Isaac Mogotsi Pt 3: ANC's fall, GNU's betrayal, and Zuma's rise to power

Key topics:.ANC's fall seen as betrayal of the National Democratic RevolutionGNU with DA branded as neoliberal, anti-progressive allianceJacob Zuma’s MKP hailed as 2024 election's surprise success story.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Isaac Mogotsi*.The 2024 South African Election Outcome and the Betrayal of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR): How the African National Congress (ANC)'s rule collapsed after thirty years..CONCLUDING REMARKS.“If the ANC collapsed today, ceased to exist, this country would become ungovernable simply because of the influence of the party,” Thabo Mbeki, Letter to the ANC, 2021.”.“A leader who doesn't have a sense of self-contradiction is a very dangerous leader”, Mondli Gungubele, ANC Member of Parliament (MP), Speech to Parliament, 19 July 2019..When campaigning for the ANC during the 2021 local government election (LGE) Thabo Mbeki confidently declared to the public that the ANC is “too big to fail”..The 2024 election outcome demonstrates that the ANC failed dismally and has been cut to a small size, although its ego remains outsized. It certainly can't now convincingly claim that it is the leader of society..It has failed and its influence on our society has substantially diminished, yet South Africa is not ungovernable as a result..It is clear Thabo Mbeki was crying wolf like a spoilt baby and got it terribly wrong. Perhaps he was trying to scare South Africans into continuing to support the ANC of Ramaphosa at the polls. The trick did not work. It boomeranged on his political reputation not in a good way..Former president Thabo Mbeki can no longer claim with a straight face that the ANC is too big to fail or that if it collapses South Africa will be ungovernable..If anything all indications are that the ANC of Ramaphosa is headed for the political rubbish heap after the 2029 election..The 2024 election outcome affirms that a massive majority of 60% of South Africans who cast their vote look forward to the ANC of Ramaphosa going the way of former president Kenneth Kaunda's ruling UNIP party in Zambia in the early 1990s..Or to quote the great German revolutionary and poet Bertolt Brecht on Carthage, an ancient African city Thabo Mbeki occasionally refers to in his speeches:.“Carthage went to war three times.It was strong the first timeIt was rich the second timeNo one remembered it after the third.”.Will anyone one remember the ANC of Ramaphosa after the 2029 election?.In 2024 Thabo Mbeki again energetically and with great media fanfare hit the campaign trail on behalf of the ANC of Ramaphosa in both Gauteng and KZN provinces to rally voter support. Mainly the pensioners of Soweto, Mbeki's age cohort, came out in some impressive numbers to rapturously applaud his message that the people of Soweto must again vote for the ANC of Ramaphosa..However the 2024 election outcome reflects that all of Gauteng's major, predominantly black urban centres, including the sprawling Soweto suburbs with a population of over three million residents, gave the ANC a mighty kick in the back, a bloody nose, a blue eye and a “thanks but no thanks” middle finger, thus making sure that in this smallest but most populated and most industrialised province of our country the urban black voters used their electoral brooms and forks to chase the ANC of Ramaphosa out of town and to its rural backwaters of the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and the North West, so to speak..How things have changed from the 1976 Soweto Uprising days when the black youth of Soweto flocked to the exiled ANC in their thousands..Prior to the 2024 election Thabo Mbeki went out of his way to launch vicious political attacks after vicious political attacks against his former Comrade-in-Arms and his former Deputy President Jacob Zuma and his new MK party (MKP) calling them “counter-revolutionary”..Whilst voters in the main ignored Mbeki's call that they should vote for the ANC of Ramaphosa in great numbers to ensure that it remained in power, they ignored his desperate calls and even much more decisively ignored his bitter and hate-laced political campaign against Jacob Zuma..Very surprisingly, despite Thabo Mbeki's best efforts to discredit them in the eyes of voters, Jacob Zuma and his MKP emerged as undoubtedly the wunderkind and star performer of the 2024 election, their amazing electoral performance outshining even the most sanguine of predictions..Clearly Thabo Mbeki is not reading the political mood in the country correctly or he is blinded by his ongoing post-Polokwane bitterness against Jacob Zuma..The uber-frenetic and motormouthed ANC Secretary General (SG) Fikile Mbalula, who is, according to the ANC Veterans' League's deputy president Mavuso Msimang “an embarrassment”, was right that the ANC was voted out of power and 'single-handedly defeated” by Jacob Zuma..In all the post-colonial history of Africa no other politician or public or a political formation has ever achieved such an astonishing political feat within a space of just six months from its inception as MKP did..Jacob Zuma's electoral phenomenon in the 2024 election is a political class act for the ages..Whilst Thabo Mbeki continues to describe Jacob Zuma and his MKP as “counter-revolutionary” and “a wolf in a sheep's skin”, so far MKP's national and provincial legislative performance as an official opposition in our national parliament and in the provinces of KZN and Mpumalanga have not displayed any signs whatsoever that it can even remotely be thought of as, associated with or be mistaken for some counter-revolutionary force bent on destabilising South Africa..So far MKP's legislative performance as our official national parliamentary opposition has been dignified, patriotic, valuable, enriching to the national discourse and quite frankly very impressive..Looks like Thabo Mbeki protesteth too much..If anything it appears like it is GNU which Thabo Mbeki apparently supports which bears all the hallmarks of a Thacherite, rightwing, neoliberal, pro-western and indeed counter-revolutionary arrangement as nowhere in its founding Statement of Intent co-signed by the ANC of Ramaphosa and the rightwing DA of Vrau Helen Zille does GNU envisage the promotion and achievement of the National Democratic Revolution (NDP) as its stated programmatic goal for the next five years of its term..The obliteration of any reference to the NDR in the GNU Statement of Intent is the sine qua non for the emergence and existence of GNU co-anchored by the ANC of Ramaphosa and the rightwing DA of Vrau Helen Zille..It will be recalled that in his much-publicised letter to the ANC of 2021, following the first major and humiliating electoral defeat of the ANC of Ramaphosa in the LGE of that year, Thabo Mbeki spoke about a network of counter-revolutionary elements from the old white colonial apartheid regime and from within the ANC conniving to precisely defeat the NDP..And now that GNU clearly fashions itself as such and takes pride in the defeat of the NDR, as attested by its omission in the founding GNU Statement of Intent, which defeat of the NDR has for long been the stated ideological, political and programmatic objective of the rightwing DA of Vrau Helen Zille and of the DA's forerunner the Democratic Party (DP) of Tony “Fight B(l)ack” Leon, Thabo Mbeki is maintaining some bizarre and studied silence to the fact that GNU, like GEAR before, is “the most serious strategic threat to the National Democratic Revolution”, to borrow the words of the SACP's Blade Nzimande in 1996 as quoted in Mark Gevisser's Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, ibid, page 263..Surely it is GNU and not Jacob Zuma nor his newly formed MKP which has effectively betrayed and buried the NDR..It is thus the ANC of Ramaphosa, Thabo Mbeki, Gwede Mantashe, Fikile Mbalula, Siphiwe “Gebuza” Nyanda, Mavuso Msimang, Snuki Zikalala, Blade Nzimande, Zamani Sol and the notorious Chris Hani cabal who have betrayed and buried the NDR by going to bed with the bitter political enemies of the NDR in the form of the rightwing DA of Vrau Helen Zille, the historically Zulu tribalist IFP of Hlabisa and the amper-fascist Freedom Front Plus of apartheid General Groenewald...These, among others, are the political parties constituting the politically grotesque GNU today. Yes indeed, as the urban black South African saying goes, history has no blank pages. But by the company you keep, ye shall be known, says the Holy Bible. And by the friends you keep, ye shall be judged..One is fittingly reminded of the deeply wise, foresighted and prophetic words of Robert Sobukwe, one of the greatest and legendary leaders and thinkers Africa has ever produced and the founder of the real and genuine Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and not the Charterist, Communist-loving, white liberal-hugging and ANC-adoring PAC of Nyhontso which is in cahoots with amper-fascist FF+ and the uber-rightwing and so-called “fight b(l)ack” DA of Vrau Helen Zille within GNU, when he said almost seventy years ago, as if having some prescient knowledge of this politically disgusting animal called 2024 GNU:.