Party like it’s 1994

• Last Updated: May 01. 2009 8:32PM UAE / May 1. 2009 4:32PM GMT

Sasha Polakow-Suransky reports from South Africa as Jacob Zuma and the ANC ride a mighty wave of liberation nostalgia to victory in the nation’s fourth post-apartheid election.


Rumour had it that he might be coming to campus, but from the looks of the usually bustling main square there was no indication of it. August 11, 1990, was a quiet winter day in Durban and the university grounds were empty but for a few students milling about. My father led me across the square to a large lecture hall, where a small group of young men wearing bright yellow T-shirts hurried about, unloading boxes of posters from minivans.

After the requisite name-dropping, we were escorted up the stairs by a group of armed guards, perplexed by the presence of a middle-aged white man and his 11-year-old son amid a sea of black and brown faces. The auditorium was brimming with excitement as students unfurled banners and more and more yellow-clad activists streamed into the auditorium, were patted down by machine-gun-toting security officials, and took their seats. The students – Zulu and Indian – chanted liberation songs, sang the ANC’s once-banned national anthem, Nkosi Sikeleli, and bellowed “Amandla... Ngawethu” (Power... to the People) in the call and response tradition of the anti-apartheid struggle.

And there on stage sat Nelson Mandela himself, a tall imposing figure in a V-neck sweater, tie, and jacket, calmly and methodically organising his papers at a table.

Mandela had been out of prison for only six months. After receiving a hero’s welcome on a tour of world capitals in June and July, he returned to a country on the precipice of war. Clashes between adherents of the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party and ANC supporters were claiming the lives of my father’s students at the University of Durban-Westville on a daily basis.

The apartheid government – unwilling to cede power to Mandela’s ANC just yet – was propping up Inkatha as a more conservative alternative to the revolutionary minded ANC and allegedly funding a destabilising “third force” of white paramilitaries in KwaZulu-Natal.

The university – an historically Indian campus, but by then 40 per cent black – was also an ANC stronghold. A few months earlier, Mandela had urged his followers not to fight back, declaring to a packed Durban football stadium: “My message to those of you involved in this battle of brother against brother is this: take your guns, your knives, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea. Close down the death factories. End this war now!” The situation had now become so dire that Mandela and the South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo had come to address the polarised student body in a plea for calm.

Five days earlier, Mandela had signed an agreement with FW de Klerk suspending the ANC’s armed struggle against apartheid, paving the way for a negotiated settlement and a constitutional convention. The students objected vehemently to the accord; some were so incensed that they cut Mandela’s image out from their T-shirts, and they did not shy from challenging their leader. Mandela managed to dampen their anger, at least for a day. But the more daunting assignment of brokering a long-term peace with Inkatha was given to Jacob Zuma, a Zulu ANC intelligence operative just returned from exile.

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Today, 19 years later, Jacob Zuma is everywhere. His bald, bespectacled head stares out from every lamppost on the six-lane superhighway bisecting Johannesburg. With his broad, chip-toothed smile, the man known as Msholozi promises jobs, health care, and better education to the suited businessmen in their slick BMWs, the gardeners and security guards riding in the back of rickety pickups and the white suburban mothers in their SUVs. Even the signs of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), a predominantly white party led by the Cape Town mayor Helen Zille, focus on the ANC candidate, urging voters to “STOP ZUMA”.

Zuma’s most viable black opponent, a little-known Methodist minister named Mvume Dandala, is barely visible along the major thoroughfares, where Zuma smiles down from every telephone pole. Dandala is the unlikely standard-bearer for the Congress of the People (COPE), a party founded five months ago by ANC insiders aligned with former president Thabo Mbeki – the losers in a three-year power struggle for the leadership of the party that began in 2005 when Mbeki dismissed Zuma, his vice-president, over corruption allegations.

It has been 15 years since South ­Africa’s peaceful revolution brought Nelson Mandela to power. The ANC has ridden his coattails ever since, cruising to victory on the collective gratitude of the country’s majority black population. But the 2009 elections marked the first time that the ANC faced a challenge from a credible, black-led opposition party. No one expected that COPE would defeat the ANC – which has taken more than 60 per cent of the vote in every post-apartheid election – but the split in the party’s ranks threatened its hold on a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament, which had allowed it to amend the constitution if it so desired and to pass all major legislation without the input of the opposition.

