IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?

IS CYBER SPACE THE MOST RACIST THING?.

HELEN ZILLE, LINDIWE MAZIBUKO AND THE DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DA.

TOPIC: HELEN ZILLE, LINDIWE MAZIBUKO AND THE DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DA.

In my Politicsweb article of 04 January 2012, which was written in reaction to the unfortunate and offensive use of the term “professional blacks” by Helen Zille, the current leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Premier of the Western Cape, I called upon her to resign from her position as the DA leader and to hand the leadership of the party over to Patricia de Lille, the DA Mayor of Cape Town. I further predicted that were she to fail to so resign, she would in the near future preside over an internally warring DA party, lose the Western Cape in the 2014 national elections, and lose her party’s municipal gains in the 2016 local elections.

I predicted that all these would happen, instead of the rosy picture her DA was painting at the time in terms of its intention to win the 2019 national elections and to depose the ruling ANC from national power.

I did state in the article that I was aware that Helen Zille would not heed my advice. And of course she did not. But I confess that even I have been completely shocked and utterly surprised by the very vicious and ferocious internecine, no-holds-barred warfare that has broken out within the DA, a factional fight to the finish. It certainly is one to easily rival, and even surpass, some of the ANC’s very worst factionalist excesses since the ANC Stellenbosch Conference of 2002.

The DA is clearly not the party of white angels anymore, if the unintended pun can be excused. The only surprise is that this mighty DA factional fight has not inspired SA’s columnists, cartoonists, satirists, comedians, overwrought TV puppets and two-pence political clowns the way the ANC’s now legendary factional fights do.

Yet there can be no doubt that today the DA is undergoing its most profound crisis ever, under the leadership of Helen Zille. Had Zille heeded my advice of 04 January 2012 to resign from the DA leadership then, she would have spared the official opposition party the insurmountable and mortal internal crisis it is facing today, few months before South Africa’s  historic 2014 national elections, which will coincide with the 20th anniversary of our teenage democracy.

The sad truth is that as long as the DA is led by Helen Zille, it will continue to fumble and to lack the capacity, as well as the leadership capability, to pull itself out of its worsening internal morass. Even worse, as I predicted in my 04 January 2012 article on Helen Zille, the DA is and will continue to face inevitable implosion, because no political party can survive for long when it lacks internal ideological coherence and a unifying vision.

The hour of Helen Zille’s reckoning has finally arrived. She is now facing her own, self-made Rubicon.

In my Politicsweb article entitled “Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment”, which appeared on 23 December 2011, I indicated that unless Lindiwe Mazibuko was able to decisively confront and deal with the racist white male patriarchy pulling the strings in the DA, she would fail miserably in her role as the fetching black face of the DA meant to win the DA the elusive black vote. I characterized this powerful but unreconstructed, racist white male patriarchy within the DA as Mazibuko’s biggest leadership obstacle, on par with the challenge of the reactionary and backward black patriarchy within the ruling ANC.

Now the daggers are drawn against her DA parliamentary leadership.

The current crisis of the DA around the Employment Equity Amendment Bill (EEAB) has been deliberately and intentionally precipitated, in the main, by the well-orchestrated and well-choreographed media attacks on the position of the DA’s parliamentary caucus on the EEAB, which attacks originate, largely, from middle- to old-aged white male DA members and supporters, or the DA’s white male grandees, if you like, who have used this piece of draft legislation to expose both Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko as merely their female puppets.

There is a powerful passage in Leo Tolstoy’s phenomenal novel, War and Peace, where, in mocking Napoleon Bonaparte, he states:

“The act is performed. The last part is played. The actor is bidden to undress, and wash off his powder and paint; he will be needed no more…The stage manager, when the drama was over, and the puppet stripped, showed him to us. ‘Look what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he but I that moved you.’ But blinded by the force of the movement men for long could not perceive that.” (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace,  page 1228, 1972, Pan Books Limited).

The DA’s Zille-Mazibuko leadership act has been performed. The last part is being played now. The DA’s white male patriarchy is now asking Zille and Mazibuko to be “undressed” on account of the draft EEAB, their fake leadership powder and paint is being removed from their masks. They evidently are no more needed. The DA’s real stage manager, which is the dominant and powerful white male patriarchy, is showing Zille and Mazibuko’s intellectual and parliamentary poverty to us, tearing apart their shallow arguments for and against the EEAB. They want to make clear to the SA public that it is they, and not the Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo, who have been moving us. But blinded by the force of post-apartheid rainbow politics, many men and women within and outside the DA for long could not perceive that it is, in the final analysis, the deeply reactionary and backward-looking middle- and old-aged white males in the DA who are the real power behind the Zille-Mazibuko leadership throne.

Now the curtain is falling on their fake leadership duo act. Finally, we know who the real puppet-masters in the DA are.

Lindiwe Mazibuko seems to be genuinely shocked and befuddled by the unbridled and hate-filled attacks on her parliamentary leadership unleashed by these DA white male Neanderthals, who are using her handling of the EEAB in the parliamentary committee to “undress” her, to borrow Leo Tolstoy’s lucid, if not lurid, term.

