A couple of years into Jacob Zuma’s presidency historian Jacob Dlamini said something to me that stuck in my mind.
“This president is a disaster for historians,” he remarked. “He runs the country on his cellphone, not through institutions. After he has come and gone, he will have left no records.”
I don’t think Dlamini or I — or anyone else, for that matter — had an inkling at the time just how allergic to record-keeping Zuma was. It is not just that he had little taste for running the country through the formal mechanisms in which minutes are kept and procedures followed. He actually wanted to destroy some of the vital machinery that made the government work. And in some spheres, this entailed disabling the capacity of the state to record what was happening in the society around it.
The most glaring example comes to us in the testimony presented to the Nugent commission on the state of the SA Revenue Service (Sars). Zuma’s henchman, Tom Moyane, wilfully set out to erode the capacities of Sars’ IT system. And in Sars’ IT system resides its entire relationship with SA’s taxpayers. To hobble its IT capacity is to render the SA tax base illegible to it.
On the one hand, it is easy to see why Zuma was so adamant to curtail the state’s capacity to record. He wanted to get away with theft on a grand scale and institutions that were no longer gathering data would be blind to what he was doing. But viewed from another vantage point, what Zuma did was stunningly unexpected and scarcely believable.
For as long as SA has had a modern state, those at its helm have been obsessed with gathering data and producing statistics. For all the different stewards who have steered SA over the generations, they have all had this in common.
In the decades after union, for instance, the state’s stewards painstakingly developed the capacity to monitor every aspect of the lives of white people. Working conditions, hours of labour, levels of nutrition, access to schooling, to decent clothes, to proper housing: it took decades of dedicated work to develop the instruments to record this basic social data. The reasons were obvious: if white civilisation was to triumph on the tip of Africa, whites would require the services of a state-of-the-art welfare state, as good as those taking shape in Australia, Canada and in Britain.
Later, the apartheid state turned this obsession with data collection to its relationship with black people. It did so out of fear. If whites were to keep control of the cities, blacks would have to be meticulously divided into a myriad categories carefully recorded by hundreds of labour bureaux and other state institutions.
And when democracy came and the ANC took charge, the obsession remained. This time, one of the reasons was a fierce defence of national sovereignty. The ANC feared that if SA went into debt and had to borrow from international agencies, it would lose control over the country it had for decades fought to govern. And so the Treasury was turned into an omniscient institution capable, in principle, of seeing into, and ultimately shaping, every state agency across the land.
This is why Zuma seems to come out of the blue. He has no precedent in SA history. His aversion to data is entirely foreign to the oldest tradition in the country’s statecraft. His style of governing was thus not just shocking and unexpected; it was also lethally dangerous; it does not take long to undo the work of generations of state-building.
The most troubling part of the story is hitting home only now that he is no longer president. While he was in charge, we might have dreamt that he was an aberration, that once he was gone his frightening view of statecraft would go with him. But we now know that not to be true.
The fightback campaign against Cyril Ramaphosa is deeper and stronger than many imagined. It is animated by the fiercest conviction. And it has adopted Zuma as its figurehead; it sees the time of his presidency as halcyon days that ought to be restored.
The genie is out of the bottle. Zuma represents something new and scary and it is not going away.
• Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University and is visiting professor at Yale
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