For those who believe the return of Jacob Zuma is less a resurrection than what happens when a seance goes horrifically wrong, the prospect of Zuma’s MK party doing well in May’s election is alarming. But it also presents us with a rare opportunity: to discover the precise number of South Africans who want to live in a feudal theocracy.
Admittedly, I’d be feeling less enthusiastic if I thought there was a chance Zuma might be about to return to parliament, but luckily this isn’t the case, not least because he’s been banned from running for office thanks to his little revolving-door spat with the penal system.
Of course, not having his face on the ballot isn’t necessarily a disaster for Zuma — after all, the Guptas ran SA for years without even contesting an election — but still, the fact remains that his MK party would have to shoot the lights out to take power even in KwaZulu-Natal, and while I would always back Zuma when it comes to making lights stop working, the most it can hope for in May is to become a coalition partner at provincial level.
But this hasn’t stopped the ANC from panicking about losing KwaZulu-Natal. We read at the weekend that the party was dispatching uMkhonto weSizwe veterans to the province, presumably to go door-to-door explaining that MK, and not MK, was MK, and that MK should stop telling MK it was MK and that MK wasn’t MK, because it was all very upsetting.
(Given that Cyril Ramaphosa disbanded the uMkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans’ Association a few years back, I can’t help wondering how these particular veterans were selected for the mission. Perhaps a combination of their loyalty to Ramaphosa, their ability to withstand blows to the head and the urgency with which they needed a pay cheque?)
Yes, the ANC cares very much about what’s happening in KwaZulu-Natal, but why should the rest of us? Surely, I hear you say, Zuma’s party is simply a transparently cynical way to top up his pension and put more bodies between him and jail? Well, yes.
But I also think it can only help us as a country to know how all of us think, not just those inside the media-industrial complex, and I think Zuma and the MK party present a perfect opportunity to check whether liberal assumptions about the popularity of democracy are still grounded in reality.
Candour
I say it’s a perfect opportunity because Zuma is being astonishingly honest and clear about the alternative he’s proposing. The candour with which he is offering to end democracy in SA is almost refreshing. Usually, when disgraced politicians try to smuggle undemocratic agendas onto the ballot they disguise them in clouds of self-righteous verbiage. Even Vladimir Putin still pretends to have democratic elections, extending the charade as far as an imaginary opposition winning an imaginary 12% of votes against him.
Zuma has dispensed with such games and, like the lord of some old-world keep who has recaptured it from the democratic layabouts who briefly occupied it, he has instead run up the flag of unapologetic patriarchal feudalism. To be fair, he’s been making such noises for some time now. His plan to tackle teenage pregnancy by sending pregnant girls to Robben Island, for example, has been floating around since 2018: the only update seems to be a new scheme to imprison the babies’ fathers on the island too, presumably in a separate cell block or else the whole thing feels a bit self-defeating.
Zuma’s support for traditional leaders has also been clear for some time. But what does feel startlingly new is his view, quoted at the weekend by the Sunday Tribune, that these traditional leaders should not just have total control over the lives of their local subjects, but over the rest of us as well. “There should be a platform where amakhosi would meet to discuss how this country should be governed,” said Zuma.
“Amakhosi should assign us (politicians) to do this and that, and after we have done that, we should return to account to them. Amakhosi will tell us how to govern their people, and the government should be a runner of amakhosi, as the government cannot be above amakhosi.”
As for who was “above amakhosi”, well Zuma has been pretty emphatic, telling a congregation three weeks ago that his party was “working for God”, while at the weekend accusing the ANC of “challenging God”.
And there you have it; the great hierarchy of the ancient, theocratic world: God, then king, then man; with the girls on Robben Island and constitutional democracy in the toilet.
I understand why one might want to react to Zuma with either alarm or amusement. I’ve done both. But I also have to recognise how rare it is to be able to hold a national referendum on democracy where the stakes are still relatively low, and I find myself oddly grateful that Zuma is giving us this opportunity to learn more about who we are, to count how many of us still stand grimly by our spluttering democracy, and how many want to be sat on by gods, kings and the priests who will interpret for both.
So fly your flag, Msholozi. I want to see who salutes.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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