Enemy of the People

How Jacob Zuma stole South Africa and how the people fought back

Adriaan Basson, Pieter du Toit

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781868428182
• eBook ISBN: 9781868428199
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Enemy of the People is the first definitive account of Zuma's catastrophic misrule, offering eyewitness descriptions and cogent analysis of how South Africa was brought to its knees – and how a people fought back. When Jacob Zuma took over the leadership of the ANC one muggy Polokwane evening in December 2007, he inherited a country where GDP was growing by more than 6% per annum, a party enjoying the support of two-thirds of the electorate, and a unified tripartite alliance. Today, South Africa is caught in the grip of a patronage network, the economy is floundering and the ANC is staring down the barrel of a defeat at the 2019 general elections.

How did we get here?

Zuma first brought to heel his party, Africa's oldest and most revered liberation movement, subduing and isolating dissidents associated with his predecessor Thabo Mbeki. Then saw the emergence of the tenderpreneur and those attempting to capture the state, as well as a network of family, friends and business associates that has become so deeply embedded that it has, in effect, replaced many parts of government. Zuma opened up the state to industrial-scale levels of corruption, causing irreparable damage to state enterprises, institutions of democracy, and the ANC itself.

But it hasn't all gone Zuma's way. Former allies have peeled away. A new era of activism has arisen and outspoken civil servants have stepped forward to join a cross-section of civil society and a robust media. As a divided ANC square off for the elective conference in December, where there is everything to gain or to lose, award-winning journalists Adriaan Basson and Pieter du Toit offer a brilliant and up-to-date account of the Zuma era.

PART 1

The capture of the ANC

CHAPTER 1

The coalition of the wounded

‘He’ll never become president. He doesn’t have enough support and he cannot do the job. Besides, the women’s lobby
will never allow it.’

– Naledi Pandor and Thoko Didiza, on Jacob Zuma,
during a Gauteng ANC media networking dinner, Sunnyside Park Hotel, 2006

‘Comrades! Comrades! Can the comrades at the front please sit down, so the comrades at the back can see?’

Dren Nupen, the petite, white-haired elections officer from the EleXions Agency – the company that managed the leadership election at the ANC’s 52nd national conference in Polokwane in December 2007 – was standing on an empty stage, struggling to make herself heard above the din in the hot, stuffy delegates’ marquee. She almost willed them into submission because she could simply not be heard over the chanting, singing and dancing. The conference was held in the grounds of the former University of the North in Mankweng, during the humid rainy season, and was dominated by factional battles. The build-up to the gathering had been acrimonious, with the different camps planting disinformation, launching smear campaigns and using dirty tricks on each other. Thabo Mbeki was determined to succeed in securing a third term as leader, while the South African Communist Party (SACP), Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the ANC’s leagues coalesced around Jacob Zuma.

‘Zuma mustn’t be allowed to win … he will destroy the country,’ was the message from the Mbeki faction.

‘Mbeki cannot get another term … he will become a dictator,’ was the rallying cry from the other side.

Most of the 4 000 delegates that Tuesday evening, 18 December 2007, were chanting ‘Zu-ma! Zu-ma!’ – with the emphasis on ‘-ma’ thundering around the enclosed space. Many were holding up a section of City Press, with a picture of a singing Zuma underneath the headline ‘What the Zumafesto holds’. The outgoing National Executive Committee (NEC) had vacated the stage and were sitting on the left-hand side of the giant tent. Mbeki sat in the front row, wearing a navy golf shirt and a tan sports jacket. He was surrounded by his kitchen cabinet, Mbhazima Shilowa, the loyal Gauteng premier and former Cosatu boss, Essop Pahad, Minister in the Presidency and Mbeki’s enforcer, his brother Aziz, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Mosiuoa Lekota, the Minister of Defence, who had been shouted down on the very first day of the conference. They were the people who told him what he wanted to hear: that he must stand for a third term as party leader, that Zuma cannot be allowed to win and that they had the numbers to ensure that.

When the delegates, who were almost apoplectic with excitement, had calmed, Nupen took to the microphone and read from a note: ‘The number of votes received … by comrade Jacob Zuma: two thousand three …’ The rest of her words – she was supposed to say ‘two thousand three hundred and twenty-nine’ – were drowned out by the absolute bedlam that had broken out. Zuma’s supporters were dancing on the tables, singing and shouting, making the hand gesture that football coaches use when they want to substitute a player and which became symbolic of the conference. ‘Zu-MA, Zu-MA, Zu-MA!’ reverberated around the tent. ‘Comrade Zuma received 2 329 votes,’ Nupen repeated. ‘Comrade Thabo Mbeki received 1 505 votes.’