Had she paid attention to my article of 23 December 2011, the current attacks on her leadership by the DA’s white male patriarchy, the real power base in the DA, would not have caught her by surprise.

Lindiwe Mazibuko’s failure is not how she handled the Employment Equity Amendment Bill. I in fact think that, as an attempt to ensure the continued survival of the DA as a potent national opposition force, and a governing authority in the Western Cape, she handled the EEAB brilliantly.

However, Mazibuko’s single, biggest failure as the leader of the DA’s parliamentary caucus was to fail to confront and defeat the DA’s fossilized and ossified white male patriarchy within her own party, whilst she constantly seemed to be more aggrieved and offended by the equally obnoxious black male, tribalistic patriarchy within the ANC leadership structures, both at national and provincial levels. Had she openly confronted this dangerous, conservative and politically backward white male force within the DA, even by way of taking her fight out on appeal to the broader SA political public, she would have triumphed over it, undoubtedly. For starters, many black South Africans, even though they deeply loath the DA’s ideology and highly deceptive politics, would have sympathized with her, just to break the back, once and for all time, of the powerful white male patriarchy within our national politics, which has found its last refuge, like real scoundrels of male patriarchy, within the DA.

Breaking the dominant white male patriarchy within the DA, and the hegemonic, tribalistic, black male patriarchy with the ruling ANC, is a sine qua non for South Africa’s overall progressive transformation and sustained progress, now and in the future.

Unfortunately, now it is too late for Lindiwe Mazibuko, because of the ham-handed way she handled white male patriarchy within the DA. The game is up for her. The white male patriarchs within the DA are going to lick her up for breakfast haggis. She may still retain her current position in the medium term, but it will become just a dummy toy devoid of any real parliamentary power and influence. In a word, Lindiwe Mazibuko is finished – kaput – as an influential political force within the DA. What is left is just to use her to mop up the DA’s parliamentary floor.

But as a black “sista”, to use a rap-music lingua franca, I still have the last advice for Lindiwe Mazibuko: Tender your resignation from the hate-filled DA today and join Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Maybe there, they will not question your skin color or gender, and maybe there they may just use your “fake American accent” (credit to Julius Malema, formerly leader of ANCYL, for the expression) to good effect. And they may just appreciate your physical looks more.

Nothing best projects the failure of the DA’s fake, thin-skinned and artificial racial accommodation, of its manufactured racial consensus, like the EEAB. This piece of draft legislation exposes, in all their glory, the shortcomings, contradictions and constraints of the DA’s “double-consciousness”, as embodied by the superficial leadership marriage between what I once termed the DA’s PowerPuff Girls’ team of Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko and Patricia de Lille (see my Politicsweb article “Lindiwe Mazibuko: An Assessment.”).

In this important sense alone, EEAB has been the ANC’s most inspired stroke of legislative genius under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma. In one draft legislative fell swoop, the ANC has irrevocably splintered the DA down the racial middle, delivering a coup de grace on the confused and insipid DA leadership of the Zille-Mazibuko duo, with an impeccable strategic-electioneering timing perfection that has left me in absolute awe.

The root of and explanation for the DA’s current crisis of existence and ideological legitimacy can be found in what the great African American intellectual titan, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his classic, The Souls of Black Folk, described as “double-consciousness.”

Du Bois memorably wrote:

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels that his two-ness, – an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals, in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1989, Bantam Classic edition, Introduction, page xxii-xxiii).

The artificial, superficial, mock-reality marriage of DA leadership between Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko has created post-apartheid’s most glaring political “double-consciousness.” The Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership is looked upon by many blacks and now clearly not by a few whites in South Africa with “amused contempt and pity.” This leadership duo in turn seeks to measure itself by the tape of the South African world which is itself deeply divided along race and class lines.

So the Zille-Mazibuko leadership duo is for ever unable to enjoy the universal admiration the way say Nelson Mandela was and is able to. The obviousness of the “two-ness” of the Zille and Mazibuko act, the shouting absence of their DA leadership’s unified “self-consciousness”, is too glaring to hide. It is an Irish coffee “two-ness”, and so stacked (Zille at the top, Mazibuko below her), unfortunately, – white South African and black South African; Zille, white, at the top, and Mazibuko, black, below her.

It is also a DA leadership duo carrying two souls – one white suburban/South African Jewish soul of Zille, and the other black township/Zulu soul of Mazibuko. Their party’s fan base thus easily splinters along racial and class lines in support of either of their racial kind. It is not sustainable.

But what is clear to many black South Africans is that the DA cannot trust its black leaders with its supreme party power, say the kind that the Democratic Party’s former leader, Tony Leon, once enjoyed. The DA’s white male grandees will never trust Lindiwe Mazibuko, or Patricia de Lille or its Gauteng rising star, Mmusi Maimane, with such unencumbered party power discretion. The Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo’s marriage of convenience at the top is seen by many black South Africans as merely a replica of the old, colonial-era “white partenalism” of Helen Zille over a rising, competent and self-assertive young black female leader (Lindiwe Mazibuko). That Zille has joined, after doing a miserable, pathetic, opportunistic and undoubtedly unprincipled U-turn, the DA white male chorus calling out Lindiwe Mazibuko and Mmusi Maimane on their EEAB position, only underscores this wide-spread perception of DA white paternalism over DA black leaders, in the minds of many black South Africans.

