Former President Jacob Zuma who now leads MK Party. Picture: Itumeleng English/ Independent Newspapers
If the current state of coalition politics in South Africa is an indicator of the health of the Government of National Unity (GNU), then all is not well.
Cyril Ramaphosa and Helen Zille will need to take a long walk to soberness to accept that outside of their coalition echo chamber, a different political environment is brewing.
The long arm of the legacy of Jacob Zuma’s presidency has not gone to rest. Everywhere it is stirring up strategic disruptions he is so well known for doing.
With the Oudtshoorn and Thabazimbi municipalities as well as the City of Johannesburg seeing breakups between the DA and the ANC, it is clear that all is not well in coalition land.
Voters would have expected that the working agreements between the ANC and the DA would influence its councillors to create coalition stability as they go towards 2026, but it appears that the old demons of political power have once again overpowered the necessity of political maturity.
New Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero summed up this chaos after his election as mayor, when he said, “Our leadership has been disruptive since 2016.”
Inserting the service delivery mantra as a priority, he too fails to see that political maturity is what local government needs to ensure stability and service delivery.
The only certainty Johannesburg voters have is that political maturity will once again be at the mercy of political power. What has all this got to do with Jacob Zuma? The erstwhile ANC intelligence operative is not resting; nor going away.
He has survived Thabo Mbeki, Julius Malema and the Constitutional Court’s attempts to get rid of him.
No other political leader can speak to the hearts and minds of the poor as eloquently as Jacob Zuma does, even if that speech is laced with contradictions and untruths. Zuma is the poor person’s president.
For many, he is greater than a president – he is the poor people’s chief. He is a trans-tribal king and chief with street-fighting prowess.
The ANC under President Ramaphosa has no real centre of power any more. Factional loyalties are destroying it from the inside. For Zuma, MK is the ideal vehicle to get vengeance on those who ousted him, beginning with Mbeki, Malema and Mbalula.
His ultimate goal is to decimate the voter majority of the ANC and be the only recourse for its survival. He wants to return to the ANC to be its potentate. He has no desire to be president of South Africa again. His only desir is to be the ANC’s lifelong chief, on whose instruction everything happens.
Zuma is a theatrical master. He speaks to the poor directly. His message to them is: “Look how they fight me, a black man who wants to help my people. They object to me all the time. If I’m gone, they will do this to you too. You need me to fight for you.”
He has created images in the minds of his voters of how black leaders are persecuted in the media and how the poverty of black people “won’t change under any other government.”
He portrays himself as the lone fighter for the black poor. Zuma does this brilliantly. The black poor understand the role of the chief – and Zuma is their Trans-Tribal Chief. He is also the disrespected, maligned chief. And in tribal terms such disrespect means excommunication, isolation and persecution to those who disrespect the Chief.
He is a master strategist who wages a war of mental pictures he paints on the minds of the oppressed poor. Zille and Ramaphosa know this looming crisis. Zuma’s hand is everywhere.
Unless they shore up their hatches and stop their immature language of power and warfare with each other, they will play right into the hands of the Trans-Tribal Chief.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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