I have always thought that the key to the prodigious success of Jacques Pauw’s book, The President’s Keepers, was the magnificent cover showing Jacob Zuma throwing his head back, laughing. There was little caricaturing to it — as is well known by now, the former president was one person who did live up to his second name given to him after birth: he who laughs while hurting you.
Pauw’s revelations were not so earth-shatteringly new and the book suffered from many flaws, as pointed out by critics. But it did powerfully represent the outrage produced by that cover, of a leader laughing in our faces while he and his coterie filched the state coffers. And doing so with the eyes of the world on him; he laughed in parliament, laughed at Nkandla, laughed while Mshini-wamming outside court under the bright lights of global TV.
Neither did the failure of his grand project, to take over the state by having his sycophants and acolytes hollow it out from within, halt him. Many of these agents had their careers in crime stopped short, the Guptas fled, some committed suicide, others slunk back in ignominy, still others wasted what little they got on litigation. But Zuma, SA’s own Tsar of Stalingrad, hopped from court to court, barely wiping the sweat from his limelighted brow.
The scrutiny, acres of airtime and news cycle hogging make it all the more astounding that after all these failures, to go with his failures as an MK chief while in exile, he was the one who came up with the most foolproof state capture project yet. Earlier in October it was finalised when the MK party endorsed its constitution, practically turning Zuma into a dictator ruling by decree. That explicitly goes for administration too, which includes the party’s financial allocation by the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC).
The IEC does have checks and balances, but in SA those are always hypothetical and the requirements just too broad: parties may use allocations to get people “involved in political life”, to aid a party in “the shaping of public opinion” and to “develop the political will of the people”. The latter gains frightening overtones in a province like KwaZulu-Natal, where the will of the people is often developed at the point of an assassin’s gun.
Parties are supposed to have a special account for such funding and be able to explain, but what IEC official is going to want to prove their bravery by checking invoices in deep rural KwaZulu-Natal?
What Zuma did with the — some would say inadvertent — master stroke of setting up his own party was to create a patronage system within a patronage system. It won’t be all bad either. In an area of dire impoverishment largesse dispensed at political gatherings might often be the best meals many people get for days. It’s going to be like Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the homeland days attracting thousands to his interminable meetings with thousands more boiled eggs.
At the top of this literal food chain will be the party’s MPs and members of the provincial legislature with their million-rand-plus salaries and hefty pensions. The usual black tax will ensure some redistribution to the people, but Zuma and his minions have already shown how debilitating chaos in the party will follow hints of dissent. Divining the old man’s interpretation of developing the people’s will is going to occupy minds, ensuring much greater loyalty and fostering the Messiah complex on which dictators thrive.
Be that as it may, what interests me is the concept of “destituent power” that has been thrown around by political theorists in recent times. Related to Walter Benjamin’s idea from the 1920s of entzetsung (unseating), it is derived from French thinkers’ pouvoir constituant (constituent or constituting power). The US-German philosopher Hannah Arendt then developed her scheme of “constituent power” versus the constitution or “constituted power” in the context of the American Revolution.
Destituent power is a counterpower, and theorists extrapolate this to all sorts of nonviolent revolts in the wake of the failure of the revolution, the one big political certainty with which the world entered the new millennium. The World Social Forum and Occupy movements come to mind but don’t fit the “destituent” paradigm since their power was too weak and temporary, as demonstrated in their tendency to camp out on public squares in the fashionable tents of the time.
Perhaps the best explanation is allegorical: many papers have already been written in this context about Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby one day comes to the office, as punctual and neatly dressed as ever, but refuses to do any work. When instructed to do so, he simply says: “I would prefer not to.” So it continues day after day, and things eventually end badly for him when he gets jailed and dies from hunger because he refuses even to eat.
How this transfers to politics I felt was once hinted at by a public servant who called in during a talk radio session devoted to their enormous pay rises, which other callers feared would destroy the country. The man said people could debate and complain till they’re blue, “If we don’t get our pay rises, we’ll make up for it by working less.”