This negative perception will cost the DA dearly in next year’s national elections. There should be no doubt about that.

The EEAB draft legislation reveals that the Zille-Mazibuko leadership duo also embodies two warring thoughts – Zille’s striving to appease the formidable and powerful white male patriarchy within the DA, on the one hand, and Mazibuko-Maimane’s striving to appeal to the black voters who have been, and remain, disadvantaged by the race policies that were supported by apartheid architects and by many current white members of the DA of Zille. Two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, and in one DA political body with double consciousness, as Du Bois would have put it.

Very unfortunately for Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko, their own, personal “dogged strength” is unable to keep the DA “from being torn asunder.” Not even their warm, personal and mutual admiration, respect and high regard for each other, which are so obvious to the SA public, can substitute for the shaky and wobbly foundation on which their leadership duo of the DA is based. Because, like Helen Zille’s own plastic surgery, their DA leadership duo is not organic, but artificially implanted; it is not meant to reveal the true nature of the ugly, deep ravages of DA’s policies, but to pepper over and hide them.

Like Helen Zille’s plastic surgery, the Zille-Mazibuko artificial leadership duo is meant to sweep under the carpet that which is unpleasant and unsightly, and to instead project and inject a more appealing, youngish, and attractive side. It is all an optical, ephemeral illusion. Like Zille’s botox work, their leadership duo cannot withstand the intensity of the DA’s internal political heat and the ravages of parliamentary time. Their patchwork leadership duo instead melts and withers when confronted with the rough and tumble of the DA’s own vicious tensions, contradictions and parliamentary leadership ambitions of DA’s senior members.

This is not how South Africa should nurture national political leadership. This is not how the standard-bearer of the South African liberalism should behave. It is demeaning. It is craven.

EEAB has revealed that the DA still has to ponderously and ploddingly work through its policy platform to transform its “double consciousness” into a unified, undivided “self-consciousness” of the DA’s national leadership, which should be much bigger than the sum total of the individual strengths of Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko, and Patricia de Lille – the DA’s PowerPuff Girls.

Unless the Zille-Mazibuko DA leadership duo does this before the national elections next year, the DA will go the way of the formerly formidable National Party, namely into political oblivion.

Possibly, South African politics will be the richer for it.

6th Cediablog.

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
Isaac@cedia.co.za
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https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com
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12 November 2013.

JACOB ZUMA AND THE TROUBLE WITH ZANC.

TOPIC: JACOB ZUMA AND THE TROUBLE WITH ZANC.

“Thinkers prepare a revolution; bandits carry it out.” Marios Azuela, the Mexican author of The Underdogs.

Is Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party of Julius Malema correct to characterize the ANC led by president Jacob Zuma as Zuma ANC (ZANC)? Is this a mere form of petulant insult? Is it a political gimmick? Or is it an accurate description of the fundamentally changed heart, soul and essence of the ANC under Jacob Zuma post-Mangaung?

Is Jacob Zuma’s impact on the ANC so profound and pervasive that he can be said to have changed the entire ANC in his own image?

Not since its founding in 1912, until Zuma’s rise to lead it, had the ANC been conflated so much with its leader, the way ZANC is today. There was never talk of MANC under the much-criticized Dr. James Moroka, or the much-beloved Nelson Mandela, nor under the controversial ANC presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Throughout its decades in exile, there was never a reference to TANC under the much-celebrated presidency of OR Tambo. Even at the height of its ideologically messy divorce from the ANC in the mid- to late 1950s, when it was throwing every available political kitchen sink at the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) spoke about “the Communist-infiltrated” and “Charterist” ANC, but never about Luthuli ANC (LANC) of the 1950s.

So why is the name ZANC catching so much traction and gaining such a wide currency in our ever-expanding political lexicon, especially among SA’s black youth?

In his very influential classic, The State and Revolution, the Russian communist revolutionary and founder of Soviet power, Vladimir Lenin, made an interesting comment about the origin of the name Bolshevik. He wrote about “…a meaningless and ugly term as ‘Bolshevik'”, which he believed “…expresses absolutely nothing other than the purely accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903 we were in a majority…” (Penguin Books, 1992, page 73).

Similarly, other than the fact that, accidentally or not, the Zuma supporters, Zumaphiles, Zuma sycophants and Zuma fanatics were in the clear majority at the ANC Mangaung conference of December 2012, the term Zuma ANC (ZANC) “…expresses absolutely nothing…” In fact, if truth be told, the name ZANC, like the name Bolshevik, is “a meaningless and ugly term”, no doubt full of pejorative intent on the part of those who threw and are throwing these names around.