“In some cases the courtship has reached a stage where the parties are going out together; and they probably hold hands in the dark but nowhere has it reached a stage where the parties can kiss in public without blushing.”.That is 2024 GNU for you! Can you imagine what Robert Sobukwe would think of the PAC of Nyhontso in cahoots with amper-fascist FF+ and rightwing and so-called “fight b(l)ack” DA of Vrau Helen Zille, the successor to Tony Leon's so-called “Fight B(l)ack” DP? Legendary and immortal Robert Sobukwe must be turning in his venerable grave at the sight.. But almost as sure as sunrise that public GNU kissing without blushing, which will amount to an obscene act of public political indecency, will probably happen during the coming 2029 national elections, if not sooner by the time of the 2026 LGE. But about this later on in this paper..Isn't it rich that in his 2021 ANC letter Thabo Mbeki correctly predicted that counter-revolutionary forces within the ANC will work in cahoots with pro-apartheid counter-revolutionary forces to carry out counter-revolutionary activities in South Africa in order to defeat the NDR?.Who then has joined with whom in GNU to precisely bring about such a counter-revolutionary offensive to defeat, betray and bury the NDR? Of course it is the ANC of Ramaphosa which Thabo Mbeki apparently supports to the tilt behind the scenes. Indeed, as Mondli Gungubele put it 2019, the most dangerous leader is the leader without a sense of self-contradiction whatsoever! How on earth do cadres of the ANC of Ramaphosa form GNU with these rightwing forces and still pretend that they have not defeated, betrayed and buried the NDR by forming and or joining GNU? Who is fooling who?.How can leaders of the ANC of Ramaphosa be so blatant and in-your-face in ditching the NDR in favour of sharing power with elements whose dreams are animated by a desire to restore colonial and apartheid fantasies in our country?.The phenomenal Indian author Arundhati Roy provides a helpful allusion as to how forces who fancy themselves as the progressive movement end up being the very same forces which uphold and defend both the iniquitous status quo and the malevolent historical processes which brought about such an iniquitous status quo..In the book The Chequebook & The Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian, she tells the latter the following about Communist parties of the Indian sub-continent:.“If you look at the Communist parties, most of their leaders are upper-caste. When they fight elections, candidates are carefully chosen to represent the dominant caste of their respective 'vote bank' – an example of how communism will harness the traditional caste system in its quest for power in a 'representative' democracy.” (Haper Perennial, 2004, page 2). Political elites will always harness the pathologies which brought about the status quo to keep themselves in power for as long as they can. Democratic South Africa is no exception. And Arundhati Roy once famously remarked that in India governed by Hindu nationalists it is safer to be a cow than to be a Moslem or a woman..Similarly in democratic South Africa, itself an enduring and perfected race caste system with the majority black masses at the thick bottom of the pyramid, the black domestic worker, the black male gardener and the black factory worker know from heuristics, as they did under apartheid, that the black and white elites and middle to upper classes of today care more about their domestic pets than they do about these black menial workers and their children who constitute democratic South Africa's ever-growing precariat..The more things have changed since 1994, the more they have remained the same. Jacob Zuma and MKP tapped and drilled deep into some powerful national anti-ANC mood abroad in the country which the voting public shared in the most concentrated form in KZN, Mpumalanga and Gauteng and which in 2026 and 2029 elections will spill over into North West and the Free State provinces.. This is because our people were not and are not interested in Thabo Mbeki's delusional, empty and misleading slogans like calling Jacob Zuma and MKP counter-revolutionary. Our people do not eat slogans but are much attuned to their lived experiences. They are actually professors in the study of their own lived experiences. It is on such lived experiences they base their electoral and voting choices, not on some high-falutin intellectualising divorced from the national political reality and imperatives..Our people understand very well that is the eagerness on the part of the ANC of Ramaphosa to jump into GNU bed with fanatical anti-NDR political forces which constitutes the very essence of counter-revolution in South Africa today. And for this type of 2024 anti-NDR GNU they will again severely punish the ANC of Ramaphosa in the coming elections in 2026 and 2029. There should be no doubt about that in any one's sober and refined mind. Political commentator Oscar van Heerden was self-indulging and self-deluding at the same time when he recently told the SABC's 404 TV channel that the three or so millions of voters who abstained from casting their vote in the 2024 election are ANC voters who will be so “shocked” by the precipitous electoral decline of the ANC that in the next elections they will pull up their socks and actively go and cast their vote for the ANC. This is the stuff wild political hallucinations are made of..My view is that the likelier scenario for the next two elections is that half of the ANC of Ramaphosa will be so disgusted with 2024 anti-NDR GNU that they will choose to vote for either Zuma's MKP (if it would not have self-destructed by then) or for Julius Malema's EFF, thus completely decimating the ANC of Ramaphosa. It is this likelier scenario on which the DA of Vrau Helen Zille based its political calculus and is counting on and which motivated it in the first instance to swallow its gargantuan pride and form a righting and anti-NDR GNU with the ANC of Ramaphosa. And the SACP's General Secretary (GS) Solly Mapaila is right to be livid at the ANC of Ramaphosa, supported by his political boss and SACP chairman Blade Nzimande, for forming GNU with the DA of Vrau Helen Zille and amper-fascist Freedom Front Plus of apartheid General Groenewald. Yet Thabo Mbeki's lack of a sense of self-contradiction as a national leader does not end with the formation of GNU or the call of his Thabo Mbeki Foundation for a GNU National Dialogue. In his letter to the ANC of 24 November 2021 former president Thabo Mbeki stated his correct belief that the 2021 LGE outcome “represented a serious reversal for the progressive movement and a significant advance for the right-wing forces.”.That was an astute political observation..It would be interesting to know how Mbeki today, in light of the formation of GNU led by the ANC of Ramaphosa and the DA of Vrau Helen Zille, defines what he called “the progressive movement” and “the right-wing forces” as it appears that the right-wing forces led by the DA of Vrau Helen Zille in cahoots with ANC's Thatcherites, rightwingers and neoliberals have registered an even much greater counter-revolutionary advance through their inclusion in GNU without ever coming close to being voted into power by the electorate, whilst the progressive forces within the ANC of Ramaphosa are in total disarray and retreat as they are forced to find political survival in including the right-wing forces in the governance arrangement of 2024 GNU..The revolutionary and deeply democratic question to pose today to Thabo Mbeki is whether he truly thinks that what he termed in 2021 as “the progressive movement” and “the right-wing forces” need to come together in GNU? And if he does, what will be the social base, political agenda, the programmatic objective and the ideological glue holding such an unlikely “toenadering” of the progressive movement and the right-wing forces within GNU be? If there is confusion in the minds of constituents of the progressive movement within the ANC of Ramaphosa as to what GNU heralds, that confusion is not shared by nor does it exist within the rightwing forces and pro-neoapartheid within GNU..The rightwing forces led by the DA of Vrau Helen Zille are very clear in their minds what their strategic aim and political agenda are regarding their participation in GNU. It certainly is not to make the ANC of Ramaphosa smell like roses electorally as an outcome of a reflected glory from GNU successes. The DA of Vrau Helen Zille want to do to the ANC of Ramaphosa what it previously did to the PAC's problem child Patricia de Lille's short-lived Independent Democrats (ID), namely as merely a stepping stone to greater power, glory and influence, after which they dumped De Lille and her ID like a used condom. This in fact is what has become the DA's formula to national and provincial executive power: cobble together some phoney coalition(s) like they did with Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) following the 2016 LGE, gain power, glory and influence in almost all of our major metros and then dump Julius Malema and his EFF like used condoms. This is the DA's political trap the ANC of Ramaphosa, like lemmings, is walking into, with foregone devastating political results in the