Implications of Zuma victory on Zim

Zuma’s inauguration will come on the back of a commanding electoral victory by the ANC in last week’s general election that many liberals and their media sidekicks had hoped would dearly cost the liberation movement because of what they claimed was the ANC’s contamination by Zuma’s alleged unsuitability as president of South Africa under scurrilous claims that he is corrupt and immoral.
Before the April 22 election, one of the well known media sidekicks of liberals, Bishop Desmond Tutu, even went as far as to declare that a Zuma presidency in the event of an ANC win would leave him ashamed to walk in the streets of New York as a South African Bishop!
Ironically Bishop Tutu, whose neo-colonial mind knows no bounds, did not understand that he in fact should be ashamed that he believes it is more of a big deal for his apparent identity crisis for him to walk in the streets of New York as opposed to proudly walk in the streets of Soweto.
Through the likes of Bishop Tutu, the hopeless claim the liberals sought to make in vain during the animated election campaign is that Zuma, who is a celebrated polygamist, was unfit to be President first because he was charged although acquitted of rape charges. Second, because he was charged with over 100 counts including corruption, money laundering, racketeering and tax evasion only to have them dropped a few days before the election by prosecutors who still insisted they had a watertight case against him.
What is as amazing as it is instructive for our situation in Zimbabwe is that the onslaught against Zuma and the ANC in the South African election was led by white liberals, political lackeys and media hacks who ply their trade under the convenient but false cover of their catch all mantra: the rule of law. If there is one thing that South Africa’s election 2009 did, it was to demonstrate beyond doubt that the rule of law in Africa has become a blunt weapon, not a principle, typically used by vested interests in the West, racist liberals and their local mouthpieces against nationalist leaders who stand by and speak for the interests of the black majority.  While it is true that Zuma was charged with the very serious crime of rape in a court of law, what is very significant in terms of the rule of law is not that he was charged but that he was in fact acquitted by the court having been presumed innocent in the first place.
The rule of law is indeed necessary and must be upheld at all times but the African experience, which was spectacularly demonstrated during the South African election campaign, is that it has become a dangerous weapon of choice against the masses. Detractors of the ANC also tried to derail the liberation organisation’s election campaign claiming that its leader, Zuma, was guilty of corruption and that South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) was wrong to drop charges against him on grounds that there had been political interference in the timing of its decision to recharge him late last year after a court had thrown out earlier charges and that only a court of law and not the NPA could acquit him.
What the NPA said was simply but significantly that it could not legally proceed with Zuma’s prosecution given audio evidence that proved some highly placed Thabo Mbeki loyalists within and outside the NPA, including its former national director Bulelani Ngcuka, had politically interfered with the case in order to deny Zuma his ascendancy to the presidency of South Africa.
What was telling about all this is that when the court acquitted Zuma on rape charges racist liberals and their media continued to present him as a rapist but when the NPA dropped legally contaminated corruption charges against him the same forces that did not respect his court acquittal in the rape case wanted the NPA to press ahead with his prosecution and let the courts decide as if they would accept a court acquittal this time.
Having failed to defeat the ANC by “stopping Zuma” under the false cloud of his legal woes, racist liberals and their media propagandists pretended that their electoral objective was to prevent the ANC from retaining a two-thirds majority. 
There’s now a syndrome in which racist liberals and their media would have the world believe that former liberation movements and now ruling parties in southern Africa measure their electoral success on whether they get two-thirds majority.  But that’s nonsense. The fact is that these parties, like their counterparts elsewhere, expect to get solid mandates from the electorate and only a mad person would not see the 65, 9 percent of the vote achieved by the ANC as pretty solid by any standard. The ANC did not run its campaign on some platform of wanting to win a two-thirds majority to change the constitution in any way, shape or form.  What the ANC wanted, given the negative onslaught against Zuma, was to win the election with a clear mandate to govern.
The Zuma presidency in South Africa and the new ANC’s way of doing things has profound implications and lessons for Zanu-PF, MDC-T and the shaky coalition government they formed on February 13.