The campaign challenged the ANC to move beyond the rhetoric of liberation nostalgia and defend its record in office, answer charges of corruption and convince young, upwardly mobile black voters – the so-called “buppies” – that the party doesn’t just represent their parents’ generation. The ANC may have brought political freedom to black South Africans, but it has yet to deliver on the promise
of ­economic freedom: the majority of black South Africans remain mired in poverty, living in squalid townships while a small black bourgeoisie adopts the lifestyle previously enjoyed only by ­affluent whites.

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Jacob Zuma was born in a rural ­Zululand village to a policeman and a domestic servant. His father died when he was young and his mother worked far away. Zuma herded c­attle during the day and taught himself to read at night with books he shared with local schoolchildren and by taking lessons with a local teacher. As a young man, he joined the trade union movement and soon became involved with the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). The police eventually caught up with the ANC militants and Zuma soon found himself behind bars, serving ten years with Mandela and other luminaries at South Africa’s Alcatraz – the desolate Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town. After his release in 1973, Zuma went into exile, where he commanded ANC guerrillas infiltrating South Africa from neighbouring states.

When Zuma returned home in 1990, he had barely a penny to his name and, like many former exiles, he turned to ANC sympathisers for support. As Yunis Shaik, a Johannesburg lawyer and Zuma confidant, told me over coffee shortly before the election, “He had been out of the country for 15 years, had fought on the borders of our country as a guerrilla, and he had no economic means whatsoever. He was coming into a country where you require a car, a house, you need to buy clothes, you’ve got to present yourself to an electorate… we had an obligation to receive the returning exiles and give them support.”

Zuma had three wives and 10 kids, and even after his comfortable ANC salary began to roll in after 1994, he relied on the financial largesse of Yunis Shaik’s brother Schabir. Between 1995 and 2005, Schabir, a businessman who also served as Zuma’s financial adviser, gave him roughly ZAR4 million (approximately $600,000, given fluctuations in exchange rates). When Zuma became deputy president in 1999, Schabir took advantage of his ties with Zuma to steer arms contracts to a firm that he owned and suppress any investigation of wrongdoing.

Nic Bothma / EPA, Gianluigi Guercia / AFP

In 2005, Schabir Shaik was ­sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in what South Africans know simply as “the arms deal”, an impossibly complicated web of corrupt transactions in which European ­defence firms lavished massive bribes on ANC leaders in exchange for even more massive contracts to deliver weapons for which South ­Africa had little need. Mark Gevisser, Mbeki’s biographer, has aptly called the arms deal the “poisoned well” of post-apartheid South Africa – the payments, which enriched various former heroes of the struggle and allegedly funded the ANC’s 1999 presidential campaign, reached the highest levels of government. The cover-up in turn displayed Mbeki’s worst authoritarian tendencies and revealed the ANC’s ruthless attitude toward ­dissenters within its ranks, like MP Andrew Feinstein, who was ostracised and forced to resign for daring to investigate the corruption.

Zuma was implicated in the ­charges against Schabir Shaik, and this emboldened Mbeki, eager to be rid of a potential rival, to dismiss him as deputy president in 2005. The fiery activists of the ANC Youth League took Zuma’s side immediately and demanded that Mbeki allow Zuma to remain deputy president of the ANC, if not the nation. Mbeki gave in, but refused to allow Zuma to come back to the halls of power in Pretoria.

By the end of 2007, when the ANC convened in the country town of Polokwane to elect its leader, Mbeki had lost the support of the party’s rank-and-file, and Zuma defeated him in a landslide – becoming a shoo-in for the presidency, provided prosecutors did not send him to jail.

When a judge dismissed the charges against Zuma in September 2008, ruling that political meddling by Mbeki loyalists had tainted the case, the ANC – now controlled by Zuma – forced Mbeki’s resignation. Angry Mbeki supporters, led by former defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota, “divorced” the ANC to found COPE, claiming the mantle of the liberation struggle and vowing to fight corruption and cronyism (somewhat ironically, given that they were in power during the arms deal) and promote economic growth and the rule of law. COPE offered the country’s voters a black opposition party that shared many of the ANC’s values – an alternative to the Democratic Alliance, still ­regarded by many as a “white” party despite its multiracial membership.

Zuma’s ascent to the presidency has been a foregone conclusion since Polokwane. Many white South Africans and western journalists have spent the last 18 months rehearsing their horror at his coronation, seen to represent the final, sad sign of the ANC’s moral and ethical decline. He is invariably depicted as either a rapist (though he was acquitted at trial) or a deeply corrupt politician (despite the dismissal of those charges). The misogynistic antics of his supporters during his rape trial – and his infamous claim that he “took a shower” to protect himself from Aids after what he insists was an act of consensual sex – along with the suspicious timing of a final decision to drop the ­corruption charges on the eve of the election, have not helped matters.