In relation to ZANC, such usage of “the meaningless and ugly” term has the unintended and unhelpful effect of reducing all the historical and contemporary problems of the ANC to one man, and one man only – Jacob Zuma. It is political reductionism of the worst order, because it presupposes, wrongly, that if only you remove Zuma from leading SA and the ANC, all our accumulated national problems would just evaporate away like dew before a hot morning sun. Just in terms of a logical argument, this obviously cannot be the case.

But then, if we swallowed this Leninist line of reasoning, we would be compelled to recall that following the historic March 1946 Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtail” speech of former UK prime minister and War-time hero, Winston Churchill, and especially in light of the very intellectually impactful 1947 essay of the influential US diplomat and Sovietologist, George F. Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, the name Bolsheviks assumed a totally different meaning, far from denoting just a mere, “accidental” numerical superiority “at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903”, as Lenin put it. It began to embody a dire and wholly threatening, expansionist political ideology of Soviet Communism and Soviet power. (See George F Kennan, Expanded Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1984). According to this line of reasoning by Churchill and Kennan, which was initially forcefully rejected by the American public, Lenin had set a train of events in motion that imperiled the freedoms and democratic rights of the West.

Likewise, since the expulsion of former ANC Youth League leaders from the ANC, including Julius Malema, especially since the recent official launch of Malema’s EFF at Marikana in October this year, the name ZANC has begun to be impugned with and to assume dire and wholly threatening overtones of a deviant, narrow-minded, ethnic, viral and currently dominant ANC sub-ideology, which, allegedly, has fundamentally departed from the historic ANC’s original mission, values and strategic perspective. In this scheme of things, ZANC currently constitutes an unrecognizable, but dreadful, mutant from the original ANC of John Dube, Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. Accordingly, the salient characteristic of ZANC is that it deliberately seeks to suborn the original ANC and the post-apartheid democratic SA State to the survivalist imperatives of one man and one man only, Jacob Zuma.

In addition, as we ponder the murky origin of the name ZANC, we should bear in mind a very fascinating assertion made by the famous American social scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, about the origin of the name America, as we today commonly refer to the United States of America (USA).

Huntington wrote that:

“…outsiders are likely to perceive people who share something in common as a collective entity before those people do and even if major differences exist among them. Looking at their North American colonies from London, the British saw them as a whole before the colonists did.”

Huntington further quotes John M. Murrin as stating that “…in a word, America was Britain’s idea.” (Huntington, Who Are We? – The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Simon and Schuster, 2004, page 111).

Interestingly, before the arrival of conquering white European explorers and colonialists in South Africa, blacks neither considered themselves “black”, nor referred to each other as “blacks.” It was the colonialists and later the apartheid apostles, who were the carriers of the white supremacist and racist ideologies, who made blacks in South Africa to be aware of their “blackness”, in relative terms, and thus forcing them to recognize themselves as a distinct “common entity” of blacks.

There is no doubt that the name ZANC is EFF’s idea. There is further no doubt that the ANC does not perceive itself as ZANC, nor does it want or like to be perceived as ZANC by “outsiders”, including by EFF. ANC still likes to refer to itself as ANC, pure and simple. This is how it wants to be perceived by others. No surprise there. There is finally no doubt that major differences are still immanent among members of the ANC who were left behind by those who were either expelled from the ANC or departed for EFF. It is also quite possible that, as former ANC and ANCYL members, and now “outsiders” themselves, EFF members may “perceive” that ZANC “…share something in common”, even before the remaining majority ANC members are prepared to publicly acknowledge the new and redefining basis of their existence “as a collective entity” called ZANC, especially when that new something is as odious as corruption.

Features giving rise to such a new “collective entity” called ZANC and to this which ZANC members “…share in common”, from the standpoint of EFF and other ANC critics, evidently, could be anything from the rising tide of state corruption, the now entrenched abuse of state organs to settle political and ideological differences, the rising marginalization and purging of political foes by the ANC’s hegemonic and triumphalist elements, the growth of a personality cult within the ANC (which former SA and ANC president Thabo Mbeki stridently bemoaned in his Open Letter to Jacob Zuma in late 2008), the growing regionalization of the political gravitas of the ANC (including the demonstrable electoral decline in ANC support, since 2008, in all SA provinces other than Kwa-Zulu Natal, a province from where ANC president Jacob Zuma hails), the blind and fanatical support for certain ANC leaders based on ethnic allegiance alone, and the rise and rise of tribalism and tribal politics within ZANC. The rise of tribalism within the SA society has recently been decried by eminent SA public personalities. As a majority party in society, the ANC could not conceivably remain unaffected by such an unfortunate development in our country, if so.

Speaking of tribalism within the ANC of today, the paranoia of those speaking about ZANC may have been fed and fuelled by a passage from the biography on Mac Maharaj, the current SA Presidency and president Jacob Zuma’s spokesman, entitled Shades of Difference – Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, by Padraig O’ Malley.