coming 2026 and 2029 elections. No wonder Vrau Helen Zille thinks she is “a parallel president” to president Ramaphosa following the 2024 election, to borrow from Mr. (no more Comrade) Gwede Mantashe's recent angry public outburst. No Mr. Gwede Mantashe, Vrau Helen Zille does not think that she is “a parallel president” to president Ramaphosa over GNU. That old white Jewish woman speaks, since the electoral defeat of the ANC on 29 May, as if she is the unelected white Supreme Leader of South Africa who calls the shots over any black leader in democratic South Africa, president Ramaphosa included and who is the uber-alles Madam Baas to poor black South Africans. Her nauseating political and colonialist hubris knows no bounds..She seems to carry a strange notion in her discombobulated head that following the crushing electoral defeat of the ANC of Ramaphosa at the hands of voters on 29 May she has effectively become to lame-duck president Ramaphosa what Nelson Mandela became to the last white apartheid and colonial president and lame-duck FW de Klerk following the cruel assassination of SACP leader Chris Hani in April 1993, meaning that she seems to believe that the tide has so definitively turned against the ANC that it is now her DA riding the power crest of the political and electoral flow from the day GNU was formed..Her mouth and lip have become ungovernable and increasingly daring and reckless. She is smelling ANC's political blood on the floor and wants to go for the jugular to finish the ANC of Ramaphosa off Her old zany white Twitter rage is now on full display and an unmistakable power ingredient of GNU since she became one of the co-anchor of GNU, South Africa's most Thatcherite, rightwing, pro-West and neoliberal government since 1994. And Vrau Helen Zille looks like she is determined to give the ANC of Ramaphosa continual political chest pains during the entire duration of GNU. The GNU battle lines have been drawn by her in her Cape wine glass..Since the formation of GNU Vrau Helen Zille is conducting herself like a white European colonial Governor-General of democratic South Africa who is above parliament and the national executive and even above national laws like on BEE, Equity Employment, Affirmative Action, Preferential Procurement. On the national laws she hates, she chooses to be lawless. She only respects the judiciary of our country because it remains so fundamentally untransformed in its overall legal-philosophical outlook, based as it is on the notorious and anti-black Roman Dutch Law which was a colonial imposition on colonised Africa by conquering white western European colonial powers. And she continues to believe that the colonial Roman Dutch Law is the best gift the atrocious, genocidal and perfectly inhumane white western European colonialists bequeathed to hapless black South Africans. And this is the new coalition-cum-GNU partner and co-anchor of GNU with the ANC of Ramaphosa. Cry the beloved country! And, Mr. Gwede Mantashe, it is you and Cyril Ramaphosa, among others, who have emboldened her incredible political chutzpah and wild fantasies by forming GNU with her rightwing and so-called “fight b(l)ack” DA. Who can blame her for her reckless audacity given that background? You made the bed with her Sir, you sleep in it! On the other hand Thabo Mbeki displays self-contradiction of a major national leader also with regard to her 2016 two-part article titled “Gear and Neo-Liberalism”, especially in its Part One. In this Part One Mbeki goes to an extra-ordinary length to explain what the term neo-liberalism means, only for him to aver that the ANC governments he and Nelson Mandela led in 1994 - 2008 never implemented a neoliberal agenda..It may be a sign that Thabo Mbeki may be as doddering an octogenarian as the USA president (“Genocide” Joe) Biden is that he forgets what he said about the Washington Consensus, which is universally understood, even by the former World Bank Chief Economist and Vice President Joseph Stiglitz as a neoliberal diktat by western countries and the international financial institutions they control. (See Joseph Stiglitz on the Washington Consensus in his book Globalisation and its Discontents, Penguin Books, 2002)..In Part One of his GEAR and Neo-Liberalism treatise Thabo Mbeki write a letter to a Comrade, whose name he withheld, in order to dispute the notion contained in an article by the unnamed Comrade of his that GEAR was a “self-imposed” structural adjustment programme (SAP) a la the International Monetary Fund (IMF)..This really is the nub of Mbeki's polemic. Yet in his Oliver Tambo Inaugural Lecture he titled “Am I my Brother's Keeper” which Thabo Mbeki delivered in Washington DC, USA on 23 May 2000, this is how Thabo Mbeki described how the post-apartheid ANC government he and Nelson Mandela led of its own volition imposed on itself and on South Africa the self-same SAP a la IMF. Let me quote Thabo Mbeki at some length for the sake of clarity and to dispel any doubt in the minds of doubting Thomases of the ANC of Ramaphosa and GNU. Said Thabo Mbeki then: “In the October 26th, 1999 edition of Foreign Policy Magazine, the editor, Moises Naim (Fads and Fashion in Economic Reforms: Washington Consensus or Washington Confusion?) says that the elements of this so-called consensus, as given in a book edited by John Williamson are” *fiscal discipline;*redirect public expenditure;*tax reform;*financial liberalisation;*adopt a single, competitive exchange rate;*trade liberalisation;*eliminate barriers to foreign direct investment;*privatise state owned enterprises;*deregulate market entry and competition; and,*ensure secure property rights.(John Williamson, ed: Latin American Adjustment: How much has happened, Washington DC, Institute for International Economics, 1990). “Many African countries have tried and are trying to live up to these prescriptions, naturally with varying degrees of success..“We too, having assessed what we inherited from the apartheid system and determined what we need to do to bring about growth and development, have embarked on our own process of reform which addresses many of these injunctions.” (See Mahube: The Dawning of the Dawn. Speech, Lectures & Tributes, Skotaville Media, 2001, page 73 – 74). The last paragraph is the key one denoting that the ANC government imposed on itself or as Mbeki put “we...have embarked on our own process of reform which addresses many of these injunctions” of the Washington Consensus, which, translated into simpler English, meant that democratic South Africa in the mid to late 1990s under the leadership of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki self-imposed many of the elements of the IMF and World Bank's structural adjustment prescripts. This is as neoliberal as it gets. Yet in his treatise “GEAR and Neo-Liberalism” which he published in 2016 Thabo Mbeki flatly denied and was offended by the charge of his unnamed Comrade that South Africa “self-imposed a [neo-liberal] structural adjustment programme” in 1996. You really can't make this stuff up even if enveloped in a euphoric and psychedelic haze. Mbeki in that “GEAR and Neo-Liberalism” treatise further wrote, and I again need to quote him at length to lay bare his gigantic self-contradiction: “In an article entitled What is Neoliberalism?, published by CorpWatch: Holding Corporations Accountable, Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia say... 'The main points of neo-liberalism include: THE RULE OF THE MARKET...CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES...DEREGULATION...PRIVATISATION...ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF “THE PUBLIC GOOD” OR “COMMUNITY”... “In 1999, the US Center for Economic and Policy Research published a paper by Robert Naiman and Neil Watkins entitled “A Survey of the Impacts of IMF Structural Adjustment in Africa: Growth, Social Spending and Debt Relief”. (sic). They write: 'Structural adjustment programs generally require countries to adopt policies such as: *Reduction in government spending; *Monetary tightening (high interest rates and / or reduced access to credit; *Elimination of government subsidies for food and other items of popular consumption; *Privatisation of enterprises previously owned or operated by the government; and *Reductions in barriers to trade, as well as to foreign investment and ownership “The two questions that arise from these correct comments about economic liberalism, economic neo-liberalism and the IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programmes are: in what part does the GEAR document advocate the policies listed by Martinez and Garcia under 1 – 5, as well as those identified by Naiman and Watkins; and,When and in what way did the Government enunciate and implement such policies?” (See.So in 2 000 Thabo Mbeki told his Washington DC audience that “we too...have embarked on our own process which addresses many of these injunctions” of the World Bank/IMF SAP, yet in 2016 in his 'GEAR and Neo-Liberalism” treatise he somersaulted and denied that democratic South Africa under his and Nelson Mandela's leadership ever “self-imposed” a form of Washington Consensus or World Bank/IMF SAP in a form of GEAR in 1996.. Of course in 2000 Mbeki spoke to his Washington