Over the years, Zanu PF has had a topsy-turvy relationship with the ANC. During the brutal Gukurahundi period, there were hints and allegations from Zimbabwe’s ruling elite that the ANC was treacherously much more aligned to Joshua Nkomo’s PF-Zapu to the detriment of national unity. At that time the Zanu-PF government sought to align itself with the PAC in South Africa whose poor electoral performance since 1994 has led to its virtual decimation at the polls on April 22. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 after 27 years of cruel incarceration by the apartheid regime, and when he became South Africa’s first democratically elected President in 1994, the saint-like attention he got around the world appeared to irk President Robert Mugabe and his inner circle who until then had believed that President Mugabe was the undisputed iconic pan African leader.
The Mandela factor did not help relations between Zanu-PF and the ANC and things got worse when Mandela married Gracia Machel who had been seen as one of Zimbabwe’s best friends among progressives who were supposed to see Mandela as a creature of global racists opposed to the African revolution that Samora Machel stood and died for.   And there was a fight that is yet to be fully told between Mandela and President Mugabe over the control of Sadc and its key institutions such as the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security.
By the time Mbeki became President in 1999 a generally bad relationship between Zanu-PF and the ANC became worse not least because the ruling class in Zimbabwe saw Mbeki as an arrogant and pretentious intellectual who was prone to using his presidency to lecture President Mugabe in public. However, things dramatically changed when the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis deepened between 2002 and 2008. Mbeki, who had previously seen President Mugabe as an out of touch autocrat started viewing the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis as a strategic opportunity he could manipulate to extend his hegemony within South Africa, the region, continent and the wider world. 
As a result, Mbeki moved closer and closer to President Mugabe in the hope of politically influencing him to promote change in Zimbabwe through succession politics whose import would be to extend Zanu-PF rule while containing the MDC-T that was being vocally supported by Cosatu, a key ANC partner in South Africa which was critical of Mbeki’s policies on such issues as HIV/Aids, poverty alleviation, the welfare of workers and Zimbabwe.
Mbeki’s change of strategy, under what became vilified as his policy of “quiet diplomacy” on Zimbabwe as if diplomacy can be done in any other way which is not quiet, did not necessarily change the relationship between the ANC and Zanu-PF.
  On the contrary, Mbeki steadily lost control of the ANC itself which became more and more influenced by various forces critical of him and loyal to Zuma such as Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (Sacp) which were particularly opposed to President Mugabe and Zanu-PF. 
By the end of 2008, Mbeki and his cronies lost the leadership of the ANC at the party’s Polokwane conference to Zuma and his anti-Zanu PF and anti-Mugabe allies. 
Therefore, the ANC forces that recorded a resounding victory at the polls last week are most definitely anti-Mbeki and they are by extension also anti-Mugabe.
But are they also anti-Zanu-PF?  While some in that party think so, the truth is that they are not.  The ANC under Zuma is not anti-Zanu-PF as a liberation movement.  Rather, many in the new ANC actually support Zanu-PF as a liberation movement but they are disappointed by what they see as Zanu-PF’s betrayal of the liberation struggle.
To many in the Zuma-led ANC, Zanu -PF ceased to be a ruling liberation movement long time ago and is now a factionalised, policy-impervious, patronage based party run through government institutions by one person, President Mugabe, who no longer commands respect or support within the party or the country.
There is nobody in the hierarchy of the new ANC who believes that Zanu-PF has any political future as it is currently organised.  In fact, the nightmare scenario for the incoming ANC government after May 9 is that President Mugabe will yet again unwisely seek re-election at the Zanu-PF congress as the party’s first secretary and president later this year. Well meaning comrades in the new ANC wish that President Mugabe and Zanu-PF could be humbled if not inspired by the fact that Zuma will be the fourth president of South Africa from the ANC after only 15 years of the party’s rule since the end of apartheid in 1994.  For the Zuma camp, it is a total disgrace to the liberation movement in the region and Zanu-PF in particular that President Mugabe has remained at the helm of his party and government for 29 years since 1980. 
Many in Zuma’s ANC rightly believe that President Mugabe’s 29 year rule specifically explains why both Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe are in serious political trouble today.  In their view, President Mugabe’s last honourable opportunity to gracefully exit was at the Zanu-PF congress in 2004.
Based on its own experience on how it toppled Mbeki at Polokwane, and based on the fact that generally the ANC has seen its leaders come and go through democratic elections that have strengthened it as a liberation movement now in power, Zuma’s camp has not understood how Zanu-PF leaders such as Emmerson Mnangagwa or Joice Mujuru among others have failed to use democratic means to replace President Mugabe.