In it Padraig O’ Malley describes current SA and ANC president Jacob Zuma in this manner:

“Zuma’s immersion in his Zulu heritage, his assiduous attention to be seen as being Zulu, is not happenstance but the cold calculation of a political poker player who, whatever the denouement of his corruption trial, has played his hand with deftness and steeliness of will that has left his political enemies flat-footed.” (O’ Malley, Viking, 2007, page 470).

Many South Africans would readily accept that Jacob Zuma is a masterful political poker player, and political survivalist, of great note. But very few would have thought that this skill extends to his use of “his Zulu heritage” and his “being Zulu.” And many South Africa would conclude that such alleged use of “Zulu heritage” and of “being a Zulu”, not as “happenstance, but as “cold calculation” in ANC internal political games, borders too closely on what may be described, quite uncomfortably, as deliberate mobilization of tribal sentiment and narrow ethno-cultural identity for questionable political gain, which, unsurprisingly, would leave, if true, Jacob Zuma’s internal ANC political enemies “flat-footed”, to borrow Padraig O’ Malley’s own florid expression.

But it is also possible that there could be available and offered a more benign interpretation of what O’ Malley meant by that passage. After all neither Padraig O’ Malley nor Mac Maharaj himself is a recognized authority on “Zulu heritage” or on “being Zulu”. So room does exist that they might have impugned altogether unwarranted motives on what was a normal recourse by Jacob Zuma to his traditional and cultural roots.

But their statement sits side by side with Julius Malema’s oft-repeated accusation that Zuma is “a tribalist.”

To appreciate the full import of what O’ Malley wrote about Jacob Zuma’s “immersion in his Zulu heritage, his assiduous attention to be seen as being Zulu”, not as “happenstance”, one needs to revert to the start of Mac Maharaj’s biography, where O’ Malley describes how he met Maharaj.

Amongst other things, O’ Malley offered this distillation of what he believes was Mac Maharaj’s view about the pre-ZANC politics of the ANC at the time, which can also be a handy summation of what the very essence of ZANC is really all about today.

O’ Malley wrote:

“But in pursuing things in his own way, he (i.e Mac Maharaj) found that in the new South Africa the new ANC had little time for the kind of behavior that served the ANC so well during the struggle.” (Ibid, page 23).

As if not content with this fire-and-brimstone political damnation of the ANC at the time, Mac Maharaj, according to O’ Malley, further indicated that “in the new South Africa, the ANC was quite willing, in the interests of enforcing the hegemony of the party, to rewrite its own history.” (Ibid).

It can therefore not be true that ZANC started at the Mangaung ANC conference of 2012. If Maharaj is to be believed, the lineage of what today is referred to by EFF as ZANC came with the bathwater for the ANC’s power baby on 27 April 1994. Post-1994, several leading lights of EFF, especially on the road to and following the chaotic 2007 ANC Polokwane conference, played a decisive role in ensuring the emergence and blossoming of an ANC trend that directly led to the birth of ZANC. It would be impossible, therefore, for them to completely disown the “monster” that is ZANC today. They are half responsible for ZANC’s birth.

But has the process of the ANC rewriting “its own history” reached its apogee under ZANC? Has ZANC even gone as far as trying to rewrite and re-interpreting key clauses of the historic 1955 Freedom Charter?

There are many today who now believe that the morbid symptoms, which were identified by the prodigiously talented Mac Maharaj, already then a veteran ANC politician in his mid-fifties, have now, to paraphrase George F. Kennan, allowed ANC deficiencies to overwhelm and hobble its intrinsic potential for transformational change in post-apartheid South Africa. If so, this would be the real tragedy of ZANC.

Fundamentally, the ANC’s dilemma, so well and trenchantly articulated by Mac Maharaj in O’ Malley’s biography of him, is the charge sheet being leveled against ZANC by EFF and other opposition parties. It is also that which today constitutes the mortal threat, from within itself, confronted by the ANC of 2013-2014 under the leadership of Jacob Zuma post-Mangaung. In a word, the threat is that, to enforce the hegemony of the party, the ANC seems today willing to rewrite its own history in the most unexpected of ways. For an example, to this day, the ANC cannot bring itself to refer to the tragic August 2012 killings by SA Police Service (SAPS) at Marikana as a massacre, taking rather the legalistic route of awaiting for the outcome of the commission investigating the matter.

To enforce its hegemony over the whole SA society, ZANC is prepared to rewrite not just its own history, but also to rewrite our common, post-apartheid SA history, which is our common patrimony and that which we bequeath to future SA generations.

This perhaps is the real, big trouble with ZANC under Jacob Zuma.

5th Cediablog.

By:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
http://cedia.co.za
isaac@cedia.co.za
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Angry Red Berets and the Two Zees: What Chance EFF and Julius Malema in the 2014 Elections?

TOPIC: ANGRY RED BERETS AND THE TWO ZEES: WHAT CHANCE EFF AND JULIUS MALEMA IN THE 2014 NATIONAL ELECTIONS?

INTRODUCTION.

