Obsessing Over Zuma Obscures the Real South African Crisis
The Ramaphosa-led ANC is South Africa's worst enemy. Zuma is now simply a convenient scapegoat.
If we were to use post-Covid metrics, Jacob Zuma was one of the greatest leaders of all time. (Irony)
Mbeki had let 330 000 South Africans, mostly children, die, by colluding with his alcoholic health minister in not accepting HIV drugs that would have prevented mother to child transmission.
When Zuma became president, the drugs were rolled out, and the HIV pandemic eased. The previous 15 years of ANC rule had seen a drop of ten years in life expectancy. Under Zuma, the average life expectancy returned to the 1993 level of 63.
Before incandescent rage rises in my readers, let me say I am no fan of Zuma. I am just pointing out the absurdity of how we perceive our leaders.
There is simply no reason to mark out Zuma as some kind of aberration from other mythically competent ANC leaders.
Mbeki allowed people to die, as he sat aloof late at night sipping whisky and quoting Shakespeare. Ramaphosa has overseen an economic disaster quite literally worse than the Great Depression. While Zuma oversaw the crumbling of South Africa, during a global financial crisis, the most obvious health metric drastically improved.
Zuma was, and is corrupt. But spare some sympathy for the old man - he got his hands dirty and all he got was a lousy homestead.
Ramaphosa was meanwhile cashing in on BEE at the same time, gorging himself on white capital. Yes, it was legal, but the man simply accepted shares and huge rewards for sitting on boards. This was given to him for the same reason Zuma was given his funds - for political influence.
The truth is corruption is shocking in South Africa, but the most damaging aspect of our regime is its mixture of anarchic incompetence and tyrannical desire to control everything. Turn off all the corruption and you would still have a bankrupt Eskom, decaying roads, and failing municipalities.
The source of this destruction is cadre deployment - a policy which forms part of deep ANC mythology, and which was enacted by Mandela and Mbeki. Cadre deployment stems from the idea that the ANC must be intertwined and in control over every aspect of the bureaucracy, because the ANC is the guiding spirit of a national democratic revolution, which will usher in a paradise akin to East Germany during its communist era.
Zuma was certainly just as guilty as any other ANC leader in this destruction - but not uniquely guilty. The entire organisation is corrupt and evil. It is irredeemable. Ramaphosa was right there with Zuma during his second term, endorsing everything he did, playing the long game apparently (irony), when he could seize power to reform the state… by implementing nationalisation of health and land.
Ramaphosa constantly defends cadre deployment. He has offered zero policy changes to the Zuma platform and is escalating land expropriation and the demise of private healthcare. This idea of him as a businessman, a negotiator, a corruption buster, is a myth. I know who my readers are, and quite honestly, the man is not hiding his desires from you. He does not care about you and your wellbeing in the slightest. When people opposed the fact that some covid bail-outs were reserved only for black people, he quite literally described these opposers of naked racism as enemies who must be defeated by the state. (Never mind the fact that such a policy hurts black people just as much as whites, if not more so.)
The covid pandemic has been a feeding frenzy of corruption and insane lockdown policies impossible to implement in a poor country, and proven ineffective everywhere it is enforced. (Name one country that has avoided a wave of infections by somehow locking their countries down.)
His health minister has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar as has his own spokesman - his closest aides, in other words. In the UK, a Prime Minister would be forced to resign under such conditions, by its rabid media. South African media repeat the lie that we are led, that Ramaphosa is majestic, and they do not even mention how he never, ever faces media questions when he makes his announcements on Sunday nights.
Other South African thinkers, like Roman Cabanac and Robert Duigan, have made similar points to the above, with greater detail than I have. And this points to a new kind of opposition to ANC tyranny, gathering force: there is no DA coming to the rescue (despite them being preferable to the ANC), there is no good ANC coming to the rescue. The entire South African polity has been destroyed.
Provinces should start seceding, if they want to escape the tyrannical Ramaphosa/ANC regime.
The truth is often terrifying and infuriating. But it must be faced. Only the false prophets tell us there is peace when there is no peace.
Great article. I applaud your honesty. And agree with your conclusion
The problem is what colonial masters created, an underdeveloped and poor black nation with no capacity to transform the lives destroyed. The damage was done before the ANC came to power. Britain and France are better because Africa is crumbling. These are the architects.
Structural poverty is not a product of Mbeki, Zuma or the ANC.
Black writers must challenge this dangerous narrative that glorifies apartheid and the Slaughter of Africans.