If you’re alarmed at the prospect of former president Jacob Zuma joining a new political party ahead of the coming elections, calm down. Zuma was great in the wake of an aloof and distant Thabo Mbeki, but without a well-oiled political machine behind him he is a distracted and disorganised mess.
The crowd awaiting him in a small stadium in Gauteng the other day was so small he didn’t pitch. Obviously he has pulled bigger gatherings in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga since announcing last month that he was going to campaign for a new party named after the ANC’s former armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), but I can’t see him following through.
As he has done all his political life, Zuma will let down the people now urging him to run. When push comes to shove he’ll throw them under the bus. For a start, he can’t become president again, having used up his two terms. Claims by his backers that this is no impediment are ridiculous. There’s an air about the rhetoric coming out of this new party that is simply demented.
At best, and in the unlikely event that Zuma is actually selected as a candidate for the new party, and then in the more unlikely event that he actually goes on the campaign trail, MK might get a few percent of the vote, and that mainly in his home province.
In the meantime, every loser in left-of-centre SA politics is rushing to join up. Ace Magashule and his ATC party are teaming up. Black Land First (0.1% of the 2019 vote) is at the gate. Former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng says he is taking his party into the new venture. Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the blockhead who used to run the SABC, is launching a political career and he’ll be welcome too.
Then there are sirens calling for Zuma to join the EFF, but our Jacob appears to be ignoring them. How must former Zuma lickspittles such as Carl Niehaus and Busisiwe Mkhwebane be feeling, having joined the EFF just before Zuma set out his new stall? In the EFF they are guaranteed seats in parliament and regular salaries. But can EFF leader Julius Malema now really trust them to remain loyal and disciplined?
So many questions, and the biggest of them all is the hardest of all: is Zuma serious? There’s good reason to doubt it: Zuma’s most enduring political skill is deceit. An old intelligence guy, he specialises in distraction. He had folk up in arms because they thought judge Siraj Desai had made the shortlist for public protector in 2016 because he was Zuma’s candidate. But he wasn’t. Mkhwebane was, and the sleight of hand worked.
Normal impulse
What he might be up to now is anyone’s guess. He never shows his hand, but pretending to be running for office is just nonsense. Zuma is not in any way ready for hard work. He would belong, possibly even as leader, to a small party with no resources and barely any seats. His speaking time in parliament would be cut according to the number of seats it won. No more droning on endlessly. No more pension if he takes up another political office.
Of course, the impulse to stand up and fight is normal. As his successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa has disappointed to the left and right, and if Zuma is able to weaken Ramaphosa by appearing to oppose him with an election just months away, that’s also normal. He has no reason to like the man.
Equally, will Ramaphosa finally appreciate now that all the fair-handedness to Zuma and, frankly, to all the state capture elite, has done him no good? Probably not. He should have finished them off right at the start. Now it’s too late and it will be Ramaphosa who pays the price.
In a way you have to hand it to the crooked old guy. It’s 2024 and we’re still talking about him, still writing down what he says as if it might help in some way. He picked his moment. The end of the second week in December is the official start of the Silly Season. Almost anything you do or say will get into the media. The fact that the season has drifted so deep into January is odd.
Despite that, and even with some solid financial backing, former First Rand chair Roger Jardine has simply slipped from view after launching his Change Starts Now (CSN) “movement” in December. Like Zuma, you’d have thought he’d have a clear run but the CSN movement appears already to have reached absolute zero. All molecular activity is stopped. Its X (Twitter) account has fewer than 1,000 followers and I fear the money invested in this project is lost.
I hope the funders learn a lesson here. You cannot create politicians out of nothing. You can fund the ones who most closely approximate the policies you want, but they have to live in a different world to you, and you need to let them be.
The big issue in the election is going to be voter turnout, and the bigger the turnout, the better chance the country has of changing course for the better. The money spent on Jardine, and any further investments planned, would be better directed to parties and leaders intent on making a real difference to our prospects.
Help opposition parties or actual alternatives to the ANC get their supporters out on the day and you’ll be amazed how big a difference you can still make here.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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