WSM's Jaundiced Eye: The political afterlife of JZ

Jacob Zuma’s health scare has parts of the press predicting MK’s collapse after the 4 November local elections. William Saunderson-Meyer argues they have it backwards. The IFP survived Buthelezi and reclaimed KwaZulu-Natal, and a Zuma martyr, minus his feud with Ramaphosa, could free MK to strike deals. Together the ANC and MK hold 217 of 400 National Assembly seats and 51 of 80 in the KZN legislature, enough to govern without the DA. That raises the prospect of a reunited liberation-movement bloc, the end of the GNU as it stands and a stalled reform agenda, with Durban’s port and the country’s second-biggest provincial economy in play..By William Saunderson-Meyer*.Like Mark Twain, Jacob Zuma can, with a certain relish, reassure his concerned friends and gleeful foes that ‘rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated’. For the second time.All of this week, Zuma’s family and retinue, together with an agog media, have been engaged in an absurdist to-and-fro comedy over whether the former president is at death’s door. Sections of the press, with a certain relish of their own, have seized on the drama as a portent of MK’s electoral obliteration in 4 November’s local government elections, and the party’s subsequent collapse. The current speculation about Zuma’s health and the political consequences of his possible death is a reprise of the run-up to the 2024 general election. Then, a hostile press carried a stream of wildly speculative, anonymously sourced reports portraying him as a man on his last legs, unlikely even to survive until polling day.If this was an ANC-orchestrated disinformation campaign, as has been suggested, it failed spectacularly. MK turned in a stunning performance for a fledgling party that many had dismissed as a knuckle-dragging ethno-nationalist throwback, whose appeal would be confined to the Zulu rural backwaters of KwaZulu-Natal.Instead, MK swept to first place in KZN with 45% of the vote, reducing the once-dominant ANC from 54% in 2019 to a pathetic 17%. Since MK lacked an outright majority, the battered ANC managed, in an alliance with the IFP, DA and National Freedom Party (NFP), to cobble together a precarious provincial government with a single-seat majority. Even then, the ANC was unable to claim the premiership, which went instead to another resurgent Zulu-nationalist party, the IFP. Nationally, MK secured almost 15% of the vote, becoming the country’s third-largest party and displacing the EFF (10%) as the principal voice of a fractured radical opposition. The DA’s decision to join the Government of National Unity (GNU) then handed MK another prize — the status of Official Opposition in Parliament. As this column goes to press, it remains unclear how seriously ill the 84-year-old Zuma is or even, amid conflicting reports, whether he is still in Netcare St Anne’s Hospital in Pietermaritzburg. That he is being treated in the provincial capital at all, is a measure of the hostility and suspicion between MK and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC, from which MK broke away. Instead of being airlifted to 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria, as is the protocol for the treatment of a former president, because of MK fears for his safety in what it regards as hostile ANC territory, he is being treated in situ by a medical team deployed under the direction of the Surgeon-General. Given Zuma’s role in the State Capture that hollowed out the country, and the crippling damage he has inflicted on the liberation movement in which he played such a large part — and where, he still insists, his heart lies — there is no shortage of people who would be only too delighted were he to obligingly shuffle off this mortal coil. But they would be grievously mistaken to assume that his death would mark the end of his extraordinarily disruptive influence in South African politics.Conventional wisdom holds that the charismatic Zuma’s death would deprive MK of its principal electoral asset. Similar predictions were made about the IFP following the death of Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Yet the party not only survived its founder — admittedly, with a clearer line of succession than exists in MK — but went on to reclaim the KZN premiership. Indeed, the province’s two largest parties are now MK and the IFP, both rooted in Zulu nationalism, while the ANC languishes in third place. For many MK supporters, as well as a substantial rump of sympathisers that remain nominally in the ANC, Zuma is more than a politician. He symbolises resistance to an ANC elite perceived to have betrayed the liberation struggle, abandoned its black constituency and, first under Thabo Mbeki and then Cyril Ramaphosa, persecuted and humiliated a Struggle stalwart for political ends. His legal travails and brief imprisonment for contempt of court — while not a single ANC grandee implicated in State Capture has yet been incarcerated — have reinforced rather than diminished that narrative. His death will magnify it, creating a political martyr whose memory would be considerably easier to gild than his conduct is to defend.Paradoxically, Zuma