Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Picture: SIMPHIWE NKWALI
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Peter Bruce on Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s African Union failure; her ex-husband’s mess at home and the nest British prime minister.
As violence and death return to South Sudan and its capital, Juba, the African Union has issued a statement condemning it all. Ho hum. As she prepares to leave and to return to South Africa, outgoing AU Commission chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is going to struggle to re-enter South African politics with any kind of record of her term at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa worth bragging about. It seems likely she will become a candidate for the ANC leadership when it holds its electoral congress in December next year. To succeed she would have to agree to continue, or at the very least not disturb, the patronage networks her former husband, Jacob Zuma, has built up throughout our body politic. It is a horrible prospect and I still can’t see how someone as intelligent as she obviously is would be prepared to do that. She would face opposition, particularly from the party base and party HQ, which would want to see tradition observed and for the deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, to take the top job. And the fact is her term has hardly been a glittering success. She has annoyed neighbouring Southern African countries by not staying for two terms and her departure has opened up a nasty debate in the AU as Francophone countries gather their forces to replace her with one of their own. It is a bit of a mess and this scathing criticism of her, while too personal in my view, accurately questions her record. In short, the author, a Nigerian human rights figure, accuses Dlamini-Zuma of having done almost nothing to really get her hands dirty solving the continent’s manifold problems: Good riddance, Dr. Dlamini-Zuma.
One of the things she will run straight into will be the mess created by her errant former husband. SA is in a mess. Zuma’s faction steamrolls on as the SABC, SAA, the NPA, Denel, Eskom and the Guptas simply do whatever they like, whatever the institutions designed to be checks and balances on power might have to say. The big victim is national treasury, which, despite its assurances that it would tighten up on the waste and abuse of the state’s finances, is simply being left in the dust. Carol Paton has written a simply brilliant analysis of the decay Zuma has wrought: ANC fires lay to waste Treasury’s sweat and toil.
There is no better example of this at present than the SABC, which, though it lives off guarantees supplied by treasury, has simply shown two fingers to its regulator and continues to impose naked and unambiguous censorship on the news. And it is very easy to do. Hlaudi Motsoeneng is protected by his minister, who in turn is protected by the president. The capture is complete. The decline is tangible and the ANC is left coughing in the dust, useless and sad: Op-Ed: Hlaudi, a mere symptom of a systemic threat.
The danger is not lost on the party though. In Gauteng, ANC leader Paul Mashatile has given this very encouraging interview to Bloomberg’s Sam Mkokeli. Reform is essential and urgent. Yes, we can all agree. But with Zuma so powerfully entrenched, how? “We have to ensure there is huge renewal of the ANC come 2017,” he says, “Otherwise we will not survive.” Read on: Paul Mashatile says ANC must reform or slowly die.
Meanwhile, as we all know and as I’ve long predicted (okay, I predicted it a week and a half ago, which turns out to be a very long time in modern British politics), Theresa May is to be the new UK prime minister. Tomorrow. This piece from The Spectator is a really great look into the way she operates: ‘The claws are never far away’: inside the court of Theresa May. It should be required reading for our diplomats. The Spectator is a Tory magazine though. Here is another view on May from a hostile newspaper, The Guardian. Not so nice: What does Britain’s next prime minister Theresa May believe?
http://www.financialmail.co.za/opinion/bruceslist/2016/07/12/bruce-s-list-africa-to-nkosazana-goodbye-and-good-riddance