DC audience during his Oliver Tambo Inaugural Lecture as a Head of State, whereas in 2016 he was already busy and has since been singularly pre-occupied with putting on some gloss on his highly contested and controversial political legacy. What is important to note however is that Thabo Mbeki self-contradicted on a planetary scale regarding whether South Africa in the mid to late 1990s ever self-imposed neoliberalism or not. The lived experiences of the South African population, which is a good measure of the correctness of any political stance, would make them readily agree with Thabo Mbeki's diagnostics during his Inaugural OR Tambo Lecture in Washington DC in 2 000. And they would be perplexed by Mbeki's strenuous denial that GEAR had anything to do with either the Washington Consensus or the World Bank/IMF SAP or with neoliberalism in general. Is Thabo Mbeki a neoliberalism denialist in addition?.What Thabo Mbeki calls “the progressive movement” must note that the forming of GNU which includes the DA of Vrau Helen Zille is not something which should have been unexpected or which should have caught them by surprise. If such a progressive movement had paid sufficient and ongoing attention to political detail, it would have detected leads which pointed to the almost inescapable eventuality of GNU, given the steady deterioration of progressive politics within the ANC of Ramaphosa since he was elected the ANC leader in 2017 and truth be told, even before he ascended to power. Upon resigning from the DA following the election of Vrau Helen Zille as its Federal Council chairperson, the former DA leader Mmusi Maimane and now the leader of Build One South Africa (BOSA) declared that the DA was “going back to its original self, which is a party of white people, focusing on the interests of white, and nothing else”. This was a pretty insightful and valuable comment coming from the party's former black leader who knew it inside out better than most. This is the same DA led by Vrau Helen Zille which is now a powerful and arguably most influential co-anchor of GNU together with the ANC of Ramaphosa. If you ever deluded yourself and somehow hoped for some progressive changes from GNU co-anchored by “a party of white people, focusing on the interests of white”, meaning the DA of Vrau Helen Zille, think again. But the foundational stone of GNU was laid by the adoption of the Thatcherite, rightwing and neoliberal National Development Plan (NDP) by our national parliament in 2012. Even before its formal adoption by parliament the DA leader Vrau Helen Zille was already crowing in a Politicsweb article that: “The National Development Commission's National Development Plan (NDP) points to an emerging consensus at the non-racial, progressive centre of South African politics. This developing policy coherence on the fundamental issues facing South Africa is an exciting and significant development. The NDP is rooted in the same analytical framework that underpins the DA's own political philosophy – the open, opportunity society for all.'” (Politicsweb, 23 November 2021). Today political parties represented in parliament which adopted the NDP such as the ANC, DA, IFP, the PAC and the Freedom Front Plus have joined GNU which is also sold as a centre for stability. Already TV and radio anchor Stephen Grootes in a recent Daily Maverick article of 26 June 2024 was suggesting that these very political parties and the other smallanyana ones constituting GNU must work together to launch what he named the South African Party (SAP) to hold rallies together across the country and jointly to prepare to contest the next local election in 2026 and the national elections in 2029. The die is cast. The dice have been thrown. The train has left the station. A new political formation made up by GNU parties to contest elections in 2026 and 2020 is already in its embryonic stage as we speak. What will progressives in our country do about this coming SAP in response? Stephen Grootes further averred that “...what unites the ANC and the DA (and others in the coalition) is a shared belief in constitutionalism. Should MK and EFF grow in strength and appear to threaten this, this could push these parties closer together...A new South African Party could be formed quickly because of the sheer urgency of the situation. While many factors mitigate against this happening, for the leaders involved in the new coalition, there is a powerful incentive: It may be the best way for them to retain political power, which could see them, in the end, moving in that direction.”I note the consistent tendency by some favouring DANC or a new South African Party to use the terms coalition and GNU interchangeably. The ANC of Nelson Mandela and OR Tambo is dead! Long Live the ANC of Ramaphosa! Joseph Stiglitz, the former World Bank Chief Economist and Vice President, using the example of post-Soviet Russian oligarchs, explained in his book Globalisation and Its Discontents why powerful, very wealthy and self-enriched wheeling and dealing oligarchs who amass stupendous wealth overnight as a result of proximity to political power suddenly develop a penchant for stability, the rule of law, for constitutional order (what Stephen Grootes calls “constitutionalism”) and for reliable institutional infrastructure. Wrote Stiglitz: “Demands for the rule of law have come from these oligarchs, who obtained their wealth through behind-the-scenes special deals within the Kremlin, only as they have seen their special influence on Russia's rulers wane.” (Penguin Books, 2002, page 164) Could it be that the no less rapacious and wheeling and dealing Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) oligarchs like Ramaphosa, who have amassed billions of Rands in wealth through behind-the-scenes special BEE deals with the ANC governments and white big capital in the last three decades now feel that their special influence on the ANC counts for nothing as the ANC has lost its majority to form a government on its own and that they should seek political insurance cover under the wings of the pro-business and law and order DA through the ruse of GNU? Not a far-fetched thought, if you ask me. In his article titled The End of the ANC's Single-Party Rule the University of Pretoria's Professor Adekeye Adebajo, a very perceptive and knowledgeable commentator on South African political affairs, recently presciently noted the following about the post 2024 election scenarios which confronted the defeated ANC of Ramaphosa, even before “talks about talks” regarding the coalition-cum-GNU began: “So, with which party will the ANC form a coalition? Many believe there are only three realistic choices. The first option is the white-dominated, business-friendly DA, which Ramaphosa seems to favour.” (See project-syndicate.org, 3 June 2024). To be fair to Ramaphosa, he was not the only leader of the ANC of Ramaphosa who seemed to favour a coalition with the DA of Vrau Helen Zille over a possible coalition with MKP of Jacob Zuma and the EFF of Julius Malema. Fervent and fanatical Ramaphosa supporters within the ANC of Ramaphosa like the ANC SG Mbalula, the ANC Veterans' League's president Snuki Zikalala, his deputy Mavuso Msimang and SA Ambassador to Mozambique Siphiwe “Gebuza” Nyanda as well as the elements of the highly notorious Chris Hani cabal of the Eastern Cape ANC favoured a coalition with the DA from the get go, even before the 29 May election, over a possible coalition with MKP and EFF. We therefore knew all along that talk about the ANC being open to engage in talks with all political parties, including with MKP and the EFF, about a coalition or GNU were just that: empty talk and an opium to mislead the poor black masses. The dominant Thatcherite, rightwing and neoliberal bloc within the ANC of Ramaphosa had already made its political preference for a deal with the DA of Vrau Helen Zille very loud and clear even before the first vote was cast in the 29 May 2024 elections. But were these Thatcherite, rightwing and neoliberal elements within the ANC of Ramaphosa mere echo chambers for Ramaphosa's own preference, as Professor Adekeye Adebayo informed us very persuasively and convincingly? The Statement of Intent agreed to between the ANC of Ramaphosa and the DA of Vrau Helen Zille was after all negotiated between the DA and the ANC of Ramaphosa to the exclusion of the other political parties which later joined and now make up GNU as political sidekicks, as Vrau Helen Zille made it clear in her recent Carter Blanche interview. The other smallanyana political parties which are now also part of GNU like the historically Zulu tribalist IFP, the now Charterist-light, Communist-sympathising, multi-racialist snoozing, white-liberal hugging and power-hungry PAC of Nyhontso which prepared to work closely with amper-fascist Freedom Front Plus in GNU and the unpatriotic Patriotic Alliance of Gayton McKenzie were in reality invited by the ANC of Ramaphosa and the DA of Vrau Helen Zille as an afterthought to disguise DANC coalition as a multi-party GNU, as if these smallanyana political parties are flower girls and page boys at a white wedding, pun intended, between the mainly white-led DA of Vrau Helen Zille and the tottering ANC of Ramaphosa. Yet