The slow political death of former president Jacob Zuma can be seen as a metaphor for the dramatic decline South Africa has suffered since he and his henchmen came to power. Like Robert Mugabe, his fellow freedom fighter in neighbouring Zimbabwe, Zuma was finding it hard to say “goodbye”, even when his African National Congress (ANC) comrades formally called on him to step down “for the sake of the country”.
Perhaps the 75-year-old Zuma’s disinclination to leave without a fight derives from the survivor mentality he developed from the hardships he endured during the apartheid era. A prisoner alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in the 1960s, he was then the subject of several assassination attempts by South African death squads after he fled into exile and became one of the ANC’s leading lights.
For someone who has spent so much of his life on the run just trying to stay alive, it is no surprise that Zuma found it difficult to move on from his exile’s mindset once he became South Africa’s president. Since coming to power, the barely literate Zuma (he was taught the basics of reading and writing on Robben Island) has shown himself totally unsuited to the demands of running a modern-day G20 economy. The result is that, as the Zuma era draws to a close, South Africa today bears little resemblance to Mandela’s vision of a rainbow nation, where South Africans of all ethnic persuasions come together for the common good.
With unemployment standing at nearly 30 per cent, and the economy facing its gravest crisis since the end of the apartheid era, the bright new dawn promised by Mandela’s 1994 election victory has been replaced by simmering resentment among both black and whites at the ANC’s chronic mismanagement.
While wealthy whites living on the Cape suffer the privations of the country’s worst drought in living memory, millions of young, educated blacks have found themselves unemployed with no prospect of employment. This disastrous state of affairs, moreover, has been allowed to develop while Zuma managed to spend more than £13 million (Dh67.24 million) of public money developing his private homestead at Nkandla. Among the improvements Zuma described as being “security upgrades” were a new swimming pool, cattle enclosure and amphitheatre.
These are dangerous times for South Africa, and what the country badly needs is political stability, in which cool and capable heads can guide it to a more stable and prosperous future.
The big question is whether Cyril Ramaphosa, the new President, has what it takes to bring the dysfunctional ANC under control and set South Africa back on the path to something approaching prosperity.
Ramaphosa certainly deserves credit for the tact he has shown in trying to extricate Zuma from high office. For all his shortcomings, Zuma is seen by most ANC supporters as a hero of the liberation movement, and therefore needs to be treated with a modicum of dignity and respect.
Ramaphosa, by contrast, does not have any exile baggage, having stayed put during the apartheid regime, where he developed a reputation as an efficient and effective organiser with the Congress of South African Trade Unions. After apartheid, he went on to make his fortune in business without attracting any of the accusations of corruption that have surrounded so many of his ANC colleagues.
Proven management track record
But while there will be many South Africans on both sides of the race divide who will be looking forward to the appointment of someone with a proven management track record as president, concerns remain as to whether Ramaphosa has the necessary support to exert his authority over the fractious ANC membership.
Apart from being the first non-exile to lead the ANC, Ramaphosa is the first leader who does not come from the dominant Zulu and Xhosa tribes, from which the movement draws most of its support. During his nine years in office, Zuma always knew he could depend on his legions of Zulu backers when the going got tough. Indeed, his latest wife has even suggested that he might summon his faithful amabutho Zulu warriors to keep him in office.
The more serious threat, though, to Ramaphosa’s prospects of bringing stability to South Africa will come from hardline radicals such as Julius Malema, the leader of the Leftist Economic Freedom Fighters, whose solution to all the nation’s ills is to intensify the persecution of the white minority. This is a formula that is hardly in keeping with Mandela’s vision of a rainbow nation, and one that, if allowed to flourish, will only serve to plunge the country into even greater chaos.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
Con Coughlin is the Daily Telegraph’s defence editor and chief foreign affairs columnist.
