New South African Review 2. Paul Hoffman
& Guardian (22 April 2009), the DA leader, Helen Zille, described Zuma as a ‘one-man constitutional wrecking machine’.
So is South Africa predestined to take the Zimbabwean path? There is certainly some evidence for the Zanufication thesis, and it does shine a light on some of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary governance in South Africa. However, we argue in this chapter that the Zanufication thesis is a blunt and highly polemical analytical tool which underplays the complexity of the South African polity and ignores a number of crucial differences between the two situations. That the ANC will become another Zanu is possible but by no means certain, even if the entrenchment of a one-party dominant system is likely to continue generating a range of democratic deficits in South Africa.
THE SITUATION IN ZIMBABWE
Robert Mugabe was clearly defeated by Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the presidential elections of March 2008. Then, in June 2008, the world witnessed a second stolen election. After a five-week delay in announcing the result of the first ballot (a delay prompted by a traumatised Zanu PF’s search for an alternative to the constitutional option of accepting defeat and transferring power), Tsvangirai was deemed to have won the most votes whilst failing to secure an overall majority, thus necessitating a run-off against Mugabe. Although this episode followed a familiar postcolonial narrative in which oppositions win the vote only to lose the count, this was a particularly egregious example of electoral malpractice. The second poll, on 27 June, was held against the backdrop of an orchestrated campaign of state terror entailing the murder, rape, abduction, and torture of opposition activists and supporters. Indeed, the country witnessed an accelerating decline into something approaching naked fascism, given the scale of the violence meted out by state-sponsored militias to those deemed to have voted for the opposition. Mugabe himself confirmed this trend when he asked rhetorically: ‘How can an X on a ballot paper compete with a gun?’ and declared that ‘only God who appointed me will remove me’ (AFP, 2008), statements providing a blend of Hitler (and Mugabe has even described himself as ‘Hitler tenfold’ (Mugabe, 2003) Mao-Zedong and Charles I of England.
The ferocity of this state-sponsored assault on the MDC and its support base led to Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from the second poll and to Mugabe’s being re-elected by default, an outcome which only intensified the country’s political crisis. In September 2008, a global political agreement (GPA) – brokered by Thabo Mbeki – was signed by Mugabe and Tsvangirai and on 2 March 2009, a government of national unity was formed. Although Mugabe was compelled to make some concessions as a result of the GPA, he effectively retained control of the state and has continued to govern in much the same way as before. In short, while the GPA has brought some respite from the worst excesses of state terror and restored some normality to the functioning of the economy and its financial institutions, it has not transformed the political culture of Zimbabwe nor fundamentally altered its political dynamics, and attention has inevitably turned southwards from this depressing spectacle towards the regional hegemon. The question now posed with increasing frequency is whether Zimbabwe’s today is likely to become South Africa’s tomorrow.
EVIDENCE FOR THE ZANUFICATION THESIS
In one respect, it is an indictment of the post-apartheid government in South Africa that such a question is posed at all. When Mandela left office in June 1999, South Africa’s global standing was high on account of the (relative) peacefulness of its transition to democracy, its discourse of racial reconciliation, and its apparent determination to act as an evangelist for democracy on the African continent. Much, if not all, of that reservoir of goodwill was drained away during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. At no stage – either at home or abroad – did Mbeki command the same aura or inspire the same confidence as Mandela, despite, paradoxically, his superior administrative skills as a head of government.
There were many reasons for this – principally his less accessible personality, the more conspiratorial and secretive political culture he fostered, and his enthusiasm for a highly centralised, top-down style of government (Hamill, 2001). All of this would ultimately sow the seeds of his demise, as he was removed first from the ANC presidency in December 2007 and then from the state presidency in September 2008. Internationally, Mbeki had initially been received favourably as a key figure in the so-called ‘new generation’ of African leaders who seemed to understand what was required to rescue the continent from its position on the margins of international politics. This ‘new generation’ had at least mastered the post-Cold War vocabulary of political and economic change, even if their commitment to its substance was yet to be tested. As Mandela’s deputy president, Mbeki had championed an ‘African renaissance’ – central to which was a commitment to clean, open and democratic government – and had spoken of wresting control away from ‘petty tyrants who would be our governors by theft of elective positions’ (Mbeki, 1998).
In his first two years in office as president, he played a major part, alongside the British prime minister Tony Blair, in constructing the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), a development contract with the West in which good government, transparency and democratisation were core elements. This was followed in 2002 by the establishment of the African Union (AU), the successor to the widely discredited Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Mbeki was one of the AU’s principal architects and he served as its first chair with a more robust – although at this stage still largely theoretical – commitment to democratic governance and a more critical attitude towards the traditional axioms of state sovereignty and non-interference. Here was a leader who seemed attuned to the new post-Cold War orthodoxies and who sought to steer South Africa in particular, and Africa in general, towards a pragmatic accommodation with them. This was evidenced by his pivotal domestic role in fashioning the Gear strategy introduced in June 1996, a more conservative macroeconomic framework and one which was an anathema to the ANC’s formal allies, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the SACP. This did not make Mbeki an unconditional enthusiast for neoliberal globalisation, as was sometimes charged. It, rather, portrayed him as a reformist globaliser who broadly accepted the prevailing nostrums of globalisation while acknowledging the continuing importance of the state. He also sought the restructuring of the political and economic institutions of global governance to give greater weight to the voice of the global South, and of Africa in particular.
THE SQUANDERED PRESIDENCY
The image of Mbeki the pragmatist and stable technocrat faded as his first term progressed and as he staked out eccentric, even bizarre, positions on particular issues and perhaps sought to overcompensate for the broadly conformist nature of his government’s economic policies by a more contrived and laboured militancy in other contexts. His policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’, introduced following Zimbabwe’s descent into state-orchestrated mayhem in 2000, had exhausted its (always) limited potential to stabilise that country and to facilitate democratic change by the time of the fraudulent presidential election of 2002. Persistence with the policy subsequent to that date, in the face of extreme regime violence and an openly stated determination to liquidate the opposition, was an exercise in self-deception on Mbeki’s part and a failure comparable in scale to his simultaneous abdication of responsibility in dealing with South Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Indeed one wonders: was Nelson Mandela’s lament (2008) about a ‘tragic failure of leadership’ directed at least as much towards Mbeki as it was towards the regime in Harare? People inevitably drew the conclusion that if South Africa failed to condemn unbridled state terrorism in its own neighbourhood and could display such scant regard for the flouting of democratic values – and if its own government ministers could offer supportive words to a regime such as Mugabe’s