The ANC’s Malema dilemma
ON 30 August, the leadership of the African National
Congress (ANC) was forced to call in the police to protect its
headquarters, Luthuli House, from its own members with water cannon,
tear gas and rubber bullets. Thousands of ANC Youth League members,
bussed in from across the country, tried to storm it, hurling bricks and
bottles at police and journalists.
The demonstrators burned the ANC flag and t-shirts
bearing president Jacob Zuma’s face to protest the disciplinary action
brought against Youth League president, Julius Malema, and four national
office bearers. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe lamented that the
ANC had not been so openly challenged since 20,000 impi Zulu warriors,
wielding traditional weapons, marched on its head office then in
downtown Johannesburg in 1994.
Malema is accused of sowing division by claiming
that, since the removal of previous president, Thabo Mbeki, "the best
cadre the ANC produced", the African Union has been weakened. He is
charged with bringing the ANC into disrepute by describing whites as
criminals for stealing the land from blacks and for demanding
expropriation without compensation. The trigger for the disciplinary
action was his call for regime change in Botswana, whose government he
denounced as a stooge of US imperialism for collaborating with its plans
to establish a military base there.
How things have changed! At a rally on 16 June 2008,
commemorating the Soweto uprising of 1976, Malema had declared that he
was prepared to "kill for Zuma". At that time, Malema was playing a
leading role in the campaign to drop corruption and rape charges
against Zuma, and to recall Mbeki as ANC president. Malema was
subsequently anointed by Zuma as a future leader of the country. As the
Sepedi saying goes: ‘Maabane ke maabane, lehono ke lehono’ – ‘Yesterday
was yesterday, today is today’.
Then, Malema was leading the charge to prevent Mbeki
from securing a third term as president of the country and the ANC, and
to ensure Zuma’s ascent to the presidency. Mbeki was blamed for
everything that was wrong in the ANC, the government, state institutions
and the country. Now, Malema is determined to stop Zuma winning a second
term in 2014. Malema’s erstwhile hero is now denounced as a ‘criminal’
and ‘rapist’ turned ‘traitor’, whose administration has to be toppled.
However, much as the conflict is being portrayed as
a showdown between these two personalities, the siege of Luthuli House
is far more than an attempt of the young lion to drive the older out of
the political pride. What is being determined is the future of the ANC
itself. The implosion of the ANC, unfolding in the run-up to its 2007
Polokwane conference – where Mbeki was deposed and the Congress of the
People (COPE) was fathered – has resumed under the person whose
accession to leadership was meant to reunite it. (Initially gaining 9%
of the vote in parliamentary elections, COPE quickly descended into
vicious faction fighting. Mvume Dandala, its parliamentary leader,
resigned in January 2010.)
In its economic policy, the Zuma administration is a
continuation of the Mbeki regime. But Zuma’s faction has displayed new
levels of insolence towards the working class, portraying
self-enrichment and corruption as legitimate government activity.
Co-owner with Nelson Mandela’s grandson of a mine they have allowed to
collapse, Zuma’s son, who has 20 luxury cars, left workers to starve
without pay for 18 months yet made a one-million rand donation
($135,000) to the ANC. The ANC dismissed an appeal by the Cosatu trade
union confederation to return the money or donate it to the workers.
In consolidating his faction’s grip on power, Zuma
has used state institutions in exactly the same way as Mbeki. Corruption
now pours out of every government orifice. Zuma is sitting on a damning
report by the public protector into corruption by the police
commissioner, Bheki Cele, whose predecessor was sentenced to 15 years
for corruption. Cele was aided and abetted by the minister of public
works whose first act was to reinstate a tender for new police
headquarters that her predecessor had found to be illegal.