Another instance was during a gathering with diplomats and foreign correspondents at the turn of the century, where at our table a consensus developed: the ANC didn’t really want to rule, as expressed in the government’s failure to properly protect foreign emissaries. This was against international tracts, something found nowhere else in the world, and for which they happily got hefty danger payments.
As for the ANC, destituent power is intimately tied to cadre deployment. This has been in the service of the national democratic revolution, another anchorless ship drifting in the doldrums. Any cadre can be deployed anywhere in a kind of sleeper role, until they are called on to rise up in an as yet unknown scenario in the service of an unknown programme towards not very clear ends. Their brief is simply to pitch up and occupy the office. The common complaint that cadres are taking their turn to eat is quite wrong; they are taking their turn to sleep on the job.
A variation might be the well-recorded inertia of Cyril Ramaphosa and many of his colleagues, as expressed in a minister’s defence that she can’t be assessed for performance after a mere 100 days because one is only supposed to meet people and shake hands in that time.
However, the best example is the relentless onslaught, one void of ethical considerations, on the judiciary in the form of Stalingrad litigation by the likes of Zuma, Busisiwe Mkhwebane, John Hlophe and the legal storm trooper Dali Mpofu. Other manifestations might be some of the ubiquitous service delivery protests or the custom of annual student protests, when the object seems to be little more than to throw a destituent spanner in the works.
It is easy to dismiss all these instances as expressions of political lasciviousness or plain stupidity. But when this “basket of deplorables” gathers in a party such as the MK party, with its submerged war symbolism, and when Zuma could now be seen as the individual with the most direct power in the country — impervious to checks and balances in his Zulu terrain — and 15% of voters support them, we have to think through it.
While the MK party is not driven by any discernible programme and not even by any great ethno-nationalistic desire, its destituent impulses are captured in its members’ general disdain and often outright rejection of the constitution. They have no alternative, they just know that they somehow want to sabotage its workings.
The unexpectedly large support for destituent parties such as the MK party and the EFF (together about 21% of the vote) goes against voters’ larger acceptance of the ANC. Thuli Madonsela tried to argue that with the ANC vote this means the people want transformation — which one could substitute with “destituency” in another line of argument — but polls and the like have shown broad support for the government of national unity (GNU).
Those who have sought linkages with the first GNU are right, but not in the superficial kumbaya ways they are generally described. It has far more to do with processes that had led to its establishment and the distinction between constituent and constituted power.
Arendt showed how crucial these differences are. Constituent power develops after a revolution or major change of a governmental dispensation, as came at the end of apartheid, The first GNU was the result of such power, when the National Party and the ANC as the dominant partners set up the transitional executive council and the constitutional assembly after the 1994 election, which wrote the final constitution.
After all this, SA began to be governed by the constituted power or constitution, in Arendt’s nomenclature, which was manifested in the constellation of institutions and laws that make up our constitutional democracy and constrains the powers of rulers and parties.
In the American context, the constituent power after the 1776 declaration of independence could draw on a well-established tradition of constitution-making by the various member colonies of the US. Coupled with the successful transplants of British non-parliamentary democratic institutions during colonial rule, America had a markedly peaceful transition to a totally new dispensation. By contrast, in the French Revolution, which was a class convulsion, such traditions or institutions did not exist, or only weakly, and chaos and dictatorship ensued.
An underappreciated aspect of the SA revolution was that here too such a constitution-making tradition existed, and among whites and especially Afrikaners with its egalitarian — albeit exclusively so — society, the advantages of liberal institutions were well understood, even if they were often shackled by censorship and other means.
But even more importantly, black people were exposed to constitution-making in the homelands — right down to the modernisation of traditional authorities — and such key concepts as the separation of powers and a nominally independent bureaucracy and judiciary were implemented, even if the National Party central government stayed in charge through sometimes nefarious means. Many homeland governments and officials were secretly and sometimes overtly partial to the ANC and often justified their collaboration as preparing the way for an eventual ANC takeover.
