South Africa? Some of the early symptoms of the ideology of liberationism are certainly apparent. The ANC has been able to draw upon a genuine and overwhelming popularity in its four general election victories to date, and has had no need for recourse to the violent intimidation and electoral chicanery of Zanu PF. However, an authoritarian mindset or mode of organisation is still visible in various forms and it has tended to cut across the post-2005 polarisation within the ANC between its Mbeki and Zuma camps. The Mbeki government – and indeed Mbeki as an individual – had a distinctly authoritarian flavour in its attitude to criticism from beyond and from within its own ranks.
The stigmatising of legitimate dissent as ‘racist’ became a routine response of the Mbeki administration to opposition criticism. While this intolerance was most pronounced under Mbeki, it is not an exclusively Mbeki phenomenon. Jacob Zuma is not free of this contagion. As deputy president he denounced criticism of the government in the media as ‘unpatriotic’ (Business Day, 8 February 2011) and stated that the ANC would rule ‘until Jesus comes again’ (Business Day, 21 June 2009), a clear manifestation of the ‘divine right’ mindset. He also once described the ANC as more important than the constitution (Politicsweb, 2008). In February 2011, while campaigning for the municipal elections, Zuma told an audience that an ANC membership card provided an automatic pass to heaven and that ‘when Jesus fetches us we will find (those in the beyond) wearing black, green, and gold; the holy ones belong to the ANC’, before adding that to desert the organisation would mean that ‘the ancestors of this land … Hintsa, Ngqika and Shaka will all turn their backs on you’ (Times Live, 2011).
Another factor reminiscent of the Zimbabwean situation is the growing influence in the Zuma era of the liberation war veterans’ associations. This has seen the ANC, like other liberation movements, tending to play ‘the struggle’ as its trump card in its conflicts with the opposition and the media and it allows the ANC to demonise (and delegitimise) its opponents as seeking a ‘return to the past’ or for opposing ‘transformation’ and the ‘new South Africa’ per se when they merely oppose ANC policies and the ANC’s model of transformation. The Congress of the People (Cope) party, which broke from the ANC in December 2008 in protest at the Zuma ascendancy and Mbeki’s removal, threatened to pose a challenge to this established means of engaging opposition parties because its own leadership had impeccable liberation credentials, and its 7.42 per cent of the vote in the April 2009 election seemed to provide a solid bridgehead from which it might make further electoral advances. However, the post-election period has witnessed the squandering of this historic opportunity as factionalism and leadership disputes have sent Cope into probable terminal disarray.
In the ANC’s polemical spats with Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) which now governs the Western Cape, there have been ugly accusations of racism and the gender card is played to grotesque effect. On 1 May 2009, ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema (Mail and Guardian, 1 May 2009) referred to Zille as ‘a racist little girl’ – a sentiment which perfectly captures the unity of the two although some elements in the ANC have gone even further in levelling the most poisonous sexist abuse at Zille.
To certain senior ANC figures the ANC is not ‘just another party’ in a pluralist setting. Pluralism, by definition, requires an unconditional acceptance that other parties have the right to organise and to compete with the dominant party irrespective of arguments over the historical record. Currently an uneasy tension prevails between the liberal-democratic values embodied in the 1996 constitution and the militant and frequently militaristic liberationist rhetoric emanating from sections of the ruling party. That rhetoric is usually distinguished by its intolerance of dissenting voices and an impatience with the basic ingredients of liberal and popular democracy such as free speech, a separation of powers and the sovereignty, not of the dominant political party, but of the constitution. Julius Malema’s infamous statement that he would ‘kill for Zuma’ was repeated and amplified by the Cosatu general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi (2008) (who later regretted making the statement). In May 2009, Umkhonto we Sizwe (the former armed wing of the ANC) veterans declared that they would make the opposition-controlled Western Cape ‘ungovernable’. With regard to the judiciary, the partisan meddling, interference and threats evident from senior ANC figures during the long Mbeki-Zuma conflict (whether from those seeking to bring Zuma to trial on charges of corruption or those campaigning to have the charges dropped) suggested that some in the party did not view the independence of the judiciary as a bedrock principle, but saw it more instrumentally and opportunistically as a temporary expedient to be adhered to (or not) as the occasion and political convenience demanded. The 2008 denunciation by the ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, of the Constitutional Court – itself composed of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – is instructive in this regard (Matthews, 2008). One of the defining struggles of South African politics over the next decade will be between the reality of one-party dominance, the liberationist ethos sustaining it (and the morbid symptoms to which it will give rise) and the strength and resilience of the country’s liberal democratic infrastructure and the capacity of constitutional values, not merely to survive, but to flourish in a political environment shaped by the hegemony of a single party.
In one significant respect the ANC has emulated its apartheid-era predecessor. In the aftermath of the 1948 election, the National Party populated the higher echelons of the state with its own loyalists. The ANC, through its policy of ‘cadre deployment’, has followed suit. Not only are key institutions like the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the South African National Defence Force, the Reserve Bank, and South African Police Services presided over by reliable (though not always competent) ANC figures, but the leaks from the intelligence services to make the prosecution of Zuma impossible also shows an alarming ascendancy of party over state. Moreover, as was
the case under Mbeki, loyalty to Zuma personally has become the litmus test for senior state appointments. Zuma’s appointment of Menzi Simelane as head of the National Directorate of Public Prosecutions, Moe Shaik as head of the Secret Service, and Bheki Cele as National Police Commissioner placed close comrades in strategically important state positions.
Supporters of Zuma suggest in his defence that he has repudiated the authoritarianism of Thabo Mbeki. We are more sceptical, given inter alia his pronouncements on the party’s electoral immovability and its imagined divine endorsement which suggest, to us, that he too embraces the notion of ANC exceptionalism – and it is that exceptionalist culture which provides the setting in which authoritarian attitudes may thrive.
There can be little doubt that levels of state corruption are rising in the Zuma era. The ANC’s ally in the Tripartite Alliance, and therefore a more difficult voice for the leadership to dismiss, Cosatu, argues that the business interests of the South African government pose a real threat to democracy and that if the ruling party does not take a tough stance on this ‘We will be en route to Zimbabwe and other failed revolutions elsewhere in the world’ (Mail & Guardian, 17 April 2010). In June 2010, Cosatu’s warnings of the emergence of a crony state were amplified more starkly by its general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, previously a staunch Zuma ally, when he stated that South Africa was ‘heading rapidly in the direction of a full-blown predator state in which a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas increasingly controls the state as a vehicle for accumulation’ (The Economist, 4 September 2010). The disbanding of the Scorpions – a unit set up in 1999 specifically to expose corruption and which incurred the ANC’s wrath by its willingness to scrutinise the behaviour of the very highest officials in the land, including Zuma himself – was troubling in this respect. It should also be noted that, in contrast to his later rhetoric, Vavi strongly supported Zuma’s decision on the Scorpions.
Writing in Business Day (11 February 2011), Moeletsi Mbeki – former President Thabo Mbeki’s brother – argued that the post-apartheid state relates to business interests in a corrupt fashion and the easy movement between the ANC and the business world triggered by black economic empowerment (BEE) is a particular concern. In a similar vein, Rapule Tabane (Mail & Guardian, 4 June 2010) commented that ‘when competent, honest business people have no hope of securing business