The ANC produces demagogues first, and constitutionalists second. And never shall the two meet. At the same time, the rule of law is both simple and complex. The principles are clear but their legal parameters can be confusing, and compounding. It is in this maze that the demagogue lives. Ostensibly guided by virtue but, in reality, permanently trapped by the particulars.
This is how Jacob Zuma has existed. In 2009 he accepted the mantle of the primary custodian of our constitutional order. It sat alongside his informal title, of SA’s primary victim. And so the maze was established. To the public, observing from the outside, he would always turn left or right on principle. But for those who watched his movements through a legal lens, this mouse was going nowhere.
He has come now, inexorably and eventually, to the terminus. The vortex at the centre of the maze, where principle and legal process meet. He has nowhere left to turn. And so he fights to bring down the whole edifice.
On his side are the thousand seeds of confusion he sowed along the way. They have grown into a forest. Outside Nkandla he would lie again to the public, in the name of principle. He has had no trial, he would say. No-one can tell him what he has done wrong. This was the equivalent of an apartheid-style detention without judicial process, he claimed. And the forest heaved, caught up in the rhetorical wind.
Stripped of his formal title and all the pretence that went with it, there is now only his informal claim to fame. He is a victim. The ultimate victim. He has used it to great effect, to make a mockery of the rule of law. And it has proved to be more infectious than even the pandemic that ravages the country.
The police minister, for one, tested positive even last week. In a desperate letter, dripping with political expediency, he would state he cannot arrest Zuma until the farce that is his eternal legal defence has been exhausted. It will, however, never end.
That was always prize one for Zuma. Not to bring down the maze but to extend it, so that it encapsulates everything and everyone. Until all-comers play by his rules and are there, in the maze, with him. Until every turn is decided not by principle but manipulated by popular appeal, and the lies and deceit he uses to frame the choices he makes. He might resort to bringing it all down, but not before he tries, one last time, to make everyone complicit.
Zuma has a large part of the ANC in the maze with him already. He always has. The party’s national executive committee might have rejected a proposal to establish a special task team on Zuma’s legal predicament, but that the idea was posited at all tells you everything. Processes, endless processes, are how demagogues survive. Process is how the maze is extended, and how you are warmly invited inside. Do not ever enter. You will never leave.
It is popular now to treat Zuma as an aberration. Some temporary cancer, on the verge of being eradicated as the forces of good — of principle and constitutionality — coalesce. But Zuma was only ever a metaphor. And he was as strong or weak as his audience allowed him to be. When the maze was at its biggest, from 2007 to 2009, he needed only to sit back and watch as his army of the unthinking dismantled both the National Prosecuting Authority’s case against him, and the Scorpions. While his effect may wax and wane, it is a permanent feature of our politics.
There is no political force for good in the ANC. There is only the law. The minute its decisions are conveyed they fall into the party’s hands to execute. On any given Sunday it will obey them only when it can carry its audience with it. Given that its audience is Zuma’s audience, ultimately it plays by Zuma’s rules. It can pretend the mouse is trapped. But the mouse is directing everyone. The mouse is in charge.
There is one thing that can change the game: a general and clear understanding that both in principle and in law, Zuma has violated the constitution. For that the ANC would have to define the problem for its audience, in a way that can be understood and accepted as it relates directly to him. But that will never happen. You can watch the president address the nation about Covid-19, and talk about positivity rates and the complexities of those rules and regulations that now govern our lives. But there will be no address on Zuma, setting out his crimes and the consequences.
Always principle is presented in abstract. Never is it tied directly to a person or action. Right and wrong are free-floating ideas for the ANC. They are not grounded in the real world. Reality is without morality.
In this way, SA is a demagogue’s paradise. The ANC would have it no other way. You see, it is all a maze. The confusion between the abstract and specificity is how the ANC governs. How it too survives. If it was to change the rules and embrace the difficulty inherent to actually ensuring any constitutional principle is upheld, it would fall apart.
Every assault on the constitution, from expropriation without compensation to a national health insurance scheme, relies on this confusion, this twilight zone. SA’s destruction is in the details, because the details are simply too much for most. But the details are where principle lives and dies.
A by-product of this is that there is no such thing as guilt in the ANC. You cannot be guilty when evidence and reason are negated by “principle” — no more than a rhetorical device, detached from behaviour or action. The simplest ideas — free speech, a fair trial, the right to vote, a parliamentary democracy — are simple only when they are understood and can be applied to a particular circumstance. When they are not, they are a terror. In the hands of demagogues, who understand only affirmation and self-interest, they are weapons, and they will be used to destroy.
Zuma is SA. His longevity a tribute to our ignorance, and his maze a mesmerising game few can resist. Least of all his own party. We live in a grand confusion, and are led by those who rely on it to retain power. How wonderfully effective they have been at making sure nothing is ever crystal clear, and that no problem can ever be identified practically, only theoretically.
Our democracy is therefore largely theoretical. Makes you wonder who the mouse really is.
• Van Onselen, a former journalist who also worked for the DA in various capacities, was head of politics at the Institute of Race Relations before joining market research company Victory Research as CEO. He writes in his personal capacity.
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