The great flaw: patronage over principle
JZ’s damage to social hope far more damaging than financial squandering
FROM meetings held under trees in shack settlements to parliament, Jacob Zuma is regularly described in extraordinarily contemptuous terms, terms that would have been unimaginable in the Mandela or Mbeki years.
He has been booed in stadiums, chased out of impoverished communities and excoriated in the press.
His Presidency is regularly described as ruinous, predatory, authoritarian, kleptocratic and even, on occasion, as pestilential.
It has become increasingly common for South Africa to be described, along with countries like Mexico and Russia, as a Mafia state.
Some of the more apocalyptic language has been excessive, but it hardly is unreasonable to warn that Zuma has been taking us into a future with some distressing parallels to the bleak condition of countries like Russia and Mexico.
With the exception of the roll-out of treatment for people living with HIV and Aids, a massive social gain won by sustained organisation and struggle from within society, Zuma’s defenders cannot point to any significant achievements during his time in office. His support is grounded in patronage rather than principle.
>http://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/politics/2018/02/15/motion-no-confidence-zuma-still-table/The attempts, some of them contradictory, to build a coherent ideological base for the capture of the ANC by the predatory project organised around Zuma, have not succeeded. In this sense Zuma is not as dangerous a figure as, say, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. With no credible arguments to support their position, a position that requires us to accept farcically Orwellian postures, Zuma’s allies routinely descend into inanity, insult and deflection.
The first, of course, is the massive looting of the state by the Gupta and Zuma families, and their allies, including a set of local party barons in the provinces and cities.In this mess it is necessary to see clearly. In the elite public sphere critique has tended to centre on particular aspects of the Zuma years. The first, of course, is the massive looting of the state by the Gupta and Zuma families, and their allies, including a set of local party barons in the provinces and cities.
There has also been a sustained focus on the collapse of the integrity of state and public institutions including Eskom, the National Prosecuting Authority, the SABC, the healthcare system and the police and intelligence services. Figures like Hlaudi Motsoeneng, Bathabile Dlamini and Collen Maine, all wholly out of place in democratic politics, but necessary to the dysfunction required for looting, have also come under intense scrutiny.
In recent times Zuma’s scurrilous conduct during his rape trial, and that of many of his allies, has also come under sustained critique.
It has also been widely noted that Zuma’s Presidency has been marked by significant economic decline, and an equally significant decline in the electoral fortunes of the ANC.
But there are a number of aspects of the decline of our democracy under Zuma that have received less public attention. These include the conflation of the party and the state at the local level where the state looms very large in the lives of impoverished people. In Durban it has, for years now, been routine for party cards to have to be presented in order to qualify for state assistance of various kinds. The equally routine brutality of a police force that, along with other armed forces under the control of the state, governs impoverished people with often sadistic violence, including torture, is seldom taken as the crisis that it is.
The normalisation of murder as a tool of political contestation, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, has been given sporadic but seldom very serious or sustained attention.The normalisation of murder as a tool of political contestation, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, has been given sporadic but seldom very serious or sustained attention.
Insufficient attention has been given to the evident fact that under Zuma the ANC has failed to fix the school system or to make any headway with land reform or the housing crisis – let alone address the essence of our systemic crisis – mass racialised impoverishment.
But Zuma and his allies have not just squandered developmental possibilities, and possibilities for moving towards a more just society, by turning the state into a vehicle for private accumulation.
They have also squandered the sense, powerfully felt by millions of people in the recent past, that the winds of history were on the side of justice. There are compelling critiques of Nelson’s Mandela’s vision of a “Rainbow Nation”, and Thabo Mbeki’s vision of an “African Renaissance”, but whatever their limits, both presidents offered some sense of collective and redemptive motion into the future. Although there have been moments and points of rupture that have enabled significant new political energies, it is broadly true that Zuma and his cronies stole that sense of a collective future from us.
>http://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/politics/2018/02/15/heres-sa-needs-now-zuma-gone-section-27/Cynicism and despair became endemic and for many people when progress was possible, it came to be understood in individual terms, a matter of manoeuvering within the social crisis, sometimes ruthlessly, rather than overcoming it.
The more millenarian forms of rupture, a phenomenon that often emerges in times of collective crisis and despair, have not engendered the sustained social forces that can credibly force an alternative. Where progressive popular organisation has been built, or sustained, it has no capacity to contest for national authority.
And the fact that Zuma, in a move typical of regimes across the region, has used radical language to mask a deeply reactionary and frequently repressive project, has generated a palpable sense in some quarters that the only real option is a return to what are imagined to be properly ratified forms of authority – money, the market and technocratic forms of power.
In this situation, it is hardly surprising that Cyril Ramaphosa’s offer of a clean-up is being received with such enthusiasm. But while it is vital to stop the looting, and to restore the basic integrity of state and public institutions, Ramaphosa, not unlike Emmerson Mnangagwa to the North, offers orthodoxy, a discredited orthodoxy, rather than innovation against crisis. Ramaphosa is an oligarch, deeply entrenched in the circuits of accumulation and authority that resulted in the massacre of striking miners at Marikana in 2012.
He has offered no economic or political vision that offers a credible challenge to the orthodoxies that have enabled men like Zuma, Trump, Modi and others to rise to power.
>http://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/politics/2018/02/15/jacob-zuma-teenage-freedom-fighter-anc-strongman/There was a time when a figure like Ramaphosa, Ramaphosa as he is now, would, outside of very conservative circles, have seemed entirely inadequate to the profound challenges that we face. But Zuma and the people that cohered around him have done such profound damage to our institutions, our society and our sense of the possible that, unsurprisingly, for many Ramaphosa now seems like a salvific force.
Zuma, and the people with whom he has made his alliances at various points, including, lest we forget, David Mabuza and Ace Magashule, have appropriated and squandered something more precious than money – social hope.
Richard Pithouse is associate professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research