When the ANC chose the constitutional path after 1990, and as members of these homeland bureaucracies moved into the cities and joined it, the knowledge and experience of their destituent power in the homelands — led by the refusals of KwaZulu and KwaNdebele to declare independence — must have acted as a brake on revolutionary stirrings among the populace.
The summum bonum of this process was the formation of the tripartite alliance, which for the first time in the history of black immigrants into SA — stretching back to the first millennium CE — united them in a single, constituent power, a momentous occasion I feel is also not yet fully appreciated.
This alliance’s weakness is that the constitution as the constituted power has turned it into a destituent formation. Its epoch-making creation occurred after the collapse of the futuristic ideology based on vulgarised Marxism, which had held its members together. The SA Communist Party (SACP) unashamedly kept piggybacking on the ANC, in a kind of copy of the double lives led by homeland bureaucrats. Cosatu’s only weapons were destituent — strikes and boycotts, often against bodies and firms now also run by their comrades, which eventually gave us the atrocity of Marikana. The ANC happily deployed incompetents and recirculated them when they were exposed, as all waited for the Messiah, even if they knew he would have no clothes on, wearing only a Gucci handbag with no ideas in it.
The national executive committee (NEC) of the ANC was, and still is to a great extent, the real government. When it decided not to censure Ramaphosa in 2023 for his Phala Phala misdemeanours, that was the end of it — what happened in parliament or the National Prosecuting Authority was irrelevant. When the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act got bogged down this year, a member of the NEC was sent to negotiate with the hotheads of the Afrikaner right instead of educational experts, so ensuring it would turn into a political arm wrestle that only the party of the majority could win.
When the ANC got hammered at the polls, the GNU was punted as a new dawn and a triumph for democracy. It could also be viewed as an expression of destituent power that the voter turnout was so low, but it is a moot point whether simple lack of interest by individuals would fit the paradigm, since there is no “project” or action behind it. But rather than a return to the politics of united action it really was a regression to the politics of constituting power, and a co-option of opposition parties into the alliance.
One of its first expressions was the instant inflation of the cabinet. A gleeful Ramaphosa, with more than a hint of Schadenfreude, said through his mouthpieces that this reconfiguration of deployment by the ANC was the fault of the electorate, who wanted co-government. Another was the demise of Cilliers Brink as Tshwane mayor, who by getting union members fired dared to tamper with the intricate patronage system, which has become so embedded in the alliance that it is running almost autonomously.
Ramaphosa’s masterstroke was that the new government was not formalised as a coalition, which might have made the government a more fruitful dialectical experiment, but the GNU. Riaan de Villiers reported on Politicsweb how a senior ANC member explained that the GNU was a victory for the party because it could now pick and choose who to elevate among all the parties. Indeed, that is how the xenophobic Gayton McKenzie rose to prominence.
Whereto from here? Of course, destituent power leads to paralysis and stasis, during which decay quickly sets in, of which we see examples everywhere. Meanwhile, its unproductive agents need to be kept in comfort by the taxpayer, which can only happen by enlarging the ranks of the powerless and creating new kinds of inequality.
A great test awaits SA during Zuma’s corruption court case. The best result could be the successful continuation of his Stalingrad strategy, dragging everything out until his death, which has to come. At least such destituent power may create the illusion of real power, and keep the old man away from destructive alternatives, all the while using up his new money.
One should caution, though, against seeing destituent power as negative only. It has the potential to prepare the way for creative results, sourced as it is in two streams of negative historical experience: the toxification or destruction of black “tribal” institutions under colonialism and modernity, and the failure of Western institutions and thought — including Marxism — during the past two centuries, the most genocidal in all of human history.
The failed student uprisings — another instance of destituent power — had one positive aspect, as a catalyst for many creative minds to chance their arm in the many fruitful debates that followed. There is no lack of creative thinking potential among the youth of SA, though this too could get bogged down in conformity to foreign ideologies.
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