Why Zuma does not matter - South Africa's elections, 2009

As South Africa goes to the polls on 22 April 2009, there is an obsessive pre-occupation with the unique personalities of Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema. Yet Polokwane was essentially a mass thrust by branch-based rank-and-file, through democratic means, to rid the ANC of an unpopular leader, perceived to be authoritarian, unresponsive to civil society, deeply flawed in policy direction around AIDS and the content of economic change. That process culminated in a much more vigorous National Executive that prioritises democratic debate and robust analysis.

Mbeki’s legacy, once the emotions dissipate, will show that he was an icon of the liberation struggle, and the driver of essential technocratic institutionalisation and modernisation. Zuma and Malema matter little. Malema is a gadfly, a devil’s advocate, void of the responsibility to govern.

Zuma is the preferred agent, based on his proven negotiations skills, and on his ability to withstand intolerable pressure, to provide the necessary analytical and leadership space to effectively address the issues below – issues that matter, and should matter, to the South African electorate.

The key electoral issue is not whether Zuma is corrupt or not (we’ll never know for sure – it is only the media that fabricated a so-called ‘generally corrupt relationship between Shaik and Zuma’, not the supposed author of this statement, the trial Judge, as he was quick to correct both the media and the not-so-very-god-like Constitutional Court; a prosecution proves nothing until there’s a conviction or acquittal).

The key issue is whether the ruling party key policy documents, approved by the very same overwhelming democratic thrust that changed the leadership, and guarded by the extensive and by no stretch of the imagination homogenous National Executive, will translate into effective leadership on the key issues that face us as a society caught-up in global duress and local opportunity.

If anyone doubts the vigorous independence of thinking within the ruling party, then how do you defend the sharply opposite viewpoints expressed – on the one hand - by the President of the country, Deputy-President of the ANC, and clearly one of the most powerful leaders over the last 15 years (Motlanthe); and – on the other hand – the head of the ANC election campaign (and self-proclaimed maker and breaker of the Mbeki Presidency, and again maker of the Zuma Presidency) and former ANC Youth League leader (Mabula), over Mabula’s scathing attack on Mbeki.

Economic Growth

Productive societies do things differently, and do that better than others. As a country, we need to embrace new products. Historically, we travel an Internationally-defined path, from Agriculture to Industry to Services. Service productivity is, today, explosively defined by growth in Information technologies, products and services. The food and resource crises necessitate that we re-define our base technologies and products. It is a path to failure to embrace the mechanistic, massively industrialized, environmentally degrading practices of Europe and America. It is also a path to failure to embrace the knowledge-defying environmentally-destructive short-term impact realities of much of the developing world.

I want to know that we will have in place a Government that can look at new and alternative agricultural and industrial processes, that studies dynamic high-impact growth economies such as China, India and Brazil (and forge active links with them), yet learns from the vigorous environmental debates in the failing economies of the western military-industrial states, and embraces the modern knowledge-expanding technologies of these same states – states caught in globally-impactful contradictions, but full of both the negative and positive.

I understand full well that we have a ruling party that made economic decisions that allowed our economy to be one of the most resilient of the G20 economies in the face of global crisis, and that is basing its stimulus response on durable infrastructure, not bailing out greed-blinded banking or auto sectors. I’m aware that we face our own overwhelming set of contradictions, contracting industries and above all else employment and social welfare time-bombs. I want to know that we can change course based on the strengths of the past 15 years. To that, the ruling party stands committed. What claim to fame has COPE or the DA?

Agricultural productivity

South Africa faces a potential loss in food productivity of up to 50% over the next 70 years, as a direct consequence of climate change.

I want to know that as we face increasing demand for irrigated agriculture and more productive output, we’re not trading that for higher salinization of soil, destruction of soil macrostructure and fertility, and erosion, leading to desertification. We need a governing party that is seriously committed to developing our natural land potential in rural areas such as Transkei, and that comprehend that mainstream agro-industry models cannot work (as a combination of topography, market access, market culture, land tenure, information & knowledge access, historical practices and emerging environmental realities), and that we need to learn from societies successfully engaging alternate models. Only the ANC currently enjoys those societal linkages and potential for networking. Our middle-class parties are simply out of their depth, and this issue is way too critical to entrust to adventurers.

