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Business Day editor Tim Cohen writes about the fallout from the ANC's national executive committee meeting under the headline Jacob Zuma slips into an abyss, but he is not the ANC's biggest problem.
Tim writes:
South Africans woke up on Monday to some profoundly disappointing news: the Teflon Don escaped censure once again. The resolution tabled at the ANC’s national executive committee meeting at the weekend that President Jacob Zuma should resign was defeated again, and now SA seems certain to live in a state of flux and confusion until at least the party’s December conference.
So, alas, Zuma won again. Or did he?
Business Day deputy editor Carol Paton's analysis appears under the headline Why the ANC NEC meeting could be good for SA.
Carol argues:
Political strife like this won’t be good for the economy. We can expect a new populist economic policy to emerge from the June policy conference. The structural reforms that the Treasury has promised SA and investors, and other outstanding police issues, have no hope of being implemented or resolved. Economic growth will remain constrained.
Given all of this, further credit ratings downgrades are sure to follow.
Business Day's political editor, Natasha Marrian, writes about how Each challenge erodes Zuma’s power.
She observes:
Every time an NEC is held in which Zuma is challenged, his power is tested.
The limits of his power were unknown before Nhlanhla Nene's removal as finance minister in December 2015.
Since then, every test Zuma has faced and every challenge made to his authority has shown the slow but steady erosion of that power.
There remains a danger, though, in his continued languishing in the Union Buildings - this is the man who in the space of four days appointed two finance ministers, wiping about R90bn from government pension funds within 48 hours.
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