Zuma’s leopard-skin wearing, Zulu war-dancing, “bring me my machine gun”-singing populism is deeply unsettling to affluent whites and foreign observers, while his ties to the Communist Party and the trade unions have frightened some in South Africa’s business community. But his selfless leadership style and his desire to please multiple constituencies may ultimately bring far more stability to the country than the cold and aloof authoritarian style of Mbeki – which enabled the cover-up of a massive corruption scandal, Aids denialism and years of coddling the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.

A Zuma presidency will not, as many have suggested, destroy the Rainbow Nation. But the insular behaviour and cronyism of the ANC – along with the state’s inability to deliver basic needs like housing, electricity and water to much of the population – most certainly could. As South Africa’s democracy moves into its adolescence it will need to redefine the party at its core, move beyond the rhetoric of the struggle – ANC members still address one another as “comrade” and talk of “deploying cadres” into government jobs – and deliver on its long overdue promises by appointing qualified officials who implement policies rather than speaking and behaving like members of an underground guerrilla movement. If the ANC is serious about tackling corruption, the government will have to regulate the black hole of party financing and allow dissent in parliament, where ANC MPs still answer to party leaders rather than voters, and those who don’t toe the line are treated like as disobedient children who have embarrassed the family. The problem is not Jacob Zuma; it is the culture of the ANC.

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On a sunny April afternoon, Jacob Zuma’s motorcade – six black Mercedes sedans – rolled into the driveway at the nondescript suburban headquarters of the Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA), the country’s second-largest conglomeration of trade unions. The historically white and Afrikaner organisation is today more than 50 per cent black, and as the white members looked on awkwardly, Zuma entered to a rapturous greeting from the black unionists, who greeted him with chants of “Msholozi”, singing the old struggle songs and dancing as he entered a meeting room.

The union reps took their seats around a U-shaped table alongside Zuma, who was wearing a black and white football jersey with a large picture of Mandela on the front. He seemed tired from the campaign and his hour-long speech, in English, was for the most part lacklustre and boring. Zuma’s opponents paint him as a bumbling fool: a grown-up rural herdboy lacking a formal education. Ironically, the policies he touted at the meeting – calling for the eradication of crime, a raise for police officers, a more efficient bureaucracy (“Almost everyone in the government works very slow,” he says) – address several of the key complaints prevalent around the suburban dinner tables of white South Africa. But he was evasive about more specific questions – saying repeatedly that a questioner had raised “an issue we need to address” or that
“I don’t have details of the policy right now”.

In the run-up to the election Zuma has been compared to populist demagogues from Robert Mugabe to Hugo Chavez. But fears that he will reverse the liberalising economic reforms of Mbeki – and that Zuma and his allies will clash with the current finance minister Trevor Manuel – may be overblown. (It seems likely that Manuel, who is highly regarded in western capitals and in white business circles for maintaining macroeconomic stability, will remain in his post for now.) Hendrik du Toit, the CEO of Investec Asset Management, a prestigious South African financial services firm, believes the alarm is unnecessary. “The treasury carries on even as governmental parties depart and change,” he said.


Johnny Copelyn would agree. He has known Zuma since the 1970s, when he worked with Zuma’s brother in the textile workers ­union. “He’s got virtually no ego,” he insists, “he’s very humble, which after Mbeki is a breath of fresh air.” Copelyn is now CEO of Hosken Consolidated Investments, a holding company partially owned by the textile workers union. As a trade unionist-turned-successful businessman, he enjoys a rare perspective on both wealthy white suburbia and the upper echelons of the ANC. The idea that Zuma’s left-wing supporters are aggressively pushing a redistributive agenda and that Manuel is standing in the way, Copelyn says, is “an entirely false debate”. Due to the havoc created by the global financial crisis, there is little opportunity for grand redistributionist schemes – and as du Toit points out, the ANC was not even able to spend its entire surplus on social services when the country’s growth was booming, because the state simply lacked the capacity.

To contend that increased state intervention in the economy foreshadows the return of socialist economic thinking to the ANC is ridiculous, Copelyn says, especially as governments across the world are stepping up regulation and intervening to resuscitate their economies. Seen in this light, there is not much of an ideological clash at all; rather, it is a question of leadership style. The left dislikes Manuel, argues Copelyn, because they regard him as an intransigent policymaker in the style of Mbeki. And the wealthy whites who fear his departure, on the other hand, are simply attached to Manuel “because he says he’ll ease restrictions on South Africans taking money out of the country,” a policy that many of them appreciate because strict foreign-exchange controls have made it difficult to take their wealth offshore.

