Communist Party headquarters, Johannesburg, July 2005, continued
I REGAINED THE THREAD of my exposition. ‘Comrades, let’s be perfectly open with one another,’ I requested of the group at Party headquarters. ‘I’m going to open my chest, and although this discussion should be confidential, if what I say gets to Zuma, I couldn’t care less.’
I certainly had their full attention and resolved to keep my cool. I had eyeballed the secretary of the Young Communist League (YCL), Buti Manamela, an up-and-coming youth leader, who was pro-Zuma, and wondered just how far he would be swallowed by personal ambition. The Cosatu president, the heavily bearded Willie Madisha, shuffled perceptibly, and looked down. I guessed he was unhappy with the growing adulation of Zuma and was in the process of falling out with Blade, who had a tight grip on the Party.
‘Comrades,’ I continued, ‘I want to address aspects about Jacob Zuma, such as tribalism; the question of morality; the fact that he is no working-class hero; and the issue of conspiracy and security.’
Blade nodded with puckered mouth, beckoning me to proceed. Outside, the city hummed under a bright winter sky. Through our upper-floor windows we had a commanding view of downtown Johannesburg’s skyline: skyscrapers, mining houses and financial centres long past their glory days. The capitalist values that once had their fountainhead in the City of Gold had taken flight to the new capital of Mammon – the gleaming towers of Sandton City on Johannesburg’s northern edge. I wondered whether we communists could adjust to the times.
‘Comrades, with all due respect, I have known JZ from his recruitment into MK in Durban, 1962 when he was a promising young activist and well thought of.’ Apart from Jeremy, who had joined while studying abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1972, the others were products of the internal struggle of the 1980s and only knew him after 1990. ‘Jeremy knows him from Zambia. I worked with him very closely in Maputo from 1980.’ I gestured in a friendly way at Blade. ‘General secretary, you were at loggerheads with him, you and Harry Gwala’ – I evoked the deceased SACP firebrand from Pietermaritzburg – ‘from the time he returned from exile, you warned about Zuma as a conservative, a traditionalist, a tribalist who was too close to Inkatha and the Zulu monarch.’
‘You comrades might not be aware that Joe Slovo and Joe Modise dissolved an MK structure he commanded in Maputo in 1979 because they were unhappy with the way he was working and withholding reports,’ I continued. ‘When I arrived in Maputo to work with him in a new structure I was discreetly warned about that, but decided to take my own time and judge him from personal experience.’
I was warming to the topic. ‘You know he’s no working-class hero. A man who immediately quit the Party the moment the ban was lifted in 1990 and we became public. Actually, comrades, quite different from Mbeki in that respect, whom the leadership saw as future president of the ANC and who in that position could not be a member of the Party.’
In retrospect, I recognise that the Party’s support for Zuma was more about its negative attitude towards his one-time close comrade, Thabo Mbeki, than about Zuma himself. Attitudes towards Mbeki by both the ANC’s Alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu, had hardened by 2005 into outright antagonism, rooted in dislike of Mbeki’s personal style and views, and towards the policies they believed he had foisted on the ANC and on South Africa.
As deputy to President Mandela from 1994 to 1999, when he played a central role in policy development characteristic more of a prime minister, and as president from 1999, Mbeki built on the compromises the ANC had felt it had to accept in the pre-democracy negotiations to consolidate acceptance of a largely market-driven liberal economic policy. While there was a need for stability in the traumatic 1990–4 period, some argued that this no longer applied by 1996 when the pro-market Gear (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) programme was instituted. The question was no longer one of maintaining stability because of the political violence and tensions. Instead, the rationale became economic issues.
At the core of this move to the right was the assumption that market stability was primary, and that rapid growth of the South African market economy would see benefits accruing to the black majority. This would ease the poverty experienced by the bulk of the population.
In retrospect, this was clearly wrong, as events were to prove. From 1996, when Mandela unveiled Gear, to 1999, inflation fell faster than the policy predicted, and government spending was slashed. But while GDP edged up, it did so well below Gear predictions, and employment levels plummeted while cuts in government spending meant there was ever less to distribute to poor and jobless South Africans.
Not only did the policy alienate the SACP and Cosatu, but Mandela’s often haughty decision-making style and the general perceptions of Mbeki as arrogant and as wanting to break up the alliance added personal bad blood to the mix. In addition, the 1999 defence procurement programme (the ‘arms deal’) strengthened the ANC allies’ sense that the organisation had lost its way. Ironically, it also produced a champion around which opposition to the ANC’s policies, and to Mbeki’s presidency, could coalesce. Almost as simultaneously as Mkeki discovered Aids Denialism, apparently on the internet, Cosatu joined the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) appeal for free medicine.
Just as we were meeting, Mugabe was sweeping 700,000 urban dwellers out of the cities – mainly opposition supporters – and in South Africa, community protests against inadequate service delivery was on the rise. The Party and Cosatu had lost patience with what they regarded as Mbeki’s treachery.1
My argument to my colleagues in the SACP was less about the pros of Mbeki than about the cons of Zuma. He was a wily operator and had by the mid-1990s recognised that Party and Cosatu antagonism to Mbeki and his market-driven policies could be useful to his career. He wooed both the Party and Cosatu, and although he was politically and ideologically aligned to Mbeki, he successfully painted himself as a viable alternative to Mbeki, able to rebuild the ANC as the ideological vehicle it had been pre-1994.
‘But comrades, let’s face it,’ I continued, ‘it’s Zuma’s corruption, his lack of morality, which has landed him in the soup and brought our movement into disrepute. I don’t have to go into the litany of corruption, whether we consider the Schabir Shaik relationship, starting with all the petty favours and leading to bigger things such as the arms purchase benefits; the talk about benefactors and crooked tycoons; all the gossip swirling about his head ever since he put his foot back in the country.’
I could have added perhaps the single most depressing thing, the suicide in 2000 of one of his wives, Kate Mantsho, while he was deputy president, and the note she left behind: ‘Life had been hell’ living with him; ‘bitter’ and ‘painful’, she wrote.2 Everyone knew about that unspoken episode though it had been brushed under the carpet. Mbeki’s director general, Frank Chikane, had prevented the media from getting hold of the suicide note and the Presidency had gone to inordinate lengths to protect Zuma – rather than conspiring to destroy his career.
I thought of those seemingly innocent far-off days in Maputo, being driven by Zuma through the busy streets, stopping to pick up a pretty young woman, niftily dressed in an Airways uniform: tight skirt, blouse, scarf, high-heel shoes, a figure you whistled about. She smiled sweetly as she got into the back seat and he introduced me to her as Kate.