The two biggest mountains Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) need to crest for them to triumph in the 2014 elections are the much bigger and much longer Mount Jacob Zuma, and the much smaller and much flatter one, Mount Helen Zille. Mount Zuma is as big and long as the Drakensburg Mountain range, whilst Mount Zille is of the size and shape of Table Mountain. Which mountain to scale first is perhaps the toughest strategic challenge before Malema and EFF. That President Jacob Zuma hails from Kwa Zulu-Natal (KZN), which the Drakensberg Mountains abut, and Zille is based in Cape Town, whose fabled background is Table Mountain, is only accidental to this analogy. So too is the fact that EFF was officially launched last week on the Marikana Koppie, which, compared to the Drakensburg and Table Mountains, looks like an anthill, another analogy which should not be over-interpreted nor over-analyzed, but which may still come to assist EFF if it’s not dismissed out of hand.

But, on second thought, perhaps Malema and his EFF need this mountain analogy to focus and concentrate their minds at the herculean task before them, if they hope to win the 2014 national elections. Because they would really need to literally move the two mountains to stand any chance of defeating either Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance (DA), and, much, much less plausibly, of defeating the ANC of President Zuma.

A defeat by EFF over the ANC would be nothing short of a complete revolution in South Africa. The defeat of the DA by EFF, for the position of the country’s official parliamentary opposition, would be nothing short of seismic political and parliamentary change, but is not far-fetched, and may even be good for the moribund opposition politics in our country. EFF can reach further into the black, especially youth and unemployed, vote than the DA can ever hope to.

In short, for EFF to be able to defeat the DA in the 2014 national elections, that would signal that there is a much broader and much deeper appetite in the SA society for the EFF’s radical economic policy proposals, or the Zimbabwe option, than we have been made to believe by both the ANC and the DA. By defeating the DA next year for the prestige and privilege of being SA’s official parliamentary opposition, that would affirm the existence of a huge, untapped growth potential for EFF in SA politics and electoral opportunities. EFF would be in a better position to challenge the ANC for power in subsequent national and local elections (2016, 2019, 2021 and or 2024). A good EFF electoral performance in 2014, by way of defeating the DA, would spell trouble for the DA as a governing party in the Western Cape and other municipalities across the country, whilst allowing EFF to build the necessary juggernaut political machinery and tail-wind momentum sufficient for it to give the ANC a real run for its money in subsequent elections. This may be directly beneficial for the ANC’s own service delivery record, which could suddenly experience a healthy uptick. Such a win by EFF will bring it closer to the national and parliamentary resources it needs to grow beyond just being a youth protest movement, into a truly national, well-resourced and well-organized modern political party with a cross-generational appeal, and whose views on SA and African issues are sought by locals and visitors alike. It could well, in practice, render the ANC and its government lame-duck. It would make EFF in practice and theory a government-in-waiting. Such an outcome would be an enormous achievement for a party established only this month. And in the most unlikely scenario of EFF’s electoral victory over the ANC, it would mean that the SA electorate has completely and totally rejected any and everything represented by the CODESA negotiations and the political settlement CODESA gave birth to. It would literally and fundamentally mean a new day for South Africa, as significant and as powerful as 27 April 1994, and as portent and transformative as 16 June 1976. Such an improbable victory by EFF over the ANC would upend everything we have come to know about SA politics since 1994.

But the failure by EFF to topple the DA from the position of official parliamentary opposition will mean that there is as yet no serious, demonstrable and broad-based national appetite in South Africa, even among the poor urban and rural dwellers, as well as the masses of the unemployed, for radical economic proposals being espoused by EFF. It would mean the death of the Zimbabwe option for South Africa, and the consequent and attendant intensification of neo-liberal Kenyafication of South Africa. This will be bad news for EFF, because it would mean it was just an anti-Zuma vengeance vehicle for expelled and bitter former ANC and ANCYL members, without much national political appeal and embeddedness whatsoever. It is hard to see how EFF will be able to surmount such a shattering defeat, and rebuild on it to recreate some prospects for future, greater electoral EFF successes.

Such a defeat for EFF will mean that, in all but name, South Africa has, for the long haul, settled for a dominant two-party political system, with many little political puppies and beagles, cornered by the two dominant parties in a revolving-door political existence, including EFF, and forever sniping at the heels of the two big political parties, the ANC and the DA, without much demonstrable success, but with much all-night harmless barking.

In a nutshell, for EFF to credibly talk about defeating the ANC in future elections, including next year, it should better the DA’s current national electoral support of about 17% and still hope that the DA itself does not gain much further electoral support next year. This in itself, let alone EFF’s more wishful thinking about defeating the ANC next year, is Himalayan ambition for the EFF. But groups of dedicated mountain climbers do claim to be able to climb any high mountain nowadays.

CHAPTER ONE.

It is simply not possible for EFF to defeat the ANC in next year’s elections, if it cannot first imagine itself becoming the official parliamentary opposition at the expense of Helen Zille and the DA. How does EFF hope to defeat the ANC, when it cannot even show the numbers that can allow it to dislodge the DA as official parliamentary opposition? Only a youthful flight of fancy, on a Limpopo-made broomstick, can visualize such an outcome. Other than through an Arab Spring-style youth revolution, there is simply no way EFF will dislodge the ANC from power next year.

