Dirk Hartford: Zuma’s political revolt – long battle for ANC’s soul finally in the open

In a dramatic turn of events on the symbolic day of South Africa's Reconciliation Day, former President Jacob Zuma, aged 81, declared open warfare against his successor Cyril Ramaphosa. With the founding of the MK party, named after the original armed wing of the ANC, Zuma aims to contest the upcoming elections. This move exposes the deep-seated divisions within the ANC, pitting Ramaphosa's faction against the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) advocates. Zuma's strategy involves unleashing the RET faction to damage Ramaphosa's standing within the ANC and the electorate while seeking to form a "Patriotic Front" for a potential coalition government post-election. The battle lines are drawn, and the future of the ANC hangs in the balance.

By Dirk Hartford

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. – Karl Marx

On a day packed with the symbolism of war and peace in South Africa, doddering 81-year-old ex-President Jacob Zuma declared war on his "sell-out, apartheid collaborator, a proxy of white monopoly capital" successor Cyril Ramaphosa by declaring his leadership of the newly formed MK party to contest next year's elections.

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