Sunday Times online (2/2/2008) — 02/05/2008
TO THE BRINK: STATE OF DEMOCRACY IN S.A.
Xolela Mangcu
Less than a decade for the ANC to betray Mandela's promise

How time flies! It seems like only yesterday that former President Nelson Mandela stood at attention, ready to be sworn in as the first President of a democratic South Africa . Almost every leading statesman and woman was here to witness the event for themselves. All over the world, people were glued to their television screens in virtual communion with South Africa as we celebrated one of the greatest political moments of the 20th century - the birth of a new country under the leadership of the most loved political leader in the world. At academic conferences and seminars, at dinner parties, at musical and cultural events, the mere mention of South Africa captured people’s interest. The conversations would turn on the miracle unfolding in SA. Even though I knew that our achievement was not a miracle, I enjoyed the voyeurism of it all. Mandela governed with the assistance of FW de Klerk and the younger, princely Thabo Mbeki. Mandela had wanted Cyril Ramaphosa to succeed him as president, but Mbeki had been groomed from exile for this moment. Mbeki was to be to Mandela what Nehru had been to Gandhi or what Jefferson had been to Washington : a worthy successor - or so we thought. Then, with remarkable rapidity, things began to take a turn for the worse. It took the African National Congress less than a decade to betray Mandela’s promise.
 
A shaming catalogue of misgovernment
Fourteen years ago I never would have predicted that a country that was the toast of the free world would become the butt of jokes over its leadership’s refusal to acknowledge that HIV/Aids was killing its population at unprecedented levels. Back in 1994 I never would have imagined that we would provide cover for a brutal dictator, Robert Mugabe, under the guise of black nationalism. I would have laughed anyone out of the room if they had dared to suggest that some of our most senior political leaders would be carried shoulder high by their supporters to prison to serve time for corruption. [Dr Mangcu refers here to the voyage to and the voyage from prison of Tony Yengeni, former ANC MP, Chief Whip in Parliament and before that the ANC’s ranking head of the parliamentary Standing Committee for Defence at the time of the corrupt arms deal of 1998/99. Yengeni was convicted of corruption and fraud, served less than five months of a four-year sentence and was elected to the ANC National Executive Committee last December as a leading supporter of ANC president Jacob Zuma. He was then appointed to the ANC’s National Working Committee, which supervises parliamentary business. – Ed]. The most surreal incident would be the President’s suspension of the National Director of Public Prosecutions for issuing a warrant of arrest for the National Police Commissioner [Jackie Selebi], who is suspected of ties to the South African criminal underworld.
 
The irresistible horror of quick decay
The last thing I would have believed was that, just over a decade after our freedom, the ANC would be split down the middle because of what Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya calls 'that darn arms deal', the deal that poisoned our souls and turned our heroes into grubby mortals. It was the arms deal that made corruption okay, and made good liberation fighters realise just how easy it is to cheat their people. This all happened so quickly that the African writer Ayi Kwei Armah could have been describing Mbeki's SA in this passage: 'How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope, to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of betrayal and deceit. There is something of an irresistible horror in such quick decay.'
 
What kind of a leader would Zuma make?
The irony of ironies is that the person most publicly identified with the arms deal has been the one to gain the most politically because of a strong anti-Mbeki sentiment in the ANC, the prevailing view being that Mbeki uses state power to persecute his political enemies. That at least has been part of Jacob Zuma’s political mobilisation for the presidency of the ANC. In one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history, Zuma unseated Mbeki from the presidency at the much anticipated ANC leadership conference in Polokwane in December 2007. Given all of his travails, it will take some doing for Zuma to be seen with an untainted eye. And yet the reality of the situation is that he has been elected by the majority of the members of his party. The most important question would be what kind of a leader would he then make?
 
The ANC to rule 'until the Second Coming of Jesus'
I once asked an ANC and SA Communist Party veteran to describe Zuma's leadership style for me. 'He is Mandela-esque in a feudalistic kind of way,' he explained. Like a chief in a village, Zuma likes to have many people and many different voices around him. The ANC and the Tripartite Alliance are constituent parts of his village. He reached out to the other members of the Tripartite Alliance, even as they came under heavy attack from the ANC leadership. However, the idea that he is Mandela-esque in a feudalistic kind of way also means he is a conservative traditionalist in his social views about women and homosexuals. And for him there is no greater earthly authority than the ANC, which he joined when he was only 17 years old. The organisation is such an important part of his outlook that he often proclaims that the party will rule until the Second Coming of Jesus. He has an unquestioning reverence for the ANC that one usually sees only in religious groups. By his reckoning, those who criticise the ANC do so because they do not understand the ANC, and in fact can never understand the ANC unless they join it.
 
How Zuma could secure a place in history
The question is whether he can be persuaded to see things differently from his semi-religious, ideological certitudes. This is important if he is going to avoid the gargantuan mistakes of his predecessor. But be NOT afraid for even his most feudalistic instincts would soon run into public challenges and demonstrations by women's groups; court challenges by gay and lesbian groups; a Parliament that consists of people who never wanted him in the first place; and a media that would be watching him every step of the way. But there is also another way in which Zuma could exercise his influence and in the process secure a place for himself in history. He could do this by voluntarily stepping aside for someone else to take over as state president while he retains the role of party president. He could even step down from the party presidency and become an elder statesman. That would require a special congress to elect a new president and that might have the added benefit of aligning the election of the ANC presidency and the state presidency.
 
Sexwale a 'voice of openness and tolerance' in Zuma-led ANC
Depending on how long the corruption trial takes, Zuma could use his role as party president to prepare for a smooth transition to a new kind of leadership in the ANC. It has been reported that Zuma's Plan B, or at least the Plan B that has been announced by his supporters, is that ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe should then be elected to take Zuma's position. Motlanthe is not well known outside the ANC, but nothing has stopped lesser known figures in other parts of the continent from ascending to power. An added boost to Zuma’s party presidency is the support he has received from business tycoon and ANC leader Tokyo Sexwale. When he announced that he would be available for party presidency if he were to be nominated, Sexwale caused waves in the ANC. This was viewed as an unconventional path to leadership in the ANC. The injunction is often that leaders must wait until they are called upon by the membership - even though everyone knows there is behind-the-scenes campaigning. The businessman is likely to play a significant role as a voice for openness and tolerance of debate in a Zuma-led National Executive Committee of the ANC. He could still be the person that the ANC looks to in the future.
 
How Mbeki's leadership rubbished Mandela's legacy
But even if Sexwale does not end up being the president of the ANC, both he and Zuma have openly criticised the accumulation and abuse of power we have seen under the Mbeki presidency. Over the past few years South Africa's leaders have rubbished Mandela's legacy by their racialisation of every little policy disagreement, and ethnic mobilisation became a big part of the ANC presidential campaign. Now is the time to reinvigorate the sense of common belonging and creativity that Mandela epitomised. The question is whether or not the ANC has the common sense to recognise how far we have veered from the original promise that our newly created democracy held, and whether the organisation will have in it the wisdom and capacity to bring us back from the brink. But then again, getting back from the brink is a task for all of us. We need to reinvigorate the sense of common belonging and creativity that ushered in the new SA.
 
[Note: This is an edited excerpt from Xolela Mangcu’s new book To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008). Dr Mangcu is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation and a visiting scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He writes regularly for Business Day, The Weekender and the Sunday Times.].