BRIEFING
good. The public who are protesting in the streets and wrapping themselves in flags have no programme of their own. No opposition party has a plan for how to generate money. All hope the West or the Chinese will provide. Always the hope is to receive something unearned. It is a disastrous legacy for a president who, even if he has not yet died, stopped being a creative and modern leader some time ago. In South Africa, although Jacob Zuma is only in his 70s – still older than a Chinese President could be – he too has failed to generate creativity and modern approaches to government. Patronage networks have made the African National Congress (ANC) a party of corrupt exchanges among its members and no longer a party of service to the wider nation. Here, as in Zimbabwe, there is the curious private discourse that those who earned liberation also earned plunder. But there is a key difference between the ANC and ZANU-PF. The Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), the guerrilla force of ZANUPF, fought in the field and did so against huge odds. The ANC forces never fought. They conducted acts of sabotage, they clandestinely mobilised the population, but no ANC army ever took the field. They had military bases in surrounding countries – but, in Angola, some of these, such as the infamous Camp
Quatro under Jacob Zuma, were used to imprison, torture and execute ANC dissidents who, even then, objected to the way their party was being run. So ‘liberation’ is a rhetoric. There was certainly an incredibly brave and protracted struggle. Many lost their lives. People suffered greatly. But many inter-
If the ANC loses the educated, especially the young, its days will be numbered national forces were involved in the final liberation of the country – although the ANC has demanded that all credit should be paid to it alone. And that means an ANC president must provide benefits to the people, as the fruits of liberation should be shared by all. The fury of the people that it has not was evidenced in the recent municipal elections in South Africa. Although the ANC still greatly outpolled the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) in the countryside, its share of the national vote for the first time fell below 60%. And, national figures aside, it is the cities that are the economic hubs, the social mobilisation centres and the educational centres of the country. The best-educated people who generate the most money live in them. If the ANC loses them, especially the young among them, its days will be numbered. And it was never a peasant party anyway. The DA needed the help of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters to achieve the total voting strength required to install non-ANC mayors in cities like Johannesburg and Pretoria. The DA took, as expected, Cape Town, but also broke into the Eastern Cape with the capture of Nelson Mandela Bay. Of the great cities, only Durban eluded its grasp. Whether this is the start of an irresistible DA rise is an open question, but Malema, in refusing to enter coalition with the ANC unless it dumped Zuma, said he was voting with the DA as the lesser of two evils. If Zuma was the greater of the two evils, the ANC must look at its leadership very long and hard, and coldly, if it wishes to rescue a decline. It must look beyond the liberation generation and not wait until it is Mugabe’s age. Colonialism ended in most Southern African countries 50 years ago. It was later in Angola and Mozambique (1975), and Zimbabwe (1980), later still in Namibia (1990) and majority rule finally came to South Africa with open elections in 1994. But, even in South Africa, that was 22 years ago. The ‘born frees’ know only that Zuma is an old man and that the ANC is a maladjusted party of privilege – maladjusted because it has not come to grips with modernity. For ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, and the ANC in South Africa, it is as if history stopped at the moment of liberation. Old men look back. The Chinese make sure they are never too old to look forward. But the influence of the old is such that even the younger men and women of the G40 cannot see the wider world except through the shrunken and withered lenses of their lost elders. ●
THE AFRICA REPORT
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N° 84
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O C TO B E R 2 016
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