As such, the impending Zuma presidency has serious implications for President Mugabe and Zanu-PF.  One thing for sure is that there will be no business as usual going forward. ANC politics of leadership change will most certainly find expression among ruling liberation movements in southern Africa.
None of this is good news for the MDC-T some of whose supporters and Western backers have presumed that the nervy relationship between the new ANC and Zanu-PF means that Zuma’s camp favours Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his party.  Far from it. The comrades in the new ANC, including its Cosatu and Sacp partners, are embarrassed by the MDC-T which they now see as a neo-colonial construction that is not only anti-liberation movement and anti-people but also ideologically and policy free.
Of particular note is that some key Cosatu operatives, who inexplicably previously saw the MDC-T as a worker’s party, have abandoned that view and now see Prime Minister Tsvangirai and his colleagues as opportunists who are not masters of the political interests they proclaim. 
Even within the MDC -T itself, the earlier infantile belief that a liberation movement like the ANC would partner Prime Minister Tsvangirai and his MDC-T against  President Mugabe and Zanu-PF is gone.
As fate would have it, the fact that Zuma is Welshman Ncube’s in-law, after the former’s son married the latter’s daughter last December has perished the idle thought of a Zuma-Tsvangirai alliance among MDC-T activists who clutch at any straw that serves their propaganda.  This does not at all mean that the ANC or its incoming government will have better relations with MDC-M on marital grounds not least because the leader of Ncube’s clique that is masquerading as a political party, Arthur Mutambara, has shown himself to be more of an unstable political clown given to childish posturing and the display of other forms of political madness. Otherwise many within the new ANC are miffed by what they say are not so secret businesses and properties, including posh houses, owned by some senior MDC-T leaders in South Africa and elsewhere in the region acquired with questionable resources. 
The bottom line is that there is absolutely no objective reason to expect the incoming Zuma administration to have a cosy relationship with MDC-T.
All things considered, the foregoing does not, however, mean that the new ANC government will be indifferent to Zimbabwe’s coalition government.  What many have not understood, especially those who have previously sought to pit Zuma against Mbeki on the Zimbabwean question, is that South Africa is a state with a government whose duty is to advance that country’s national interest.
Without doubt, and regardless of who is in power on the day, it is in South Africa’s national interest to have peace and stability in Zimbabwe.  In this connection, there is no doubt that the coalition government bringing together Zanu-PF and the two MDC formations is the best formula on offer for promoting peace and stability in the country and even the region.
There are two crucial issues on this score, one political and the other economic. Politically, even the most ardent opponents or critics of the coalition government will agree that the coalition government has succeeded to reduce the political tension that was polarising the country with the consequences of untold instability. The fact that the parties in the coalition were the ones responsible for the tension in the first place is immaterial because its victims were innocent people. The South African government under Mbeki, and later under President Kgalema Motlanthe, has been very instrumental in ensuring that the parties to the coalition government work together on the political front to keep the peace and maintain stability in the country and the region.  Given that Motlanthe is a key member of the Zuma camp, there is no prize for guessing that his political and diplomatic approach towards the coalition government, which is in fact the Mbeki approach, will be continued and intensified by Zuma. An area which is more complicated however, is on the economic front.  Some two weeks ago, South African foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told the media that contrary to popular perceptions in some quarters Sadc countries had never said they would give Zimbabwe’s coalition government the US$8 billion or so it maintains it needs to revive the economy. Rather, she said Sadc had committed itself to helping the coalition government to look for the money from international donors and not to give it any.
What this means is that Zimbabweans should not expect any serious funding from the incoming South African government under Zuma.  This is a big challenge to the coalition government because, as made clear by the directors of the IMF only last weekend, multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, IMF and African Development Bank will not provide any assistance to Zimbabwe until the lifting of US economic sanctions that by law prohibit their directors from voting for any aid or loans to the country.
There is therefore nothing on the horizon to suggest the Zuma government in South Africa will be able to help Zimbabwe’s coalition government to overcome the scourge of illegal economic sanctions or to have them lifted.
 In the end, Zimbabweans cannot wait much longer to see if those in the two MDC formations, particularly Prime Minister Tsvangirai and his MDC-T, who vigorously campaigned for the illegal sanctions will use the same vigour to successfully campaign for their removal.  If they can’t, the coalition government will collapse as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.