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On April 17, five days before the election, over 3,000 buses disgorged ANC supporters from across the country at Ellis Park stadium on the edge of Johannesburg’s blighted Central Business District. The party expected a crowd in the hundreds of thousands, and it was not disappointed: a sea of yellow shirts streamed into Ellis Park and another overflow stadium next door. Unable to get within a mile of the stadium, I drove uphill through the once-Jewish neighbourhood of Yeoville, which has in recent years become a hub for Congolese refugees and other African immigrants. Hand-painted signs in French grace shopfronts and young children play in the streets. Higher up on a hill a group of Zimbabwean refugees convened for services; as their white-shrouded parents pray in Shona, three children ran around on the trash-strewn hilltop, pointing sticks at one another as if they were machine guns. Perched on the edge of the hill, a few dozen men and women who didn’t make it into the stadium watch from above.

Down below, despite the divisions in its ranks, the ANC family puts on a show of unity. Nelson Mandela – wearing a T-shirt with Zuma’s face on it – and other stalwarts of the struggle flank Zuma on the stage, sending the unmistakable ­message to the masses that Zuma, warts and all, is their candidate, the man who will carry the banner of liberation forward. Only Mbeki is absent – he has hinted that he plans to
vote COPE.

Despite his massive, adoring audience, Zuma sounds less the fiery populist than the responsible international statesman. He promises to uphold the constitution, respect the independence of the judiciary, fight domestic abuse and “show the world we deserve to hold the 2010 World Cup” by building sports facilities in poor communities. Next to me on the hill, a 24-year-old house-painter named Prosper, who says he is voting for Zuma, shakes his head at the extensive litany of promises: “Politicians should promise one thing at a time, or people expect too much.”

When I attended a COPE meeting for donors and supporters a few nights later at the Hilton in the upscale suburb of Sandton, the scene could not have been more different. Pretty women dressed in elegant corporate attire greeted supporters at the doors where volunteers were distributing COPE campaign merchandise. The hotel ballroom wasn’t even filled to capacity and Mvume Dandala, the party’s presidential candidate, who was scheduled to deliver the keynote address, failed to show.

After a prayer (“Thank god for COPE for once again liberating our people”) and a few rambling speeches, the night’s sole bright spot was a presentation from the 37-year-old tycoon Andile Mazwai, who serves as the party’s “finance minister”. His lucid talk detailed the vulnerabilities of the country’s economy, criticised the ANC economic programme and assailed the process by which ANC “cadres” are “deployed” into government­ ­positions on the basis of loyalty rather than ability. But it also suggested that COPE will have a difficult time challenging the ANC so long as its base remains a narrow slice of rich, black South Africans. “How many of you know the price of a litre of milk?” Mazwai asked the audience. Silence. “Ask the woman who takes care of your kids,” he continued. The poor, Mazwai assured the Sandton buppie audience, “know about inflation”.

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In 1994, the year of South Africa’s first democratic election, the University of Pretoria scarcely had any black students; now the line of people waiting to vote, which snakes around a football pitch, contains only a few white faces – laid-back sandal-wearing kids and some middle-aged couples from down the road. Alexander Stramrood, a 19-year-old white student wearing shorts, flip-flops and a backpack, tells me that many Afrikaners on campus are voting for the Freedom Front Plus – a minuscule Afrikaner nationalist party whose posters read “Te Wit vir ’n werk?” (“Too White for a job?”), pandering to white resentment of affirmative action policies. Stramrood, who will vote for the DA instead, insists that “the ANC has had enough time to make a difference – and they didn’t”.

Straining to comprehend the persistent loyalty to the ANC among older blacks – even those who acknowledge its many failures – he turns to Hlengiwe Masika, a black classmate standing next to him, and says, “I bet your mom would agree with me”.

“She comes from the oppressed era,” Masika explains, “that’s why she votes ANC.” Masika herself – young, black, university-educated – is precisely the sort of voter to whom the ANC must appeal, but she says she will cast her vote for the DA or the Independent Democrats. She rolls her eyes at the mention of the ANC, and says, with evident exasperation, “Zuma raped a woman and then he took a shower afterwards and Mbeki was like, ‘HIV doesn’t cause AIDS’… A lot of people are dying out here and you wanna tell us to just take a shower!” She is not even considering giving her vote to COPE, which she likens to a teenager rebelling against his parents: “They come home with spikes in their hair, piercings everywhere trying to prove a point... Eventually they’re gonna go back running to mommy and mommy’s gonna just give them the sweets and its gonna go back to the way it was.”