these smallanyana political parties meekly, like terrified sheep, went along uncritically, perhaps pushed behind their spineless backs by their white big capital donors and as if afraid that it is cold outside anti-NDR GNU. The so-called sufficient consensus deadlock breaking mechanism in the DANC (DA & ANC)'s Statement of Intent is in reality nothing but an acknowledgement that GNU is effectively and to all intents and purposes just a marriage of convenience and a hastily-consumated coalition between the ANC of Ramaphosa and the DA of Vrau Helen Zille under the guise of GNU and that the other smallanyana political parties who have joined GNU were and are just page boys and flowers girls at the DANC white wedding where traditional African ceremonies have no place.. In 2009 the author Moss Mashamaite published his book under the title DemoNcracy: A Doctrine of Active Citizenship, Seeking to Exorcise the Demons that Bedevil African Democracies. The cover of this book has the faces of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, former ANC and SA president Thabo Mbeki, former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. At the time of publication of his book, only Thabo Mbeki had lost power through a democratic recall from power by his ruling ANC. The other three leaders went on to lose power through mass and popular revolts against their regimes. It is interesting to note that of these four leaders only Thabo Mbeki remains free, vocal, powerful and influential in our society regarding contemporary political developments in his country and internationally. Even our country's leader president Cyril Ramaphosa now and again seeks his counsel on important ANC and national issues. This alone is a clear demonstration of the strength and enduring vitality of South Africa's young but slowly maturing democratic and constitutional project. It is hard to think of any other African country other than democratic South Africa which would have allowed and ensured that Thabo Mbeki post-power is free and secure to utter ongoing blistering critiques against the governments of his own ruling ANC. Even Botswana, for long held as a poster child of African democracy, has not been kind to its former president Ian Khama, the son of its post-colonial founder the venerable Sir Seretse Khama and now self-exiled in South Africa. The Botswana government of president Masisi though says former president Ian Khama is a fugitive from Botswana justice. Ian Khama on the other hand claims that he faces unjust political persecution and lawfare back in his own country. The last time I checked Thabo Mbeki and Al-Bashir are the only two out of the four African leaders Moss Mashamaite chose to illustrate the front cover of his book who are still alive. But unlike Mbeki, Al Bashir is unfree, deeply reviled by most of the Sudanese people and rotting in a Sudanese prison following a military coup which ousted his military-backed repressive regime. You really got to admire how South Africa's democracy and constitutional order performed in the last thirty years, and not just when Thabo Mbeki wielded power between 1994 to 2008, as wrongly alleged by Thabo Mbeki himself during his latest address to his TM-School at UNISA.. Despite the negative views some in our country may hold about Thabo Mbeki, our democracy and constitutional order do confer on him ironclad protection and security as our former president and provide him with all the privileges. This is good. This is better compared to the rest of our beloved African continent. This is among the best in terms of such protocols towards former presidents and or Heads of State of the world. Yet some have indeed asked eyebrow-raising questions about Thabo Mbeki's legacy and latter day post-power political activism in the public domain, just as Thabo Mbeki himself does so about Jacob Zuma's political legacy and ongoing public activism. For example in his book mentioned above, this is what Moss Mashamaite wrote about Thabo Mbeki: “Mbeki was a traitor within the African National Congress and he spent more time in his country (the international community) than in our country (South Africa, to prove my point). Who knows what he was doing out there while our country was going to hell. Helen Zille knows opposition politics and she knows an ally when she sees one and Thabo Mbeki looked and acted the part. She has lavished a lot of praise on Thabo Mbeki despite all that has gone wrong because she was aware that Mbeki was all this time a member of the Democratic Party and all its interest groups, national and international, even though clad in ANC colours. He was ANC only as a leader, never as a member.” (Chatworld Publishers, 2009, page 99 – 100). It is not at all clear if Moss Mashamaite was using figurative speech gone over the top, or whether he was just expressing in a rather over-heated language and overwrought and generalised personal political opinion about Thabo Mbeki or whether he was just rhetorically flailing in anger against Mbeki. I suspect the last is the case, politically speaking. What can be easily refuted is Moss Mashamaite's claim that Thabo Mbeki was interested in being only an ANC leader and not an ordinary ANC member. Nothing could be further from the truth. History does show that the young Thabo Mbeki was an ordinary ANC member in the period between when he joined the ANC in 1956 and 1960, before he was elected a leader of an ANC-aligned African student formation in the early 1960s. But this blistering criticism of Thabo Mbeki by the author Moss Mashamaite also shows that some South Africans hold a very dim view of Thabo Mbeki's political legacy and his ongoing shrill anti-Jacob Zuma political activism and that they do not regard him as holier-than-thou or as a demi-god whose publicly expressed political views must be embraced uncritically like manna from heaven. What has been most unsettling to many observers in South Africa has been Thabo Mbeki's threatening, supercilious and condescending tone when he claims, as he did in his latest address at his TM – School at UNISA, that “there are people who do not like our democracy”, or words to that effect, as if Mbeki has propriety right over our democracy and constitutional order which propriety right confers on him the ultimate power to determine who likes or dislikes our democracy. Things do not work that way in democratic South Africa which Mbeki did so much to bring about, alongside millions of other South Africans. Of course he has no such propriety license over our democracy. No one person can lay a claim to such a right but the people as a whole through their vote. But again what is wrong in not liking our democracy? What law forces us to like our democracy? No one can even be forced to like our Constitution, our Supreme Law, although we all must abide by it, to the extent and to that extant only, that it remains our Spreme Law but not cast in stone. Some even even have the right to grudgingly and reluctantly abide by it. But abide by it they must.. Yes, there is undoubtedly a good reason for some among us not to like our democracy, if Thabo Mbeki did not know. The reason for not liking our democracy was provided by the author Christine Qunta. In her book Why We Are Not A Nation, in an eponymous chapter, Qunta wrote that: “...the ushering in of the democratic era in 1994 was not a victory for the forces of liberation. It was a settlement filled with compromises that essentially left the architecture of colonialism intact.” (Seriti sa Sechaba Publishers, 2016, page 16). In a word, what Qunta was correctly saying was that European settler colonialism which blighted South Africa and her people for close to 400 years lives on in the bowels of post-apartheid South Africa's democracy and constitutional order, thus permanently and very visibly disfiguring and poisoning them. This is neither trite nor trifling. And no one in good conscience can gainsay this painful reality pointed to by Qunta and many others like the author Moss Mashamaite, which reality still defines the lives of millions of poor black South Africans, in spite of the political gains of our political freedom and democracy. How do we reconcile the blatant fact mentioned by Professor Adekeye Adebajo in his Project Syndicate paper of 3 June 2024 that “after 350 years of colonialism and apartheid, South Africa remains the world's most unequal society, with 10% of the population controlling 80.6% of financial assets”?How do we? What will GNU led by the ANC of Ramaphosa and the DA of Vrau Helen Zille do about this shameful South African reality? Zilch of course. Dololo, as we say in South Africa. And we know it is the white European race in our country which overwhelmingly dominates that tiny 10% of our population controlling 80.6% of the country's financial assets and much more, thirty years after the ANC's rule while the overwhelming majority of black people live in absolute and abject poverty. Where is justice and equity in such a racially skewed ownership patterns of the country's strategic resources, financial assets and national income distribution? These statistics represent a severe rebuke and condemnation of the ANC's thirty year rule. They are also the fundamental and main reason why black