In DA intellectual circles a story explaining Jacob Zuma and state capture has become de rigueur. The problem, the story begins, did not start with Zuma’s ascension to the ANC presidency in 2007, nor with his association with the Guptas. The Zuma catastrophe was always going to happen, for the problem was the ANC itself: Mandela’s ANC, Mbeki’s ANC, the whole organisation and its history.
The ANC has never been what it said on the tin, the tale continues. It was never a nonracial, democratic organisation, but a Leninist organisation intent on capturing the state. And capture SA is exactly what it did in the 1990s, under Mandela, dissolving the line between state and party. All that happened in 2007 is that a more destructive crew took over.
There is some truth in this story, but as a stand-alone explanation for what has happened in SA it is far too crude to pass muster. There is a more illuminating place to begin. With the important exception of KwaZulu-Natal, almost all of black SA voted for the ANC in 1994. A nation crowded into a single organisation. It contained the educated and the uneducated, the urban and the rural, middle-class people and very poor people, people who spoke different languages. And all these people expected a lot, for they had just acquired freedom.
One of the primary tasks of the ANC was to manage this cacophony of expectations. The organisation aspired to shrink sovereign debt, to run a budget surplus, to run a tight ship. And all this while the millions who voted for it were clamouring for the dividends of freedom.
That is the context in which to understand how the ANC ran the state. In the noughties, Thabo Mbeki undoubtedly, undeniably, over-reached his presidential powers. He installed people he believed would do his bidding all over the state apparatus, most glaringly at the summit of the police and the prosecuting authority. And when the police commissioner got into hot water, Mbeki intervened to save him because he was Mbeki’s police commissioner. And when the director of public prosecutions asserted his independence, Mbeki fired him.
But why did Mbeki want his own police commissioner? Primarily to investigate people in his own party. And why did he want his own prosecutor? It was to go after people in his own party. In inappropriate, ham-fisted ways, Mbeki was trying to put a lid on that unruly cacophony of voices.
The ANC did not capture the state because it was a Leninist party. The ANC under Mbeki is perhaps best described as a national liberation movement abusing its incumbency to manage the populist clamour that erupts when a people acquires freedom.
Zuma’s ascension was the victory of that populist clamour. He came to power because he told a host of constituencies, most prominently a frustrated provincial middle class, that it was no longer necessary to limit their appetites, that the long, long wait was over.
Contra the DA intellectuals, what happened in 2007 was not more of the same. It was a revolution. The project of national containment, which had been successful for 13 years, came apart under Mbeki’s mismanagement.
Diagnosing SA’s problem as the existence of a Leninist party is a tinny, superficial account of what happened. It is far more illuminating to describe things thus: the most unequal country on earth acquired freedom, a country so unequal that nobody in its ranks has the authority to tell others to quell their appetites. The first 13 years were a long, drawn-out honeymoon, a shelter from the coming reality. Everything that has come next is the inevitable fight.
Nobody will ever win this fight once and for all. It will forever be replayed. But to the extent that the forces pitted against populist excess get the upper hand, as they have here and now, their ranks will be filled with people whose histories are rooted in both the ANC and the DA. Those Leninists are in fact the DA’s bedfellows, its allies, its comrades in the trenches.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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