President Jacob Zuma – PICTURE: AFP

 

WHEN the ANC started preparing for the 2009 election campaign, one thing was crystal clear: the party‘s tripartite allies, Cosatu and the SA Communist Party, were fully behind it.

Cosatu had 2.2million members. Each one could go home and mobilise their family members.

The trade union federation‘s then secretary-general, Zwelinzima Vavi, proclaimed that he was prepared to kill for ANC president Jacob Zuma.

SACP leader Dr Blade Nzimande was always with Vavi on stage, flanking Zuma at rallies and stepping in to protect Zuma from making intellectual gaffes.

This trio was complemented by a rampant and voluble ANC Youth League president, Julius Malema, who also proclaimed his preparedness to kill for Zuma.

Providing guidance and political cover was a graduate from the ANC Youth League, Fikile Mbalula, who ran a vigorous election campaign and pulled off a major coup by bundling Nelson Mandela on a plane to Johannesburg to be present at the ANC‘s final election rally. Where are they now?

Zuma‘s right-hand man at the time was Kgalema Motlanthe.

Motlanthe — who became Zuma‘s deputy after the 2009 election — is a disappointed man today. Recently he said that he refused to serve in Zuma‘s administration after 2012 because “if I continued serving in that leadership it would be a constant battle just to get them to operate on the basis of the constitution”.

Vavi has joined up with the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa to lead an exodus of 25% of Cosatu‘s members.

Cosatu‘s private-sector unions, such as the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union, could join up with Numsa. The once-mighty Cosatu is mostly left with public-sector unions such as the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union and the SA Democratic Teachers Union — workers whose livelihood depend on Zuma‘s continued high pay increases.

The Cosatu of 2009 is dead. The ANC goes into the 2016 local elections with a limping, divided and obsequious version of what Cosatu once was.

Malema‘s ANC Youth League no longer exists. He now leads Economic Freedom Fighters, a party that has been running rings around Zuma in parliament. What‘s left of the ANC Youth League is truly pathetic — a leader, Collen Maine, who is flirting with his midlife crisis, and an organisation that really only exists at national level, as it is made up of tenderpreneurs at provincial, regional and local level.

Then there is the sad case of the SACP, an organisation that dispensed with principle to throw all of its support behind Zuma.

It might have been Malema and Vavi who said they would kill for Zuma, but the organisation that really lived up to those words was the SACP.

Its whole leadership structure was absorbed into Zuma‘s cabinets of 2009 and 2014. Its moral and ethical compass was also subsumed by the Zuma administration — and it was silent when its natural constituency (the workers) was mowed down by police at Marikana in the worst case of police violence yet witnessed in the new South Africa.

Zuma is repaying that blind loyalty in his usual manner. Tensions between the president and Nzimande are now spilling over into the public domain. In the recent #FeesMustFall saga, Zuma has consistently sidelined Nzimande — the Minister of Higher Education — while speaking directly to university leaders. Zuma‘s praise singers, the new ANC Youth League leadership, last week issued a statement demanding that Nzimande be suspended from the ANC‘s national executive committee for apparently speaking on the party‘s 2017 succession battle. The SACP‘s kindergarten, the Young Communist League, then issued a statement saying the ANC Youth League‘s call for Nzimande to be suspended was “factional and a piece of rubbish”.

And so it goes. Word in the corridors of power is that there is a systematic campaign in motion to get rid of “the commies” from cabinet and all the upper echelons of the ANC and state-owned enterprises.

Zuma‘s great success between 2005 and 2007 was to unite virtually everyone who had been shafted, overlooked or offended by former president Thabo Mbeki. Zuma is a man of song and dance, of laughter and banter, but lacks substance or conviction except when it comes to lining his and his family‘s pockets.

Now, in about six months, he leads the ANC into an election it will only win on the basis of its glorious struggle history. The economy he has overseen since 2009 is collapsing, while he does nothing about key cogs, such as South African Airways. Institutions of accountability are under siege. Corruption has become a cancer. Crime is rampant while the police leaders that he appointed fight each other.

Zuma‘s ANC is not so mighty, either. In just three years it has lost more than 450000 members. Cosatu has split. The SACP wants to contest elections on its own, appalled by the corruption it has experienced under Zuma. Crucially, the long-standing tri-partite alliance is on its knees.

Zuma has achieved the impossible. In just six years he has managed to destroy what other ANC leaders had put together over a period of 100 years.

 

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