voters voted the pathetic and weasly ANC of Ramaphosa out of power on 29 May this year, and not the fact that president Ramaphosa signed the NHI bill into law, as misleadingly claimed by Vrau Helen Zille of the DA. When Jacob Zuma, the leader of MKP, questions why this continues to be our reality, the uber-frenetic Secretary General (SG) of the ANC of Ramaphosa Fikile Mbalula gets offended and says Zuma appeals to “extremist instincts”. (eNCA, 29 July 202). Questioning existing and growing inequality in South Africa, the world's most unequal country, reflect “extremist instincts”? Poppycock. This clearly shows that political consciousness has departed the collapsing ANC of Ramaphosa. So much for the ANC of Ramaphosa, Fikile Mbalula, Gwede Mantashe, Siphiwe “Gebuza” Nyanda and the notorious Chris Hani cabal. And no one in good conscience can gainsay this painful reality pointed to by Qunta and many others like Moss Mashamaite which defines democratic South Africa, despite the ANC having been in power during the last 30 years. Not yet Uhuru, to quote the lyrics of the South African music icon Letta Mbulu. On the other hand the new GNU co-anchor and partner of the ANC of Ramaphosa in the person of Vrau Helen Zille believes that we black South Africans should be eternally thankful that we were colonised by west Europeans and should stop complaining much about the legacy of colonialism, which she believes is great and turn ourselves into little Singaporeans. Unbelievable chicanery! Absolute GodZille codology! Is it any wonder that in a recent podcast Professor Bonang Mohale, former (titular) head of Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA), chairman of the board of white big business Bidvest conglomerate, a BEE beneficiary in his own right, a prolific public intellectual, opinion former and the Chancellor of the University of the Free State UFS) questioned why the ANC saw it fit to form GNU “with our former colonisers” instead of forming such GNU with say MKP and EFF, who “are our people”? He further bitterly bemoaned the fact that Vrau Helen Zille of the DA is “calling the shots” within GNU. In case Thabo Mbeki gets roiled by Bonang Mohale and my usage of the term “our people”, he should remember how he himself, in another of his many gigantic self-contradictions, used similar exclusionary phrases from the bottom of the deck to defend his Presidency at the height of the debilitating public controversies regarding his HIV/Aids denialism. (See Mark Gevisser's chapter on Thabo Mbeki and Aids in his biography on Thabo Mbeki, ibid, pages 288 – 308). Hopefully Mbeki, after reading this chapter in Mark Gevisser's biography of him, will immediately stop asking the rhetorical, opaque, loaded but very unhelpful question: “But who are our people”? He has already answered the question. Our people are those he claimed he was defending from the capitalist greed and the so-called “Negrophobia” of giant international pharmaceutical companies at the height of his HIV/Aids denialism. I love the way Thabo Mbeki speaks about “the progressive movement” whilst Christine Qunta speaks about “the forces of liberation”, which is a more precise and positively directional term as millions of our dirt poor and landless black South Africans still have to be liberated from their economic bondage so as to attain true and meaningful justice which must enable them to enjoy the fruits of democratic and politically free South Africa. Christine Qunta returned to this theme in her book when she further wrote: “Those who thought South Africans could seamlessly merge into a new and unified nation by instituting democratic reforms, while the physical and psychological infrastructure of colonialism was left intact, were wrong” (Ibid, page 86). And they remain wrong to this day! And to again be fair to Thabo Mbeki, his blistering critiques of the ANC leaders and governments since he was ousted from power rather unceremoniously in October 2008 are not unique to him either. The ANC as a political organisation is very unique in the entire world, especially amongst former liberation movements, in being the only one in history which seems to have some leaders and members post-Nelson Mandela who seem to enjoy bitterly criticising and excoriating it even more than its political opponents and enemies do, while strenuously and emphatically proclaiming to all and sundry, incredulously, that they love it and remain deeply committed to it and are its best cadres. Ridiculous but true. Very strange tough love indeed. Take these few examples to illustrate this point. In his latest address at UNISA on 16 March this year Thabo Mbeki basically told us that for thirteen years when the ANC was the ruling party (2009 – 2022), without him and Nelson Mandela constituting part of its leadership cohort, it degenerated and dragged the country backward with it into a holy mess. On the other hand, appearing before the Zondo Commission on State Capture president Cyril Ramaphosa informed the country and the world that the ruling ANC he leads is Corruption Accused Number One. A leader of a ruling political party accusing his own party of being a Corruption Accused Number One. Not even the amper-fascist Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged, could have conjured up such a bloated political absurdity. Ramaphosa also infamously described the nine years when former president Jacob Zuma was in power (2009 – 2018), the period when he (Ramaphosa) was Jacob Zuma's Deputy President (2014 -2018) as “nine wasted years”. Stranger than fiction? You bet. So Ramaphosa in essence admitted that for four years when he deputised Zuma, he and Zuma wasted the country's four years. Unheard of political hocus-pocus? For sure. In a 2017 BBC Hard Talk interview former ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe and now head of ANC Election Commission loudly and infamously sermonised before the whole world that “it would be good for the ANC if it was voted out”, meaning it would be good if the ANC lost power. A leader of the ANC wishing and even calling on his own party to lose power? Ultimately the wise South African voters granted Kgalema Motlanthe his bizarre wish on 29 May 2024 and he seemed stunned that voters answered his prayer, because voters wisely choose not to entangle themselves in highly destructive and unending internal ANC factional battles. Strange political posture on the part of the former ANC deputy president? Hundred percent. In the run up to the Mangaung December 2012 national conference then ANC Secretary General (SG) Gwede Mantashe was predicting the ANC's “implosion” unless intensifying legendary internal ANC factional fights were reigned in before the conference, which you might think was his first and primary duty as ANC SG. This is how the political commentator Dr Mzukisi Qobo put it in an IOL newspaper article back then titled “ANC leadership bar set too low”: “Recently the ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe painted a bleak picture of a party bursting at the seams, infested with factional battles that has become a hive of corruption, and is populated with ill-disciplined cadres. Welcome to the new vanguard of South Africa.” This astonishing picture Gwede Mantashe painted was not about any of the opposition political parties. It was a weathering criticism of his own ruling ANC. Nowadays strangely ANC leaders reserve such apocalyptic and hellish political descriptions only for their own party, the ANC. In my more than 60 years living on this planet, I have never come across anything comparable in the whole world after travelling to over 65 countries of the world. Yet despite these chilling utterances by ANC leaders about their own organisation, the ANC leadership bar crushed to rock bottom since Mzukisi Qobo wrote that piece so very many years ago, as attested to by the humiliating defeat the ANC of Ramaphosa suffered in the 2024 election. Talk is cheap. Gibberish has two legs too. This is not Glastnot. This is not Perestroika. This is not Chinese rectifications campaigns. This is not like Nikita Khruchev's ant-Stalinist campaign. This is not even Lenin's criticism and self-criticism dictum. This is political nihilism within the ANC. This is something much more sinister and almost unique to black South Africa. It is intense black self-hate which once drove the newspaper columnist Andrew Kenny to rhetorically ask the question: “Why do black people hate each other so much?” Why indeed? Of course what South Africa awaits with baited breath is for the successor to Cyril Ramaphosa to also indulge in similar nihilistic terms to level criticism at post-power Ramaphosa and the ANC of Ramaphosa. It's all par for the course of course when it comes to the ANC, like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. And of course those legendary internal ANC factional fights were never reigned in by successive ANC leaders I quoted above. They contributed so much to cost the ANC power in the 2024 elections. Additionally Gwede Mantashe further lambasted his own ANC in biblical terms, accusing it of “Sins of Incumbency.” Sadly no Jesus Christ is coming back to save the ANC from its self-inflicted wounds. The ANC as the Incumbent Sinner? (Gwede Mantashe) The ANC as