Zuma was welcomed onto the stage amid raucous cheering and, wearing a brown leather jacket and ANC cap, turned to acknowledge his supporters. Mbeki, still sitting in his seat, was stunned. In an instant, he became old, his face creased, his skin grey, and his hair and goatee looked white. He tried to hold on to a smile and winked towards the media contingent, sitting cross-legged in front of the stage. To his left, Lekota leaned forward, clapping hands and smiling at Zuma. Essop Pahad, to his right, frowned, and Shilowa, behind Mbeki, sat stony-faced.

It was brutal – a disaster and utter humiliation for the Mbeki slate. Zuma’s candidates defeated their opponents by roughly the same margin – 60% support to 40% – every time. Kgalema Motlanthe over Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma for deputy president; Baleka Mbete over Joel Netshitenzhe for national chairperson; Gwede Mantashe over Lekota for secretary general, Thandi Modise over Thoko Didiza for deputy secretary general and Mathews Phosa over Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka for treasurer general.1

Mbeki went onto the stage and gave Zuma an awkward hug, shook his hand and returned to his seat as delegates shouted ‘ANC! ANC! ANC!’ in staccato. Outside the tent it was drizzling softly, inside it was steaming, heaving. The election for the 80-member NEC saw prizes for a number of Zuma backers. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela received the most votes; the SACP’s Jeremy Cronin (ranked fifth) and Blade Nzimande (11th) were near the top; loyalists Jeff Radebe and Jessie Duarte received strong support, as did former ANC Youth League (ANCYL) leader Malusi Gigaba, Free State chairperson Ace Magashule and ANCYL president, Fikile Mbalula. Derek Hanekom came in at 23rd, Zweli Mkhize 24th, Bathabile Dlamini 29th and Cyril Ramaphosa – who had been out of politics for almost a decade – was ranked at 30.

Zwelinzima Vavi, then general secretary of Cosatu – along with the SACP’s Nzimande and the ANCYL’s Mbalula, Zuma’s most loyal of operatives – was relieved at the victory but cautious. Days before the elections, Vavi had said, ‘The media demonised Zuma terribly, they created a monster out of him.’ If it wasn’t for Cosatu and the workers, Zuma would either have been in prison or in his home town, Vavi said. ‘Ideologically and otherwise, Zuma we like him because the fellow has some natural gifts: down to earth, humane, accessible. He is by nature a unifier. We have never seen Zuma be angry against anyone. He laughs off the most provocative statements made against him. He will never throw tantrums. We see ourselves in him, not a high-flying intellectual, arrogant who will not listen to anyone.’2

But there was a rider: Vavi refused an offer to take up a seat in the NEC, telling the media after Zuma’s victory he was content to remain as Cosatu’s general secretary. ‘Our role will remain that of providing checks and balances. We can’t be co-opted. We need to remain on the outside,’ he said. Those were to prove prescient words.

At a media conference the day after the election, Mbalula, who at the age of 36 was technically too old to serve as ANCYL president and would hand over the reins of the organisation to Julius Malema in five months’ time, was triumphant. He bounced around the room, talking to journalists and bragging about how they had plotted Mbeki’s fall. ‘Nobody believed us when we said Zuma will win … well, you were all wrong!’ he crowed.

‘There are many kinds of denialism, you know. Aids is only just one sort,’ said Jeremy Cronin,3 the SACP second general secretary and a strident Mbeki critic, referring to the distance between the then president and the party’s rank and file, and Mbeki’s reviled policy on HIV/AIDS.

Zuma’s ascension to the party leadership was the biggest political moment in the country since the advent of democracy in April of 1994. It signalled a change of course for the young democracy and introduced populism, cynical manipulation and organised corruption into the South African body politic. It also entrenched factionalism and division in the ANC. And although the governing Tripartite Alliance (the ANC, SACP and Cosatu) remained unified for a short period of time, it exposed the deep ideological cleavages between these organisations.

When Mbeki fired Zuma from his position as deputy president on 14 June 2005 during a speech to a joint session of Parliament, Zuma was not in the house. Two weeks earlier, Justice Hilary Squires had found Zuma’s friend and associate Schabir Shaik guilty on three counts of corruption and fraud for soliciting bribes on behalf of the then deputy president. No specific finding against Zuma was made but, from the thousands of hours of expert testimony and forensic evidence put before the court, it was clear – Zuma had a case to answer for. His name appears a total of 474 times in the judgment, with the word ‘corrupt’ or ‘corruption’ appearing 14 times in the same sentence.

Squires said in his judgment:4

Shaik is quite plainly anything but a fool. Our assessment of him over the prolonged period he spent in the witness box, supplemented by the tone of his letters and his contributions to shareholder and board meetings revealed in the minutes, show him as being ambitious, far-sighted, brazen, if not positively aggressive in pursuit of his interests and discernibly focussed on achieving his vision of a large successful multi-corporate empire; and ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Part 1: The capture of the ANC
• Part 2: President of scandals
• Part 3: Institutional capture
• Part 4: 9/12
• Part 5: We the people
• Part 6: Zupta fights back
• Part 7: Endgame