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.

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Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
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