PETER BRUCE: Potentially damaging splits hit ANC and DA before EFF campaign launch

Just days before the EFF  kicks off its election campaign, potentially damaging splits have struck their opponents, the ANC and DA.

First, last weekend former DA leader Helen Zille raised the prospect of a “tax revolt” in a tweet, saying: “I’m waiting to see how many ppl get prosecuted and land in jail for a reasonable amount of time after the Zondo commission. If they do not, just watch me. I will be organising the #TaxRevolt. I have tried the electoral route for years. Voters seem to like voting for corruption.”

It sparked an outcry, with DA leader Mmusi Maimane and other DA luminaries rushing to say the party  does not support not paying tax. But hang on. After the elections, Zille holds no public office and the DA as it is cannot much longer be her political home. If she struck out on her own I would bet on her getting some traction among the DA base. Maimane is already leaving it behind.

With Gwen Ngwenya resigning last week as head of policy and telling Maimane the DA  seems to have no interest in policy, the latest split with Zille (which she would fully consciously have triggered; she knows she is not supposed to comment on national politics) and the general tension between the party’s liberal (mainly white) and social democratic (mainly black) wings, it is reasonable to ask if it would survive even a modest reversal in the May elections.

If Zille formed a political party after the elections and persuaded four or five of the DA’s top liberal MPs to join her, and they found the finance to campaign and live for the next five years, they’d get 20 seats in the next parliament. A million votes. Easy.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a brewing war between President Cyril Ramaphosa and former president Jacob Zuma has finally come to the boil. It promises to shatter the fragile “unity” Ramaphosa has been trying to build within the ANC ahead of the election, and if it does the prospect of the ANC vote falling below 50% in May becomes real again.

Ramaphosa has been speaking quite openly, even in Zuma’s home province, of the need to “restore” and “revive” the integrity of the party. He did it at numerous events in KwaZulu-Natal  in January with Zuma right behind him. So he must be feeling confident. Then he went to Davos and India and did it again, lamenting SA’s “nine wasted years”, manifestly the length of Zuma’s presidency.

Even Zuma clicked, and on Tuesday the former president, who has just joined Twitter, penned a long tweet on “twitlonger”, having a full go at Ramaphosa: “Being part of the ANC has always been my proudest association,” he twote. “So it is with unease that we must bear witness to certain recent comments and attitudes that, if not questioned, threaten to become the prevailing wisdom and even the new status quo in the ANC.

“Because we are hearing, now, of the country’s ‘nine wasted years’. When referring to the past decade as ‘wasted years’ in this way, these critics saying so within the ANC might be quick to point out they are not only speaking in reference to me. They may even say they are pointing the finger at themselves, or at the movement in general, but I must still caution against this new trend, and not for my sake.”

There may be attempts to paper over this crack but I reckon it pretty much brings the truce between the two men to an end. The question now is who is stronger? Who is braver? We know Zuma is at the heart of a “fight-back” campaign as the screws are tightened daily on the state capture project he fronted. Many thoughtful people are convinced the fight-back is financed by Russian money and intelligence, still determined to sell us 9,600MW of nuclear power.

Whatever. The question is whether Ramaphosa has the tools to fight off the fight-back.  On Friday, February 1, a major anti-corruption missile lands in the form of Shamila Batohi, the new head of the  National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). With Ramaphosa’s permission, she is able to use the  National Prosecuting Authority Act to create her own special investigating directors who, without any interference, are able to investigate literally anything, make arrests and prosecute. Just like the Scorpions used to do. And just as former FBI director Robert Mueller is doing to torment Donald Trump in the US by slowly exposing the scale of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.

I would be hugely disappointed if we got to the elections in May without one or two major corruption arrests by the NPA given the wide powers available to Batohi under the Act. And, let’s face it, you have to start with a bang. Batohi doesn’t have to wait for any commission of inquiry to end. She can investigate, charge, arrest and prosecute all on her own any time she likes.

If she’s half as good as her CV says she is, the clean-up can start on Monday. Zille shouldn’t have to wait. The Zondo commission will take years. She should give herself a tighter deadline.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.