has been both MK’s indispensable electoral asset and its greatest obstacle to forging the political alliances that could translate its support into power. His departure would remove both. Instead of the widely anticipated implosion, an MK that successfully navigates the leadership transition could precipitate a realignment of South African politics more consequential than anything Zuma achieved while alive. The ramifications could extend far beyond MK itself. They threaten the present balance of power in the KZN legislature, the ANC’s vaguely reformist direction, the survival of the GNU and conceivably reopen questions about the territorial integrity of the Republic. After all, Capexit can perhaps still be dismissed as political whimsy. But KwaZulu-Natal is a different proposition. The sense of a unique Zulu nationhood and an always smouldering aspiration to political autonomy are deeply rooted in history, and remain potent forces in the province’s political imagination.MK has so far thrived electorally despite being an organisational shambles, with Zuma on a whim appointing — and then dis-appointing — his choices for the party’s top jobs. The loss of his authority, which has been exercised with the ruthlessness of a medieval monarch, will undoubtedly leave a power vacuum. Much would depend on the political maturity of his would-be successors. A destructive succession struggle could unleash centrifugal forces that rip MK apart, much as the Tweedledum-versus-Tweedledee leadership battle between Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa reduced another ANC breakaway, the Congress of the People (COPE), from a respectable 30 parliamentary seats in its first election in 2009, to just three in 2014. Simultaneously, under a less tainted and divisive leader, MK could begin to wield the political leverage that has so far been denied to it by the bitter personal enmity between Zuma and Ramaphosa. For all their present mutual loathing, the ANC and MK share much the same ideological DNA. Their estrangement is more of a family feud than an ideological schism — one for which the ANC is paying an enormous electoral price.There have already been tentative moves towards reconciliation. In February, MK deputy president Tony Yengeni invited the ANC to discuss forming a new government in KZN, alongside the EFF and the NFP. ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula contemptuously refused even to acknowledge the invitation. Nevertheless, the overture demonstrates that an accommodation is already being contemplated, even while Zuma lives.JZ’s departure could therefore be as destabilising for the ANC as it might be for MK itself. Within the ANC, especially among its grassroots membership and its trade union and Communist Party allies, there are many who would prefer a radical, nationalist alliance to the increasingly uncomfortable embrace of the DA. For Deputy President Paul Mashatile, who aspires to succeed Ramaphosa, there could be considerable political advantage in presenting himself as the man capable of healing the schism and reclaiming the 2.3m voters that decamped to support Zuma. Other estranged elements of the liberation movement, including the EFF and assorted radical splinter groups, might also be drawn into such a realignment.The parliamentary arithmetic illustrates the prize. The ANC and MK together hold 217 of the National Assembly's 400 seats, enough to govern without the DA. Add the EFF's 39 seats, and that rises to 256, exceeding the ANC's representation in 2014. The immediate pressure for this kind of realignment could come from KZN. An ANC–MK alliance would command 51 of the legislature's 80 seats, allowing the ANC to abandon the shaky IFP–ANC–DA–NFP coalition in favour of a new arrangement with MK. This would fundamentally reshape the political balance in a province where ANC electoral support has collapsed, and recent polling suggests further losses.Those polls put MK's support in eThekwini anywhere between 33% and 55%, with the ANC trailing substantially in both surveys. Meanwhile, MK has positioned itself alongside the swelling anti-immigration movement, tapping into yet another source of public anger against the governing party. For the ANC, the stakes extend beyond electoral humiliation. KZN is the country's second-biggest provincial economy and, with Durban's port and its vital road and rail links to Gauteng, is simply too strategically important to surrender without a fight. Or a deal.Of course, assembling such a coalition is not the same as reclaiming the ANC's lost electoral support. Nor is such an alliance inevitable. There may still be enough reformists within the ANC to resist what the DA and the business community regard as a ‘doomsday coalition’. But a reunited liberation-movement bloc is likely to spell the end of the GNU in its present form and thwart Ramaphosa's hesitant attempts at economic and political reform.There is, after all, a political afterlife. Zuma could prove as disruptive from beyond the grave as he has been in life..Follow *WSM on X @TheJaundicedEye

WSM's Jaundiced Eye: The political afterlife of JZ

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