At the tail-end of his recent interview with Sunday Times political editor Sibongakonke Shoba, Jacob Zuma left the journalist and his audiovisual crew with an injunction: “But never forget that you are black,” he said in Zulu before repeating it in English. “Defend the black who has been enslaved, colonised ... I am just saying, my brother, help the black man to be an equal to those who employ us a lot.”
It was a strange instruction to give to a journalist whose job is merely to report the story. But it was also vintage Zuma — race-baiting not only to gain the sympathy of the reporters, but also to win the hearts and minds of those who would be watching or listening to the interview as a podcast.
Zuma is an old hand in this game. Reporters who covered him after his axing as deputy president in July 2005 — and before he took office as head of state in 2009 — would remember the trick well. If he found himself in the company of black journalists, he would say: “I know you guys are not free, what is published in the newspapers is not always what you send through. The white subeditors change your copy, isn’t it so? We know about these things, we know about your suffering.”
This would always be followed by that laughter of his, as if to assure “black reporters” that he was on their “side”.
Even when said reporters protested, pointing out that they were nobody’s puppets and that subeditors — white or black — command no such power in newsrooms, Zuma would just carry on talking about the “oppression”.
Apparently he employed similar tricks when meeting black professionals from other sectors, selling himself as a champion of black advancement whose elevation to power would bring about racial and economic justice.
He has every reason to believe the strategy worked for him then — after all, he did end up as president of the ANC and the country, despite pundits believing the odds were heavily stacked against him.
It is therefore no surprise that he is employing it again as he seeks to stage what would be, if it succeeds, a spectacular second coming. This time, as leader of the MK party, his brand of racial nationalism is not inhibited by the “nonracial” doctrine leaders of his former party, the ANC, are expected to abide by.
Hence this astonishing statement from a former president who publicly swore allegiance to the country’s constitution at least twice: “I don’t understand this business of black and white ... coming together because they [whites] are free, we are not”.
If fanning anti-immigrant sentiments in the US helped Donald Trump stage a dramatic comeback to the White House, why would Zuma not use an equally emotive issue of racial inequality to win votes? After the US presidential election there has been much commentary about the remarkable similarities between our populist former president and Trump.
The discussions invariably lead to the question: “Can Zuma pull a Trump on the ANC in 2029?” Highly unlikely, should be the obvious answer. For starters Zuma, who is the same age as Joe Biden, the 82-year-old outgoing US president, will be 88 in 2029. Hardly a good age for anyone to run state affairs.
Zuma has been president previously, for two terms, and there should be sufficient consensus that his tenure was mostly a governance disaster. But the same was said of Trump, but this did not stop 50% of the US electorate from choosing him over current vice-president Kamala Harris (48% of the popular vote) as the next president.
What should stop Zuma’s bid on its tracks though, is the constitutional provision that prohibits anyone from serving more than two terms as SA’s president. But that does not mean he’ll give up on his dream to have his MK party take over the levers of power at the Union Buildings and then, as we learnt from his Sunday Times interview, stage a reverse takeover of a weakened ANC. Zuma and the party are also on record saying that once they and their allies secure a two-thirds majority in parliament they will change the constitution.
Much of what he said in the interview, as well as on many other platforms Zuma has featured on since launching MK, may sound incoherent and illogical to the ears of the chattering classes. Insisting that he is still ANC even though he has founded a rival party, calling for “drums” to be used instead of ballot boxes on election day, lashing out against the ideal of nonracialism that he claimed to espouse during his nine years in power ... Yet it somehow resonates with sections of the electorate he is targeting.
If Trump’s playbook in the recent US election was to promise voters he would revive the economy and deport immigrants in large numbers, Zuma’s is to sell himself as a black messiah who has come back to politics to rescue the black majority from a Cyril Ramaphosa government that, as Zuma put it, “is selling the economy to white people in the main, leaving us to starve”.
As he prepares for local government elections in 2026 and the ultimate battle in 2029, Zuma is banking on enough voters falling for his “black unity” gospel, in which salvation from poverty and landlessness would come only through MK. Hence his concerted efforts to liquidate Julius Malema’s EFF and have it swallowed by MK.
There has been much soul-searching in the US journalism community after Trump’s victory, some wondering how mainstream media “got the story so wrong”, others asking if political journalists were not hindered by their liberal and middle-class prejudices from hearing what the voters were actually saying.
There are even those who blame the advent of paywalls, saying they have prevented many citizens from reading mainstream media and forced them to rely on social media platforms that are more susceptible to the spread of propaganda presenting as news.
Perhaps we need to do our own soul-searching here at home, for though Zuma and MK didn’t win the May 29 elections, almost no-one foresaw that more than 3-million votes would go to a party that was hardly six months old.
Are we listening carefully to why so many voters were drawn to him despite his obvious flaws? What is it that, three decades into democracy and nonracialism, draws sections of our society to his brand of politics, as well as the other strands of ethno-nationalism that are being propagated by the variety of other parties now represented in our National Assembly? Is the nation-building project holding?
Though parties such as the EFF used the same kind of rhetoric in the past with some success, the major difference between the EFF and MK is that while the former tended to attract the youth vote, the latter’s appeal seems to cut across age groups and social classes. This makes Zuma’s approach potentially more sustainable than Malema’s.
However, all of this does not necessarily mean the country is facing another Zuma tsunami; that the MK party’s ascendancy is inevitable. There is still ample time for centrists to push back against Zuma’s black messiah message.
The one sure way of undermining his message is for those in government, and their partners, to start showing the benefits of moderate, inclusive policies by delivering the much-promised jobs to the unemployed, business opportunities and access to funding for aspirant entrepreneurs, and an administration that is intolerant of corruption.
• Msomi is editor of the Sunday Times.
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