A few spots ahead in line, another black student voices a more sympathetic line toward COPE – but not until his friends are out of earshot. “Hopefully there aren’t any
Zumas here,” he says as he pulls me aside toward a set of bleachers, leaving his pro-ANC friends in line. “I’m not telling anyone!” he exclaims. Vusi is a 22-year-old electrical engineering student, and he’s voting for COPE to obstruct the ANC’s two-thirds majority in parliament, which he says “allows them to do what they want”.

“We don’t owe them our freedom,” argues Vusi, naming various other small parties who took part in the struggle. The ANC, he says, has “become a gravy train” and “lost sight of what it is supposed to be.” Vusi doesn’t think COPE will prevail, but he is determined to help build a black opposition party. “As soon as there are other credible parties that have a substantial number of people voting for them,” says Vusi, “then you’ll have democracy, because they know if they f*** up there will be repercussions.”

Across the street, a group of self-described “card-carrying” ANC members talk derisively of the COPE insurrection. “They defected from the party... it’s a matter of them protesting,” says Constable Selebeti, a gaunt recent UP graduate wearing a Che Guevara hat. Mxolisi Ndlovu, a lawyer working for the Pretoria municipal government who bears a striking resemblance to the American rapper Ice Cube, insists that the former ANC cadres who formed COPE never criticised the party until Mbeki was deposed. “If they had won in Polokwane,” he argues, “they would not have realised the need for an opposition, for defending the constitution.”

Ndlovu refuses to believe that the ANC is surfing on its historical record. “It sells itself on the basis of its experience in government, not the liberation struggle.” Those who say the ANC is stuck in the past are “hallucinating”, he insists. But as he rattles off the number of houses the government has built and tallies the rural areas that now have electricity and running water, ANC volunteers manning a nearby campaign table shout “Amandla” and the driver of each passing car that honks its support is addressed as comrade. The ANC may have given slightly more emphasis to its record in government thanks to the pressure coming from COPE and the DA, but the reminder that “we brought you freedom” and the implication that the election is but another chapter in the struggle is never far beneath the surface.

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In the end, of course, Zuma won easily – but the opposition parties succeeded in holding the ANC to 65.9 per cent, just short of what was required for the party to retain its supermajority.

South Africans seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. As foreign observers went on the air ­proclaiming the elections free and fair, 19 million voters scratched awkwardly at the dark stains of democracy around their fingernails, marvelling that they had managed to pull off a fourth democratic election with only isolated acts of violence (which all parties immediately condemned), and a single case of ballot fraud (which was prosecuted within hours).

COPE, despite the hopes it inspired, fell flat – taking just under eight per cent of the vote, while the DA took almost 17 per cent and won control of the Western Cape. The fact remains that South Africa has not yet emerged from the era of national liberation politics. The Congress Party, which led the anti-colonial struggle in India, was not seriously challenged nationally for the first 20 years of independence and it did not lose control of the parliament until 1977. It was in the same year, three decades after the establishment of Israel, that voters there shocked the nation’s founding elite by electing the Likud opposition for the first time.

South Africa has not yet reached the stage where, as Johnny Copelyn puts it, “the previous order is so far in the background that it is no l­onger a compelling explanation for the problems people have”. Despite the ANC’s construction of nearly three million houses, the provision of cash grants to over 12 million citizens, and widespread electrification, for South Africans the wounds of apartheid are still fresh and the jobs and houses required to heal them remain a dream deferred. South Africa maintains its precarious economic balancing act – a first-world façade covering a third-world reality – building world-class stadiums for the World Cup and a rapid-transit system in greater Johannesburg, while angry, poor citizens who have not seen the promises of 1994 materialise inhabit corrugated shacks along the highway to Cape Town’s airport.

Zuma’s ability to connect with poor rural South Africans could make him a far more effective president than Mbeki, whose image as a pipe-smoking intellectual and penchant for quoting Shakespeare did not resonate with South Africa’s 40 million poor. But for a man whose path to the presidency was strewn with innumerable – and once apparently insuperable – obstacles, the hard part is yet to come. To fulfil his promises Zuma will have to transcend the model of the party as a r­evolutionary cell where loyalty is paramount and dissenters are purged. He will have to clamp down on the sort of corruption he has himself been charged with, allow the airing of dirty laundry, permit unfettered debate – and abandon, once and for all, the poetic glory of liberation for the prosaic task of governing.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky is associate editor at Foreign Affairs in New York. He is completing a book on the history of South Africa–Israel relations.