s antagonists. On a recent tour of the United States, as a guest of right-wing lobby groups, Zuma promised “no change” in economic policy. Among his newfound supporters are former provincial premiers Tokyo Sexwale, a newly-minted mining tycoon, and Mathews Phosa, a millionaire lawyer and poet. They can identify with Zuma on more personal grounds, having faced – along with Mbeki’s erstwhile rival Cyril Ramaphosa – an unsubstantiated charge of conspiracy to harm the president, in 2001. That opportunistic assault, coinciding with closely fought elections to regional ANC structures, exposed a tendency to paranoia in Mbeki. At Polokwane, the tensions between party and government were exposed as a schism.

There are now two centres of power in South African politics. Even if Zuma fails to secure the national presidency, his victory has conceivably served its purpose for Mbeki’s leftist critics. The ANC’s new deputy leader, Kgalema Motlanthe, is a former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. So too is new secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, a strategic thinker and serving chairman of the SACP.

The critical question of who succeeds Mbeki as president is still to be decided. Motlanthe appears to be the frontrunner to succeed Zuma, if his campaign is thwarted in court. Ramaphosa is an outside contender at the edge of the frame, a centrist who may yet unite the party but says he is wary of entering “the wrong race”. In contrast to Mbeki’s rise to power freighted with a sense of dynastic succession to Mandela, Zuma’s victory follows the first contested race for the ANC leadership since 1949. A formal break-up of the ANC is unlikely, but Polokwane marked the resurgence of a restive mass movement in South Africa – a tortuous, timely end to the long tradition of electing ANC leaders unopposed.