But EFF can rattle the ANC massively in next year’s elections, and rattle it to its foundation at that.

What a good, solid electoral performance by EFF in next year’s national elections may do, by way of becoming the second biggest political party in South Africa, is to so rattle the ANC’s leadership at national and provincial level – meaning so hard and so unexpectantly- that President Zuma will hardly be able to survive the next ANC National General Council (NGC) following after next year’s national elections. Meaning that such a good EFF electoral performance may force the panicky ANC National General Council to consider to recall President Jacob Zuma from office, in a paradoxical reversal of the Pretoria 2005 ANC National General Council’s decision to reject Zuma’s decision to resign as ANC deputy president, following his firing from Cabinet by former President Thabo Mbeki, in the wake of Shabir Shaik’s conviction for corruption.

And this electoral outcome is within EFF’s grasp and realm of electoral possibilities next year, partly because a lot of anti-Zuma forces within the ANC are just waiting for any credible excuse to gang up against Zuma and to send him packing back to iNkandla. That it may be EFF which may provide them with such an excuse is a bitter pill they will be ready to swallow. Does EFF have the requisite organizational muscle – the boots on the ground in every village, township, town and city in South Africa – to do that? I do doubt it.

In practical political terms, such an outcome for EFF, of seeing Zuma once again politically beleaguered by his own ANC’s internal forces post-2014 national elections, may actually be more satisfying, and more important, at a personal level, to Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu, two of the co-founders of EFF, than even an outright electoral victory over the DA to make EFF the next South African official parliamentary opposition. It would constitute the two’s ultimate revenge against and triumph over their sworn and bitter political nemesis – Jacob Zuma of iNkandla. I think this is a more realistic and attainable goal for EFF in next year’s national elections, than the more improbable aim of electorally toppling the ANC from power.

But will the perfect become the enemy of the good for EFF’s duo, in terms of their electoral strategizing for next year’s national elections? I suspect so, unfortunately.

Malema, Shivambu and EFF’s fixation, and even morbid obsession, with Jacob Zuma’s ANC, or ZANC as they are wont to call it now, and specifically with Zuma himself, coupled with their unchecked hurry to scale the Drakensburg Mountains, even before they reach the Table Mountain and the SA parliamentary princinct, and even before they muster mountain-climbing on the Marikana Koppie, will be their ultimate undoing. If the former ANC Youth Leaguers keep on pursuing unattainable, but alluring, gargantuan, short-term political objectives, and keep on accumulating huge, successive, but insurmountable, political defeats in the SA political market-place, such as failing to deliver on their newest promise to defeat the ANC in next year national elections, whilst neglecting the more attainable, but prosaic, political objectives, such as defeating the DA, or at least becoming the third biggest SA parliamentary party in less than eight months, which in itself would be a mind-blowing achievement for any new political kid on the block, they are, sooner than they probably expect, going to be in far worse political space than they now reckon possible.

It should be remembered that despite their wild and loud pre-Mangaung promises, they did fail to topple Zuma in Mangaung. In fact, their defeat in Mangaung was so overwhelming, so total, that they ended up, unintentionally, strengthening Zuma’s grip over the ANC. Zuma emerged much stronger after Mangaung than before Mangaung. Similarly, their miscalculation, based on an unrealistic political calculus, which itself is driven by emotionalism and short-termism regarding next year’s national elections, and motivated by an irrational obsession with wanting Jacob Zuma to be consigned to history’s dustbins in the shortest possible time, will help Zuma to again triumph over them decisively, and to finally consign them, instead, to history’s dustbins, if not to long jail terms. Another commanding, decisive Zuma win in next year’s national elections will silence the emerging and powerful anti-Zuma voices in the ANC post-Mangaung, especially in the ANC’s Gauteng and North West provinces.

This is because ANC and SA president Zuma and his band of fanatical ANC supporters, especially in KZN and Mpumalanga, have reached a very simplistic and compelling political conclusion – in politics, a win, any win, cleans all your scandals, incompetence and non-delivery. As long as it continues to win, the post-Thabo Mbeki ANC will not mind being led even by a drunken donkey covered in ANC colors and muttering inaudible prattle about the National Development Plan (NDP). For, with regard to this post-Mbeki ANC, a win is a win, is a win, is a win. Period. It is into this simplistic and simple-minded conclusion that Malaema and EFF’s unhelpful obsession about, and fixation on, ZANC plays. It is really not about Zuma, stupid. It is about the nature and state of the current post-Mbeki and post-Mangaung ANC. Got it?

CONCLUSION

For EFF, the target should be Zille’s DA, and not Zuma’s ANC.

