The arrest of Jacob Zuma, former president of the republic and the governing party, was always going to be accompanied by controversy, drama, chaos and mayhem. However, what has been surprising is how ill-prepared the ANC and the government were for the weekend’s flagrant flouting of the law and sabre rattling in KwaZulu-Natal.
To be clear, Zuma’s central grievances are an issue for the courts. The mayhem, firing of guns in public and breaking of other laws are matters of political leadership and governance. The ANC and the government have both been found wanting in that regard.
It has been clear for a while now that Zuma is headed for jail. Still, few thought he would go to jail for contempt of court, rather than the hundreds of serious corruption, fraud and racketeering charges he faces.
Once he walked out of the Zondo state capture commission and refused to file answering affidavits at the Constitutional Court, Zuma set himself on the path to incarceration. This prospect became certain as his strident attacks on the judiciary through late-night statements grew.
His strategy to avoid jail — if one can call it a strategy — has been made up of several elements: frequently changing lawyers; second-guessing legal advice; and listening more to other advisers than legal ones.
When he was finally cornered on June 29, when the Constitutional Court ruled against him, sentencing him to 15 months in prison, the consequence of relying on non-legal advisers was laid bare.
Reality only appeared to dawn on him when he couldn’t attend the funeral of Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s founding president. Instead of paying his respects to Kaunda, Zuma had to spend the bulk of last week scrambling for legal loopholes to try to avoid being locked up.
His inner circle of non-legal advisers has struggled to speak with one voice: some, like his son Edward, remained defiant; daughter Duduzile announced her father was in good spirits and ready to hand himself over to Nkandla police; and his foundation came out spitting fire.
Legal advisers were only allowed to step in last Friday and filed two astonishing applications, one seeking an interdict against the police effecting the warrant of arrest, which kicks in on Wednesday, and another asking the Constitutional Court to reconsider based on factors such as his age and alleged ill-health. This application even admonished SA’s court to apply the law and not politics in adjudicating the case, yet curiously it has agreed to hear the application on Monday.
Despite the threat of jail, Zuma’s conduct outside court and that of his supporters in the past few days has revealed the ANC’s ineptitude and lack of a considered strategy to deal with the Zuma phenomenon.
In the middle of a deadly coronavirus pandemic that is threatening to claim 100,000 SA lives by the end of 2021, Zuma and his supporters have shown contempt for the government’s lockdown restrictions. Thousands of his supporters have congregated outside his homestead for days without the required social distancing or masks, yet no action has been taken.
It was only on Tuesday that the ANC reacted with a long statement on the political disaster of the past weekend. Clearly, expecting the ANC to do something decisive and different is to expect too much. Its leadership has allowed Zuma to break every one of its, and the country’s, rules for years. He refused to resign as president when the party’s integrity commission asked him to; and after its 54th conference, which resolved to clean the party’s public image (not to be confused with tackling corruption), he ignored directives to stop participating in party activities like others facing serious criminal charges.
The current ANC leadership appears consumed with two interrelated projects: polishing its image by appearing to be dealing with corruption, and uniting the party at all costs. The latter explains the reluctance to face Zuma down.
Zuma has long been the ANC’s bugbear. Former president Thabo Mbeki tried and failed to contain him. Zuma was Mbeki’s third choice as deputy president of the country, yet it was only when he got mired in corruption allegations that sent Zuma’s former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, to prison, that Mbeki sacked him, only to give him time and space to plot his return.
On June 27 Mbeki, who recently returned to the public square after a decade-long exile, delivered the Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture at Walter Sisulu University, in which he aptly characterised the country's problem in this way: “It cannot and must not be that if we, the ANC leadership, are trapped in an organisational death wish, SA at large acts in a manner which allows that the macabre within the ANC visits immense disaster on our already suffering population and millions of others elsewhere in our region and continent.”
Mbeki is correct in suggesting the time has arrived for South Africans to unfollow “the macabre within the ANC”, which is ruining the country.
• Dludlu, a former Sowetan editor, is executive for strategy and public affairs at the Small Business Institute.
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