No action has been taken against the local
government minister who flew to a prison in Switzerland to visit his
girlfriend serving a sentence for drug smuggling. The minister for state
security claims he had no knowledge of his wife’s drug smuggling for
which she has been sentenced to eight years. The first action of the new
police unit (the Hawks), created to replace the one said to have been
misused by Mbeki (the Scorpions), was to shut down an investigation into
arms-deal corruption. It was then forced to reconsider following new
evidence unearthed in Sweden, which sold Grippen aircraft to South
Africa – although Zuma has now announced a ‘commission of inquiry’ whose
outcome he will no doubt try and influence.
Zuma promised to create five million jobs, but one
million have been lost since he took power. Against this background, the
political authority of the ANC has crashed. Local government elections
were characterised by unprecedented levels of revolt, with the
occupation of party offices against the imposition of candidates by head
office.
There has been a spectacular disintegration of the
coalition of forces that swept Zuma to power. Every member of his
coalition is at war, if not with itself then with its erstwhile
partners, a struggle of all against all. Zuma was the centripetal force
that held the anti-Mbeki coalition together. Now he is the centrifugal
force pulling it apart. His coalition lies in ruins less than half-way
into his first term as president.
The most trenchant criticism of the administration
has come from Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi. He has warned that South Africa
is degenerating into a predatory state where the elite behave like
hyenas, ensuring their families are the first to feed at the state
trough.
The roots of this implosion lie in the deep social
crisis resulting from the government’s failed capitalist polices. South
Africa is now the most unequal society on earth. Standard Bank chief
executive Sim Tshabalala said: "The statistics are chilling: 65% of
South Africans live on less than R550 a month – less than a monthly
satellite TV subscription. Twelve per cent are desperately poor,
struggling to survive on R150 a month. One in five children shows signs
of malnutrition. The unemployment rate for black South Africans under 30
is over 50%. Two-thirds of 15-to-30-year-olds who want work have never
been able to find a job. The richest 10% of South Africans earn more
than the other 90% combined. Few would deny that we are sitting on a
powder keg which is ready to explode for there are plenty of struck
matches around". (Business Day, 6 July)
For the first time, sitting on top of the Sunday
Times annual rich list is a black capitalist mining magnate,
Patrice Motsepe, brother-in-law to justice minister Jeff Radebe. It
reveals: "The combined wealth of the country’s 100 richest people has
grown by 62.9% since last year – to R112.2 billion – and can now almost
cover the country’s budget deficit. Retail giant Shoprite CEO, Whitey
Basson, last year took home a pay packet worth R627.53 million".
With Zuma’s pro-poor credentials shattered, and the
alienation of the working class displayed in a rising tide of class
struggle, Malema’s radical posturing has found an echo among workers and
youth, but also with sections of the aspirant black capitalist class.
The latter are Malema’s real constituency. They are seething with
frustration over the fact that, after 17 years of democracy, black
shares on the Johannesburg stock exchange do not even exceed 10%.
Malema’s claim that he believes in socialism is a
cynical attempt to exploit the anti-capitalist sentiment of organised
workers. Through the virtual control of the Limpopo provincial
administration, he is an active player in the orgy of self-enrichment
under the Zuma administration. The aspirant black capitalists see
Malema’s ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’ programme as their quickest
road to self-enrichment. The radical posturing is intended to secure a
base among the ANC rank and file to take control of the 2012 conference
and of government two years later.
Zuma has miscalculated seriously. The use of
disciplinary action to crush Malema’s faction is an attempt to put out a
fire with petrol. If the disciplinary case collapses, it exposes Zuma as
weak and guarantees that he will be a one-term president. If Malema is
expelled, this will give him the freedom to campaign among the rank and
file as he prepares an appeal to an already divided national executive,
and probably to the conference.
In local government elections, the ANC’s vote fell
to 18% of the eligible voting population in spite of a 60%-plus victory.
Illusions in Malema and his faction will be shattered as surely as those
in Zuma. The only answer for the working class is to form a mass
workers’ party on a socialist programme to unite in struggle all those
now fighting in isolation into a mighty force for the abolition of
capitalism and for the socialist transformation of society.
Weizmann Hamilton
|