The two Zees – Zuma and Zille – cannot be taken on both at once by EFF. EFF simply does not have the resources, tested organizational strength, the visionary talent, the maturity and vitality, the necessary intellectual depth, mature internal political culture, sufficient ideological cohesion and, frankly, even the boots on the ground, to take on the ANC and the DA all at once, other than as staff-riders on a wave of a popular, if not populist, youth revolution breaking out across SA, which thing will not happen next year. EFF should also learn from the history of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) that the moment you make the ANC your primary enemy and primary focus, and not the structural system keeping blacks and the poor down, you lose significant black support, despite the fact that you may carry impressive struggle credentials and despite the fact that you may have very popular and charismatic leaders in your mist. A focus on the DA and Helen Zille in next year’s national elections, in line with Julius Malema’s own highly jaundiced view about, and very bitter denunciations of, the DA and Helen Zille, when he was still the ANCYL hell-raising leader, will strike a chord with SA black and non-middle class politics that made him such a formidable young politician in the first place. A focus on the ANC and Zuma will make him come across as merely a bitter and furious young man, like a teenage lover scorned by the ANC.

In this sense, the electoral outcome that should give the EFF the greatest satisfaction is when they can establish themselves as post-apartheid’s first official black parliamentary opposition, and to see Helen Zille and the DA bite the electoral dust at the foot of Table Mountain.

It would be easier for a biblical camel, ridden by a very rich, fatty boom-boom BEE oligarch, to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a Marikana Koppie to suddenly become as big as the Drakensberg Mountains by July next year.

If it is wise enough, EFF should really focus all its energies and attention exclusively on the DA and Helen Zille. They should make Helen Zille and the DA the primary target of their electioneering, and not Zuma or the ANC. In any case, the ANC under Jacob Zuma is bound to self-destruct in the next ten years, and in time for the 2024 national elections, unless it can replace Zuma with a more credible and ethically upright leader, such as Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the current AU Commission’s chairman.. So, to paraphrase Jacob Zuma himself, why would EFF harp on and waste its time beating a python which is busy chocking itself to death. It is a waste of EFF’s resources and energy. The ongoing and unstoppable mighty factional fights within the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance will ensure that the ANC brings itself down to its knees, with or without the EFF, and by dint of its own explosive, irresoluble internal contradictions. The deep, philosophical question the EFF should ask itself is whether it really matters that a mighty tree falls in the forest, or whether EFF believes a mighty tree falls in the forest only when EFF is near it, cuts it down and hears it fall. It is a bigger historical process at work within the ANC that EFF may ill-advisedly seek to own or hasten. Like the DA, an EFF that is overly obsessed with and fixated on the ANC and Jacob Zuma will only prolong the historical process of the ANC’s self-destruction and demise under Zuma, because practically all factions in the ANC are strongly united only by their intense animus to either Helen Zille and the DA, or Julius Malema and his EFF. Nothing else in SA politics unites and animates these ANC factions, otherwise at each other’s throats most of the time, than either Zille or Malema, either the DA or EFF. The very huge turn out for Jacob Zuma’s recent rally at Julius Malema’s own birthplace, Seshego, Limpopo, should have made this point clear to EFF. These two entities, DA and EFF, are the ANC’s “neo-apartheid”, in terms of presenting a transcendent, uniting, external threat, enemy and organizing principle for the ANC, especially during election times.

EFF should also not underestimate the organizationally- and politically-paralyzing effect a huge Zuma defeat has on SA politics and Zuma’s political foes alike. It is really true that people underestimate Zuma at their own peril. It took former President Thabo Mbeki, following his landslide defeat by Zuma at the ANC conference in Polokwane in 2007, almost five years to effectively regain his previous balance and poise within the domestic political scene and public intellectual space. It may take EFF a much longer time than that to regain their electoral balance and poise after the 2014 elections, if they suffer a similar, massive electoral defeat at the hands of Zuma, in a toe-to-toe electoral battle with the ANC next year. Whilst Mbeki is now splendidly recovering from his Polokwane defeat, largely thanks to his amazing intellectual, organizational and, most importantly, strategic depth, EFF may not survive its first body-blow electoral defeat at the hands of Jacob Zuma next year.

Will Julius Malema and EFF be in a position to moderate their clearly excessive political exuberance, EFF’s policy and ideological hubris, and their youthful impatience to see Zuma politically and electorally defeated? Do they have the required maturity, strategic stamina and organisational foresight to survive their first five years between next year’s elections and the 2019 elections, without going the sad and messy route of COPE post-2009 national elections?

This is the ultimate test for EFF, and not whether they can defeat Zuma or not in next year’s national elections. They clearly will be unable to defeat Zuma next year, whilst reducing the margin of ANC victory will help them exacerbate ANC’s acute and volatile internal contradictions at the expense of Zuma. This realistically should be EFF’s political aim in next year’s national elections. The truly admirable triumph for Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu is that they could at all lead their new-born party in a contest with the DA and ANC in next year’s national elections. That is achievement enough for them. If they handle matters well and strategically, going forward, they may still one day surprise South Africa and Africa. And possibly surprise even themselves.

But that cannot be next year, however much they may wish that to be the case. To insist otherwise is to give sway within EFF to subjectivism and voluntarism. It is to mistake a wish for a fact. In politics, that is an unpardonable and very costly error. The history of the ANCYL under Julius Malema attests to this truism.

3rd Cediablog

By:

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
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16 October 2013