Has the ANC underrated Jacob Zuma, as its denominator?

Published in TimesLive of 09 January 2025

In recent history, it was unimaginable to think of a movement that has lost as much influence in as short a time as the African National Congress. Until May 2024, it was arguably the nexus of RSA political life. Yet, in months, the edifice of ANC influence has been subsumed into the GNU. The ANC has become weaker and teetering on the brink of unprecedented vulnerability in the last three decades. Its claim to fame, occasioned by its monumental policy documents that have become the DNA of RSA's constitutional and democratic order, has been bequeathed to us, the people, without it being replaced in ANC-specific terms. 

This has rendered the ANC program deficient; hence, it has been hopping from RDP to Gear to AsgiSA and, lately, the National Development Plan framework. The vortex included many other neo-false starts, such as BEE in all its iterations, Black Industrialist Programs, and others. The GNU statement of intent could become another of the RSA and ANC-endorsed programs. Unlike when the program was the attainment of the Freedom Charter objectives and principles, where the focus of the entirety of the ANC was the national liberation of South Africans, blacks in general, and Africans in particular, a post-1996 constitutional order ANC has for the past three decades been in a policy maze with little to no possibility to exit intact.

 

There are several reasons accounting for this state of affairs. Apexing these, and the focus of this rendition is how Jacob Zuma, as a person, grew to become an ANC disintegrating denominator. As a figure, whether deliberate or by default of the manufactured consent about him, he accounts for three of the costliest splinters from the ANC. The formation of COPE was the first by senior leaders of the ANC and its alliance partners. The formation of the EFF, the second by senior leaders of the ANCYL, to be specific its President and several other ANCYL NEC members. The third and inarguably most consequential was the formation of the Mkhonto we Sizwe Party led by Zuma, a former President of the ANC. These splinters have cost the ANC the absolute power to govern without a coalition.

 

When he was elected Deputy President of the ANC and appointed Deputy President of RSA by President Thabo Mbeki, he grew into the ANC's most targeted leader, through which its reputation could be rendered the most fragile. The reported activities associated with his name, concocted, proven, absolved, and by his collusion collectively had a corrosive effect on the ANC with long-term and catastrophic reputational cost to its leader of society standing. His 20... Newsmaker of the Year nomination regularised him as a symbol of the dominant narrative associated with his name: corruption and state capture, a stain that the ANC struggles to wash away. 

 

From Judge Hillary Squires's judgement in the case of Schabir Schaik, Judge Willem van der Merwe's no guilty judgement on the rape case, the state of capture report by the Thuli Madonsela-as-Public Protector report, references in the Nugent Commission report on SARS, and the Zondo Commission report, the common factor that the Zuma presidency was, makes him the lowest and arguably most fracturing denominator of the ANC. Wherever his name and the ANC's reputation were put together, the ANC came out intact on very few occasions. This has now moved into areas where its reputation as a voice of the new poor Zuma has organised and dubbed them ignored.

 

The blows that his person has been inflicting on the reputation of the ANC over time and the ethno-social capital he has garnered for the ANC have converged into an existential threat the ANC will take long to neutralise. The ethnosocial base Zuma built as his personal social and political capital has had the most significant denominating influence on the dismal 40% performance by the ANC in the 2024 elections. As his influence grows in the ANC/Zuma fraction, the resultant quotient becomes a worrying zero. His influence must be less than or equal to one and greater than zero for the ANC to grow without him as a factor.

 

The resultant ANC weakness has reopened the debate about how the RSA liberal establishment and its partners should approach the challenges posed by the Zuma factor. Some see an opportunity to address all dimensions of the threat, the entirety of the ANC and Jacob Zuma's MK Party, in one fell swoop. Others would add that precipitating the end of the long-term hegemonic hold of the National Democratic Revolution and its legitimising force; the Constitution has become altogether to the mix. 

 

With the tripartite alliance being reconfigured, the ANC entering into new breeds of political alliances, and the Zuma MK Party emerging as a strategic node for enhanced traditional leadership affirmation in RSA politics, at issue are the priorities of the liberal establishment and the unavoidable tradeoffs the depth of RSA inequality demands of the democratic order. It will ultimately be about how the Zuma denominating factor sequences the ambitious renewal of the ANC, protection of the constitutional order, the rise of a new political alternative, and the rescue of South Africa from the slide along the crisis-fragile-failed state continuum. 

 

The stakes are high. Whatever fractions RSA ends up with from a denominated ANC and its alliance partners will have significant implications for the liberal promise in the Constitution. The influence of the ANC on society, essentially earned through what it stood for, all of which define RSA today, has been shrinking commensurate with how society embraces democracy and sees the constitutional order more than the ANC as the liberator. Those who stay relevant are the ones who positioned themselves early enough as defenders of the Constitution, and those who problematise it's the reason for the woes of the poor and economically marginalised on the other. With sufficient tacit support from within the ANC rhetoric, Zuma denominates based on the latter whilst operating according to the framework of the former. This makes the ANC, if it operates alone, the most vulnerable. 

 

The more internally focused the ANC becomes, the more it adds to what the Zuma factor is focused on denominating. The most significant currency for growing the JZ factor is the growth of internal discontent. Few at the centre still have the moral authority to find fault in others, discipline-wise. As malfeasance was growing alongside the rise of the normalisation of selective justice within the party, it became less vigilant of the seeping tradition of not being afraid of internal systems designed to restore order and discipline. Few were forced to step aside, yet many still qualify, albeit untouched. The reunification of justice and fairness as what should undergird the renewal process might be the antidote to the continuation of the denomination. 

Besides the GNU, the disarray within the new MK Party-led opposition complex, the political trauma dumping rants of the left, the miscalculated triumphalism of the liberal right represented by the DA, the bottoming-up business confidence in the politics of RSA, and the general stability the GNU has created, the mooted National Dialogue is not just a strategic opportunity, but a beacon of hope for the re-emergence of a new or renewed leader of society. The ANC's National General Council, due in 2025, should be modelled to respond to this opportunity in as much as it is about plotting its return in the 2026 Municipal Elections.