Corruption Accused Number One? (Cyril Ramaphosa). The ANC as our national Lotus-Eater for nine years (2009 -218)? (Cyril Ramaphosa). The ANC as our National Dystopian for thirteen years (2009 – 2022)? (Thabo Mbeki) The ANC as a Power Usurper to be booted out? (Kgalema Motlanthe) How did these ANC leaders expect voters to trust a party they belong to which they paint in such unbelievably stark, liquidationist, rejectionist, utterly dismissive and uncompromising terms? For his part former ANC president Jacob Zuma has consistently characterised the ANC led by Cyril Ramaphosa as un-ANC, if not anti-ANC. With its leaders making statements like these, who is to say the ANC needs political opponents and enemies? By their character they shall be judged, the Bible says. In my view these negative utterances of these ANC leaders did more to ensure the ANC was voted and booted out of power than the hard work of all opposition parties combined. I mean since the time Kgalema Motlanthe became the ANC SG in 1997, each and every ANC SG has presented a blistering critique of the debilitating and cancerous internal flaws of the ANC under the SG's Organisational Report to not only the ANC conference delegates but also to the opposition parties in South Africa watching and following the ANC national conference proceedings on TV and to the whole world, taking a cue from Nelson Mandela's blistering ANC President's Political Report to the 1997 ANC Mahikeng national conference which set the bar for such critiques of the ANC by its own leaders. But has any elected ANC national leadership cohort done anything since 1997 to be on top of those problems that bedevilled the ANC over the last twenty five years and more which they identified? Of course not. Those identified problems have festered and exponentially compounded and even gave rise to new and much more complex ones under each such national ANC leadership cohort since 1997. This is a monumental failure of national ANC leadership and the betrayal of trust the people of South Africa placed in the ANC between 1994 to this year, which trust has now completely evaporated. Karl Marx once sagely remarked that the task of philosophers is not just to interpret the world, but to change it. ANC leaders have since 1994 proven to be poor philosophers in their own ANC house, which once was the best and most powerful political instrument black South Africans ever had to transform the legacies of slave ownership, colonialism, apartheid, racism and continuing white minority hegemony over our economy.. So what precisely is the point of engaging in constructive criticism if you cannot come up constructive solutions to the problems you identify over a period of twenty five years or more? The only thing possibly worse than these astonishing utterances by ANC leaders have been the personal insults these leaders have hurled and continue to hurl at one another in public and under the glare of national and international media. Thabo Mbeki takes the cake in this regard by describing his former Deputy President Jacob Zuma as “a wolf in a sheep's skin” and “a counter-revolutionary” for forming Umkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP). This is rich coming from Thabo Mbeki because at the 1997 Mahikeng ANC national conference it was the self-same Thabo Mbeki who moved mountains to ensure that Jacob Zuma was elected his ANC deputy, including by Mbeki publicly shaming would-be Zuma challenger Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to abort her campaign to deputise him and to stand down so as not to be nominated from the conference floor to challenge Jacob Zuma. Arguably no one did more to propel Jacob Zuma into the presidency that Thabo Mbeki himself. Also Mbeki biographer Mark Gevisser called post-power Thabo Mbeki “the backroom eminence of the Congress of the People (COPE), a new political party founded in November 2008 by his close supporters.” (Ibid, page 4). If Gevisser's description of Mbeki holds, does it means Thabo Mbeki, an ANC member and leader, played this “backroom” role for a party (COPE) which was formed to oppose the ANC and to challenge the ANC in the 2009 national elections, meaning fifteen years before Jacob Zuma formed MKP to oppose the ANC and to challenge it in the 2024 national elections? COPE indeed went on to take a significant chunk of voter support away from the ANC and gained 9% of voter support during the 2009 national elections, just as MKP went on to defenestrate the ANC from national power. Did Zuma learn a trick or two from the “backroom eminence” of COPE on how to electorally and politically hurt the ANC? You be the judge. Did the alleged role of Thabo Mbeki as “the backroom eminence of COPE” similarly make him “a wolf in a sheep's skin” and “a counter-revolutionary”? A valid hypothesis? Who knows? Let me leave only few prompts for your guesswork. For his post-Polokwane ANC conference Jacob Zuma was reported by news24 on 24 September 2008 as comparing the terribly lame-duck ANC government of former president Thabo Mbeki as a “dead snake.” A newly elected ANC president referring to his ANC government led by his fellow Comrade and leader as a “dead snake”? You can't make this stuff up even in your wildest nightmares. Kgalema Motlanthe went on local TV before the 2024 elections to blast Jacob Zuma for referring to the ANC under Cyril Ramaphosa as “the ANC of Cyril Ramaphosa”, forgetting what Thabo Mbeki biographer Gevisser revealed in his book Thabo Mbeki: A Dream Deferred that Thabo Mbeki himself had in exile referred to the SACP under Joe Slovo, with whom he had ideological differences, as “the 'party of Joe Slovo'” which he believed was different from “the party of Moses Kotane'” which Mbeki allegedly believed “was dead” because Slovo was leading the SACP. (Ibid, page 189). Such colourful but hurtful continual usage of wild and often baseless political misnomers meant to politically insult are a common political currency throughout the history of the ANC and not confined only to Jacob Zuma, if Motlanthe had bothered to check.. In 2021 the Nelson Mandela Foundation even went as far as indirectly accusing Jacob Zuma of being what it approvingly quoted as “...the ways in which Mr. Zuma mobilises both struggle-era identities and ethnic identities for his own ends”, meaning falling just short of openly accusing Jacob Zuma of being a Zulu tribalist. In 2014 Thabo Mbeki had declared to UNISA's College of Human Science that: “One of the things that has worried me is that the ANC is 102 years old this year and, at its formation, it said [that] part of its task was to bury the demon of tribalism. But in South Africa, 102 years later, tribalism is raising its head again.” (Mail & Guardian, 16 January 2014). On the other hand, Thabo Mbeki biographer Mark Gevisser wrote the following about Thabo Mbeki mobilising his Xhosa heritage and ethnicity for political gain in a political factional fight against Jacob Zuma. Wrote Gevisser, quoting Mbeki: “'I don't need to build a constituency,' he said, rather arrogantly, in a 1995 interview.’I was born in that area [the Eastern Cape] but I took a decision that I am not going [back] there'...This would change after 2005 when Mbeki would activate his Xhosa heritage or allow it to be activated for him --- to establish an Eastern Cape beachhead against the challenge of Jacob Zuma.” (Ibid, page 235). To paraphrase former ANC Women's League president Bathabile Dlamini, when it comes to the issue of tribalism or ethno-chauvinist politics, it looks like many ANC leaders have skeletons galore in some dark cupboard somewhere. Are there Mr. and Madam Clean among ANC leaders when it comes to ethnic mobilisation for a political gain? Are there those who can boldly claim to be holier-than-thou on tribalism? Although many lambaste Jacob Zuma for identifying himself with is world-renowned and much admired Zulu culture and heritage, which is his democratic and constitutional right, when other leaders do the same regarding their culture heritage, it is seen as acceptable and not to be scolded or frowned upon. So how come Jacob Zuma has been made the poster boy of tribal politics in democratic South Africa? How did this come about? What is beyond any doubt is that the ANC itself led the charge to frame one of its former leaders as pandering to a specific ethnic group of our country, the Zulu-speakers. Dr Judy Dlamini in her book Equal But Different; Overcoming Race, Gender and Class, Women Leaders' Life Stories ( (Sifiso Publishers, 2016) quotes Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa (I am sure not a woman) regarding his immersion in his Venda culture and heritage earlier in his life as a young Venda man who grew up in Soweto: “I decided to leave Soweto and go to school in Venda. I am Venda-speaking. Having grown up in Soweto, I felt a need to go back to my roots, to go and see where my parents, grandparents and my forebears had been born and had lived, in a way there was a quest in me to immerse myself in my people's culture, traditions and way of life.” (Page 144). If it was Jacob Zuma who had uttered the same words regarding his immersion in his Zulu culture, traditions and way of life, there would have been a national uproar and he would have been