[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Neoliberalism and Mbeki's 'impeachment'

[Patrick Bond]

Patrick Bond wrote:
> (This failure to reproduce neolibs is rather encouraging: ""It would 
> be good if he did stay on, but it would be even better if there were 
> five more of him waiting in the wings." Cronin's rebuttal to 
> Netshitenzhe amuses, but is rather serious, as he pointed out at the 
> CT Book Fair yesterday. There may be a backlash and reconfiguration of 
> centrist and conservative forces in both Mbeki and Zuma's camps in 
> coming months. So it seems reasonable to keep Mbeki on the run with 
> this SACP recall strategy, particularly as the various socio-economic 
> crises intensify.)
>
And here's the thesis more explicitly stated:

Business Day
17 June 2008
Read between the lines of Mbeki, Zuma joint letter on ANC unity
Anthony Butler

LAST weekend’s jointly authored letter in City Press from state 
President Thabo Mbeki and African National Congress (ANC) president 
Jacob Zuma had an ostensibly noble purpose: to curtail provincial 
conflict over candidate lists and premierships, and to insist that local 
factions must stop waving Zuma and Mbeki “camp” banners in their battles 
for control of state resources.

The letter’s stunning subtext was that Zuma has terminated his marriage 
of convenience with the left.

The idea of “two hostile camps” captures something real, if not tidy or 
definitive, about national ANC politics. The first broad grouping is the 
political establishment that has ruled SA for the past decade, dominated 
by Mbeki’s own ministers and senior officials. The government has 
included leftists and liberals too in this period, but they have been 
subordinated by the dominant group’s backbone of conservative 
former-exile enforcers.

The second camp has its origins in the leftist exile faction of Chris 
Hani, Joe Slovo and Mac Maharaj, and in the alliance this group formed 
with the leadership of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and union 
federation Cosatu in the early years of SA’s negotiated transition.

As UDF networks were dissolved, trade unions demonised, and the SACP 
leadership strategically co-opted in the decade after 1994, this leftist 
camp was kept perpetually on the back foot.

Three years ago, however, it entered into a marriage of convenience with 
Jacob Zuma. Mbeki’s tragically victimised deputy needed the support of 
the left to survive; and Cosatu and the South African Communist Party 
believed that they could not defeat Mbeki at Polokwane without Zuma.

Zuma’s alienation from the ruling establishment has turned out to be 
brief. As the two leaders explain in their City Press letter, “both of 
us worked together closely for three decades as friends, brothers and 
comrades, and (we) remain friends, brothers and comrades”.

Zuma is now heading home and the establishment is certain to welcome him 
with open arms. First, the City Press letter contemptuously rejects the 
idea that Mbeki imposed a “class project” through the macroeconomic Gear 
strategy.

“Since 1994, when we openly informed the nation about our Reconstruction 
and Development Programme”, Zuma and Mbeki write, “the ANC has not 
implemented any government programme that was hidden from the people.”

Second, whereas leftist challengers have promised a crackdown on 
enrichment and an end to mediocrity in the cabinet and official 
appointments, Zuma and Mbeki insist that feeble and sometimes corrupt 
members of the elite who have failed SA — the “perceived losers” of 
Polokwane as they call them — will stay in office and get Zuma’s protection.

Third, the joint letter resurrects a contrast between “genuine” and 
false ANC cadres. The leadership’s critics, former UDF members, 
communists, former black consciousness activists, and trade unionists: 
all of these are only incompletely members of the ANC.

The “genuine” ANC remains the exile network of Zuma and Mbeki — the 
politically cunning but practically ineffectual exile right that had to 
scuttle back to SA in 1991 to make sure a settlement was not negotiated 
without them.

Finally, the letter hints at political instability if any move is made 
to replace Zuma with an alternative leader. Warning “there can be no 
surprises”, Zuma and Mbeki caution against actions that might divide not 
just the ANC but “the nation”.

In so doing, they provide a chilling reminder that most of Zuma’s 
immediate rivals for the presidency are linked by descent with the north 
of the country, and that the so-called “xenophobic attacks” that also 
left 20 South African citizens from the north dead have allegedly been 
associated with Zulu chauvinism.

Now that he is back with his old friends, Zuma can depend on Mbeki to 
stall transitional arrangements that the left’s serial optimists are 
forever expecting to materialise. If Zuma enters the Union Buildings as 
state president next April, he and his enforcers will preside over a 
fundamentally unchanged government and national bureaucracy.

His rhetorical commitment to the ANC as the “only centre of power” will 
quickly fall away and leaders of the movement’s leftist camp, deputy 
president Kgalema Motlanthe and secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, will 
find their leverage extends little further than the front doors of 
Luthuli House.

In the presidency’s budget vote speech on June 11, Minister in the 
Presidency Essop Pahad read out passages from Zuma and Mbeki’s City 
Press letter so fluently and passionately he could almost have written 
them himself. “The ANC does not function as a double-headed monster”, he 
quoted. “The ANC has no camps.”

In truth, the ANC continues to have two camps. Motlanthe and Mantashe 
are in one; Mbeki and Zuma are back together in the other.

# Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.