As Zuma becomes history….

The resignation of Mr Jacob Zuma as president of South February 14 could not have come as a surprise to many who had watched the intense political drama in that country in the last two months or so. When the ground begins to shift under a politician his fall from the top of the totem pole is only a matter of time. 

Zuma’s sudden political demise is a personal humiliation in more senses than one. He is perhaps the last of the redoubtable anti-apartheid heroes who, like Dr Nelson Mandela, was imprisoned on Robben Island for many years. A man like that ought to go down, not with a whimper but with a heroic adulation. Sadly, Zuma is a tragic figure too who parlayed his charisma into a reckless life. He once admitted to having sex with a woman infected with AIDS. 

Zuma was a very entertaining figure on the throne of Dr Nelson Mandela he had occupied since 2009. His election, on the ouster of President Thabo Mbeki engineered by him and his supporters, was seen as an appropriate reward for his years of suffering in the anti-apartheid struggle. Because of his common touch, Zuma raised some hopes of a paradigm shift that would make the poor command his special of attention. He did not travel that route. Not long after he assumed power, he systematically began to withdraw enormous amounts from his bank of public goodwill. By the time his time ended on the political throne, that bank account was in the red. Many South Africans would feel relieved that the great man whose bronze statue rises above the neighbourhood on a street in Owerri, Imo State, has now played his part and left the stage in circumstances that were unedifying of his person. 

In his last hours in office, Zuma was mildly defiant in the manner of a last kick from an animal being dragged into the slaughter house. He believes his ouster was ‘unfair.’ On the morning of his resignation he told an interviewer from SABC: “I think we are being plunged into a crisis that I think my comrades will not be able to handle.” It remains now to be seen if his comrades have unleashed forces they cannot control. But the country or the ANC is not in a post-Zuma danger of imploding.

What is sad is that another African leader has drowned in the cesspool of corruption, real or alleged. I do not think Zuma ever had an easy ride in the presidential mansion. He was repeatedly accused of corruption. The courts took a dim view of his protestations of innocence in all such matters brought before them. Perhaps no one found these allegations strange. After all, corruption among African leaders is what makes leadership on the continent unique. The problem with corruption though, is its uncanny way of destroying people through what you might loosely call family connections. In Zuma’s case, one of his sons had business dealings with the Gupta family. That family used its presidential connections to wield undue influence in the executive mansion. Many South Africans watched the growing fortunes of the Gupta family with both concern and distaste. Hours before the president resigned the police raided the Johannesburg home of the Guptas and arrested three men who might have, by the time you are reading this, appeared in court on charges more serious than influence-peddling.

What I find fascinating about the South African system is the supremacy of the ANC as a political party duly respected by everyone, including the president who is its national leader. In 2009, the party forced Mbeki to step down because a South African court had said that he showed undue interest in a corruption case involving one of his supporters. Mbeki promptly obeyed. Zuma’s right as his successor owed to his being a graduate of Robben Island. Mbeki was not. His father was.

In his statement announcing his resignation, Zuma made an important point. He said: “The ANC should never be divided in my name.” He was willing to leave office to save the party. It might not be his primary reason but it was still an important point to underline in a continent where sit-tight leaders make a virtue of treating their political parties like mere constitutional instruments of personal longevity in office.

The Zuma era has ended. South Africans have a new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a former trade unionist who was also in the trenches against apartheid. I first met the new president at an international conference in Johannesburg sometime in 1992 when the world was already singing the nunc dimitis to apartheid, a system of government in which the minority white South Africans ruled on the basis of skin colour and thus denied the majority blacks political opportunities. We had a brief discussion during the coffee break. He left me with the favourable impression that he was on his way up the political ladder in his country. The feeling in the country at the time was that he would be chosen as vice-president to Mandela.

 He missed that because the ANC leadership felt that majority rule would make little meaning to the black people if they merely held on to political power and neglected the economic front. Black people needed to be big players in the economy too. Ramaphosa was then parcelled off to the business world to learn the ropes and open up business opportunities for black people. It was an important apprenticeship period for him. He came back into political reckoning armed with the experience of managing multi-national conglomerates. He became a leading reformist in the ANC. 

Ramaphosa has enormous challenges ahead of him on two crucial fronts: politics and the economy. The ANC was almost factionalised along the lines of the old brigade and the reformists. His election as deputy president in December last year was the beginning of the power struggle within the party. Zuma lost in that struggle. The new president has the urgent task of keeping the party united. 

His second critical challenge is the economy. Under Zuma, its annual growth rate was a sluggish 1.6 per cent. Management of the economy is not always an easy task for anyone. He would need to use his long experience in business to get the economy back on the track of a steady growth. His success as a new generation president in South Africa would depend on what he makes of these challenges.

I wish him well.