Military spending

Despite the obsessive media mongering around the supposed arms scandal, this country spends much less on military expenditure as a percentage of Government expenditure than the UK, France, Australia, Argentina, Canada, Namibia or Egypt. We spend vastly less, as a percentage, than the USA, Russia or China. Such expenditure is ultimately destructive of genuinely productive and sustainable economic growth.

I want to see that our military spending helps to control conflicts that impact destructively on global stability and localised human rights (where localised populations cannot escape poverty as a direct result of such conflicts), in disaster management, and in resource protection, such as our (and our neighbours’) vulnerable coastlines.

To that effect, I believe we have a Government that strives for relative balance, relative quality of military expenditure.

Human rights

I never ever again want to see xenophobic violence rampant as we recently witnessed. I was deeply distressed by the absent reaction of our African renaissance leader (Mbeki), and I do not trust the DA or COPE leadership to put in place macro-framework policies that will minimise this potential. I am more trusting – not convinced, just more trusting – of the exile history and greater warmth and affinity (and skill in negotiations, as witnessed in central Africa and particularly KZN) displayed by Jacob Zuma; or the on-site emotional response by Winnie Mandela.

I accept the need to step carefully around Zimbabwe. We cannot – cannot – afford a social and economic implosion on our border. I take heart from the fact that strong components of the current leadership – COSATU, the SACP in particular – have been in the forefront of condemning Mugabe’s excesses. That will ensure a more balanced tempering of our vital strategic and security interests in dealing with the Zimbabwean issue.

The Dalai Lama – with a chequered history of insurrection and flight – is of very little consequence in the far more overwhelming human rights needs of fighting poverty, unemployment, and atrocious health & educational disparities. If those needs can be better met through partnership with China, so be it in assessing our self-interest to dictate that we take unpopular decisions. It is not satisfactory. Perhaps at this time we have to reconcile ourselves with a democratic system that allows for vigorous disapproval – even from a minister – but ultimate subjugation to global political considerations.

Legal and Constitutional order

The legal challenges around the Zuma case has resulted in an extremely dynamic and vigorous self-examination, by different courts, commissions, prosecutorial authorities and public institutions, including those established as part of our constitutional order. That strengthens the establishment of a democratic and constitutional state, and the evolution of a law-driven society. If you cannot see or accept that, you are merely reflecting your emotional entrapment in a preferred outcome, shaped by media trial, shaped by the class interests of the past and their enthusiastic parasitical emerging black capital collaborators. I – and most South Africans – do not care for your blinkered interpretation of justice - it looks suspiciously like the narrow group-justice so preferred before 1994.

The debate will continue, not with any semblance of relevance through the populist calls to override judicial independence and try-by-political-demand, but through the Constitutional Court addressing the conflicting Nicholson and Supreme Court judgments, and the NPA de-politicising, transforming and professionalising itself.

I will not trust a party (COPE) that selected its leadership through undemocratic means, in order to avoid internal conflict, to protect the main pillar of post-1994 democracy – our constitutional order. The ANC, by contrast, enjoyed an extraordinarily intense, if very bitter, democratic contest for leadership. COPE’s founders could not accept the verdict of that democratic contestation. Nor can the DA accept that the ANC has, for 10 years, not had the reason to use its two-thirds majority to change the constitution simply because it actually played the overwhelming lead role in establishing that constitution. COPE and the DA exhibit imbecile populism around these issues – and I am expected to embrace their infantile and convoluted latent totalitarianism.

Corruption and crime

The ANC’s Strategy and Tactics outline the base analysis that underpins policy development. I simply do not see any analysis remotely as sophisticated emerging from either the DA or COPE. That does not mean there’s not been a failure in policy. That also does not negate the reality that a party with 70% electoral support attracts corrupt opportunism. It will be a defining challenge for the incoming administration – and that is why addressing it is a core pillar of the ANC’s election manifesto.