accused of being “a wolf in a sheep's skin”, “mobilising his ethnic identities”, being a “counter-revolutionary”, being a Zulu tribalist and of all sorts of insults and nasty things. Even when Jacob Zuma innocently declares that he is Zulu-speaking, some people choose to get terrified and fell uncomfortable in their skins. The good question is: If Jacob Zuma is a Zulu tribalist, how come in the 2024 elections he and his MKP performed far better (almost three times better) in Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) than the the historically Zulu tribalist IFP which for decades promoted itself as the foremost defender of Zulu culture, traditions, heritage and way of life or as a Zulu cultural movement? If the Zulu people of KZN vote along tribal lines, why didn't they give MKP and IFP equal share of their provincial vote since both are led by Zulu speakers (Zuma and Hlabisa)? If anything the historically Zulu tribalist IFP was almost decimated by the Zulu voters of KZN in favour of Jacob Zuma's MKP. Clearly even the historically Zulu tribalist IFP's supporters and voters in huge numbers abandoned it in KZN and voted for MKP led by Jacob Zuma in the 29 May election. What differentiated Zuma's MKP from Hlabisa's IFP in the eyes of Zulu voters in KZN, Mpumalanga and Gauteng? Tribalism and ethnicity do not suffice to explain the spectacular performance of Jacob Zuma-led MKP in the 2024 election unless we willingly choose to fall hopelessly into and propagate colonial, anthropological, so-called “negrophobic”and apartheid tropes about Zulu people. In any case if Jacob Zuma is a tribalist, how did he appoint and for four solid years survive working with a Venda, namely Cyril Ramaphosa, as his Deputy President? Or for that matter with Kgalema Motlanthe, a Sotho as his Deputy President? Or to work with Thabo Mbeki, a Xhosa, as his Deputy President. This all does not make because such a ruse can reduce any of us into a tribalist, depending or likes or dislikes. It is not politically sustainable. This canard that Jacob Zuma is a Zulu tribalist mobilising Zulu ethnic identities is a failure of imagination on the part of the ANC of Ramaphosa. It is a clever but shallow way to make the deep problems of the ANC of Ramaphosa to look like Zuma problems. Nothing could be further from the truth. After it’s unbanning in 1990 the ANC deployed Jacob Zuma to pacify KZN. After the 1994 election it deployed him as a Member of the Executive Committee (MEC) of KZN responsible for the Economic portfolio. After electing him ANC deputy president in 1997, the ANC consciously albeit in a Machiavellian way used Zuma's connection to KZN to amass a huge vote bank in KZN to install itself as a provincial government there, displacing the IFP. After Thabo Mbeki fired Jacob Zuma as his deputy, it was ANC KZN structures which chose to use Zuma to continue to strengthen its grip on power in KZN. But the game changer came when Jacob Zuma was charged with corruption. From that moment for close to twenty years huge numbers of KZN people have assembled in solidarity before his appearances in court to give Zuma political succour as one of their own being perceived as persecuted. No other province in our country experienced this kind of continual televised political mobilisation around a national leader for close to twenty years. None. And not surprisingly ANC people from Gauteng and Mpumalanga would often travel to these court appearances by Jacob Zuma in Durban or Pietermaritzburg in KZN. No other national leader worked huge crowds for close to twenty years the way Jacob Zuma did at these rallies. Certainly not Thabo Mbeki. In the end any consistent, long lasting and good political mobilisation on the ground for a period of close to two decades is bound to eventually pay off handsomely politically and electorally. Is it any wonder that Jacob Zuma has this huge following in KZN, Gauteng and Mpumalanga which he and MKP harvested during the 2024 election? If you are ANC and choose to be fatalist, of course you will reduce Jacob Zuma's support to Zulu identity politics, forgetting that in the low-intensity and very vicious civil war in KZN between 1990 – 1994, which was fuelled by the apartheid Third Force, Jacob Zuma was among ANC leaders who led the KZN ANC in its bloody confrontation with other Zulus belonging to the historically Zulu tribalist IFP. To be blunt, Zulus were butchering their fellow Zulus belonging either to the ANC or IFP and even innocent Zulus caught as bystanders in the political crossfire. How then do you square that thousands of Zulus in KZN died and were killed in those confrontations which pitted Zulus against Zulus in KZN during the time when Jacob Zuma was ANC leader in KZN? It does not make sense, this absurd political libel that Jacob Zuma is tribalist. The real danger is that such an accusation is self-defeating because we hardly can change much how people construct and perceive their identities. It is why Thabo Mbeki himself conceded that after putting non-tribalism as is core more than 102 years ago, tribalism is again rearing its ugly head in democratic South Africa which was led by the self-same ANC, just as white racism is. As Josef Stalin said, when things are good, we pull together, but when things fall apart, each to his own small identity. ANC leaders, members, thinkers and public intellectuals should know this better than most, given the life of another major ANC leader of the past who was also a Zulu-speaker, namely Josiah Tsangana Gumede. Disclosing that he was born into a Zulu family and grew up in the Eastern Cape where he became an integral part of that province's Christian educated black elite, Josiah Gumede biographer Raymond van Diemel saluted Gumede for successfully blending his strong loyalty to his Zulu culture with an equally firm determination to promote the wider unity among South Africa's black national groups or tribes, just as Jacob Zuma did from the moment he joined the ANC to this day. (See Raymond van Diemel, In Search of “Freedom, Fair Play and Justice”: Josiah Tsangana Gumede, 1867 – 1947, A Biography, 2001). Progressively harnessed for a greater national cause, these two identities are not mutually exclusive but can actually be mutually reinforcing. And this is what Jacob Zuma has sought to do throughout the many decades of his membership to the ANC. And that does not make him a tribalist no more than it made Josiah Gumede, whose biographer described as the pioneer of the very close alliance between the ANC and first the CPSA (and later the SACP), just as Jacob Zuma can rightly be considered as the pioneer of South Africa's membership to BRICS. It bears mentioning that the current GNU led by the ANC of Ramaphosa and the DA of Vrau Helen Zille include parties which clearly mobilise along ethnic or racial lines such as the unpatriotic Patriotic Alliance which yesterday Northern Cape ANC leader Zamani Saul openly accused on an SABC interview with Samkelo Maseko of pandering “to Coloured identity politics”. Also in GNU is the amper-fascist Freedom Front Plus which is fighting for a Volkstaat for white Afrikaaners. Not to mentioned the historically Zulu tribalist IFP better known as a Zulu cultural movement under apartheid. If the anti-tribalist position of the ANC of Ramaphosa was principled and not politically expedient, it would not have invited these political parties mobilising along ethnic lines to join GNU. And by the way, whilst at it, what then again would be the basis of the ANC's alliance with the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALEASA) or with the Khoisan Leadership Council if ethnic and or tribal identities are such a taboo to it? To choose to make Jacob Zuma the only ethnic problem facing the ANC and South Africa is to choose to ignore and not resolve the real problems out there holding our nation back. It is an easy cop out. It's a Kool Aid drink. It can't be right that tribalism riles only when perceived by some to be practised by Jacob Zuma. That would not be a principled stance but phoney political expediency driven by unending bitterness some continue to harbour towards Jacob Zuma as a result of the spectacular outcome of the ANC leadership contest at the 2007 Polokwane ANC national conference, which was no less spectacular than the outcome of the 2024 election from which Jacob Zuma once again emerged as the biggest winner of them all. Some people must just learn to let go of their ongoing and crippling personal bitterness towards Jacob Zuma..Read also:.Joshua Meservey in Washington: What SA must do urgently to transform the USA from Foe to FriendSome Uber Truths from Moeletsi Mbeki on SA/US trade; Business and the GNU; roots of destructive BEEHelen Zille urges “boxing smart with cool heads” on Trump Tariffs; creaking GNU; Business pressure.*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi: Founder & Executive Chairman Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA) Cedia African Times Editor-in-Chief isaacmogotsi@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.comhttps://centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com/

Isaac Mogotsi Pt 3: ANC's fall, GNU's betrayal, and Zuma's rise to power

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