I am not really interested in South Africans from the diaspora screaming blue murder around corruption, when they readily chirp about what a lovely country the demonstrably corrupt and reactionary Berlusconi’s Italy is. Yes, it’s white and western. Good for your sense of self-righteousness. Come and address the problem; bring solutions. In case you didn’t notice, corruption is out in the open because of the media freedoms protected by the current constitutional order. We no longer have National Party ministers using state helicopters, away from media scrutiny, for demented hunting trips in vassal territory. And crime is no longer bottled-up (through a murderous police state) in the townships, where your parents and their politicians never gave a hoot about it, as it didn’t impact on their lives.

That doesn’t mean it must be anything but smashed. It does mean that populist and inhumane calls for capital punishment and police state methodology, and reflective of the more reactionary ways of past societies globally and locally, is not going to be on the agenda. And I trust the ANC a damn lot more to guard against base instinct vulgar politics.

The rural poor

Above all else, the middle classes – insulated in their dynamic growth and very opulent lifestyles, allowed so unabatedly the past 10 years in particular – do not have the (seeming) personal need or integrity or Dutch / Scandinavian-style social contract mentality to calculate the cost and enormity of Apartheid’s legacy around issues of health, education and security. I understand that these issues represent failure in state policy. I believe that a change in leadership in a political movement clearly rooted in the rural poor is more likely to address these issues than a change to COPE or the DA’s leadership, living in gated communities with gated mind-sets. The ANC branch rank-and-file that swept Zuma into power do not live such lives.

I live – and have for 22 years now - in a township that has slowly transformed from rural peri-urban village to loxion, complete with devastating decline in crime indices, health (AIDS and TB), food security, and cultural values and attitudes of youth; added to the long-established environmental degradation, atrocious educational standards, poor infrastructure. I have witnessed some developmental delivery (atrociously implemented and maintained water systems, poorly thought-through electricity connectivity, sub-standard housing – lacking imaginative pro-active urban planning considerations). I have also witnessed a rise in (general) income levels, a greatly expanded social welfare net, and a rapid decline in fear associated with the past disrespect for basic human rights. I’ve witnessed the development of political tolerance and an eradication of the supremacist value systems that accompanied first colonialism and then apartheid.

In this area, as in the rural hinterlands of South Africa, none of us want to witness the latent-arrogance of an urban elite in dictating our spatial, economic and political development. It was completely the norm for more than a hundred years, epitomised in the stupid racism of forcing black people, by threat of fines and physical abuse, off the pavements of Mthatha, or charging them labour or money to cross expropriated ancestral land. That urban and cultural elitism has slowly crept-back, in the form of dramatically skewed economic growth, through the consequences of the Mbeki-era growth models, and declining respect for human rights and democratic debate. It no longer has an automatic white face. That does not make it less ugly.

In these areas we will, in overwhelming numbers, assume that the middle-class and urban leadership (and membership) of the DA and COPE will increase such elitism and disdain. We don’t accept the limited delivery of the past 10 years. We demand change in course. That is exactly what Polokwane concluded, and the ANC will change course, based on its own lessons learnt. We don’t want the strengths and successes of the past 15 years abandoned.

Change has a strong foundation. We have a legal and constitutional order that is globally one of the finest. We are renewing infrastructure both within the context of the World Cup and of our own development priorities, on an uninterrupted scale, basically not compromised by the global melt-down. We did not defer our economic policies to the rampant greed that destroyed western banking systems.

ANC forever?

Only in the dreams of the living dead, incapable of learning lessons, and in the populist electoral rabble-rousing of the day. Liberation movements, great parties and great agendas stultify and fail. Politics by definition attract those tending towards corrupt greed and grandiose delusional power. I see more reason to vote ANC in 2009 than to support the charlatans and faith healers of COPE and the DA. But that will quickly change if I see increasingly poor environmental and energy management; more enthusiastic aping of western dehumanisation and its coke culture; a retreat of hard-fought progressive societal advances such as gay rights or the abolition of capital punishment; or declining economic growth.

I live in a massively better society than Apartheid South Africa. We do not engage in genocidal adventures in other countries. The standards are set. That is what must determine political support, not nebulous hatred of an individual. Zuma does not matter. The policy driver and its mechanisms matter – the internal political democracy, the constitutional order, and state capacity to deliver.

It helps to have a relatively sound economic track-record in a global context.