Zuma: The road to the presidency

 Will he surprise everyone as the charming people’s president, or will there be a Zuma establishment behind the scenes that will be pulling the strings? And who in business will have his ear?
When Jacob Zuma proudly steps on to the hallowed grounds of the Union Buildings to claim his prize next month, he will do well to remember the contribution of Thabo Mbeki — the man he defeated after a brutal power struggle — to his improbable victory.
Without Mbeki’s decisions, missteps and at times downright naiveté, it is doubtful whether Zuma would have even been in any position to pursue the highest office in the land. His victory is a gamble that paid off handsomely, beyond his wildest dreams.
Mbeki may not have plucked Zuma from obscurity. But he is unintentionally the architect of Zuma’s presidential triumph. Zuma is a creation of Mbeki. The Zuma presidency — and the type of society that will be spawned by it — will be Mbeki’s enduring legacy. He unwittingly chaperoned the man to power.
Zuma was minding his own business as the ANC leader in KwaZulu Natal, not greatly influencing policy decisions in the party, and may probably have seen the premiership of his beloved province as the zenith of his ambition, when Mbeki, on succeeding Nelson Mandela, anointed Zuma as his deputy.
Mbeki’s motives in picking Zuma were hardly honourable. His intention was to stop the resurgent candidacy of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She was regarded as a shoo-in for deputy president. Mbeki personally intervened and stopped her nomination from the floor. Unlike Madikizela-Mandela, Zuma was seen as unthreatening and malleable. At the time, however, the grassroots had no appetite for Zuma.
Though Mbeki wanted Zuma to be his deputy in the ANC, he never saw him as deputy president of SA. That’s how lowly he thought of the man who was later to bite the hand that raised him. Mbeki wanted Mangosuthu Buthelezi to be deputy president of the country, and in exchange, he wanted the IFP to forgo its claim to the KZN premiership. But Buthelezi balked.
As one of Mandela’s two deputies — FW de Klerk was the other — Mbeki was in charge of the day-to-day running of government. He was almost a co-president.
When Mbeki succeeded Mandela, he took all the powers with him.
Buthelezi saw the position for the shell it was, and promptly rejected it. Mbeki had no alternative but to offer the job to Zuma, the man who should have got it in the first place.
Zuma was to serve his boss with loyalty and diligence. There is no evidence of Zuma disagreeing with Mbeki or hoeing a different path to his.
In 2001, after a near-rebellion in the ANC when Mbeki had accused three party stalwarts — Mathews Phosa, Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale — of plotting to overthrow him, Zuma, at the behest of Mbeki acolytes, pledged his loyalty to Mbeki and promised not to challenge him for the ANC leadership.
That episode marked the beginning of simmering dissent against Mbeki’s leadership, which up to that point had been secure and unassailable. Nobody, in either the party or government, dared to question him even as he pursued loony policies on HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe.
Zuma remained the loyal lieutenant as Mbeki excoriated Cosatu and the SACP — now among Zuma’s most fervent supporters — for challenging his economic policies.
It was the conviction of Schabir Shaik, Zuma’s so-called financial adviser, that eventually drove a wedge between the two. With his deputy being investigated by a unit headed by Bulelani Ngcuka, a close associate, Mbeki had to walk a tightrope. He’s known to have complained to his aides that while Ngcuka kept him informed about the progress of the investigation of Zuma’s relationship with Shaik, Zuma was studiously keeping matters to himself.
And, not for the first time, Mbeki was to save Zuma’s bacon. Ngcuka is known to have wanted to charge Zuma and Shaik together, but was dissuaded from doing so by Mbeki. Ngcuka said as much in an off-the-record briefing with black editors. One newspaper quoted Ngcuka at the time saying Zuma would leave the Union Buildings in leg irons. In the end, he didn’t.
Ngcuka’s now infamous announcement at a press briefing, with then justice minister Penuell Maduna sitting next to him, that though he had a prima facie case against Zuma it was unwinnable, was in retrospect a parting shot by a man who knew he had a case against Zuma but had been stopped from nailing him.
Shaik’s conviction, and especially Judge Hilary Squires’s strong comments on corruption and Zuma’s implication in it, forced Mbeki to announce Zuma’s dismissal as deputy president. That unleashed a political tsunami, to use Zwelinzima Vavi’s word, that was ultimately to sink Mbeki’s career.
In sacking him from government, Mbeki also convinced Zuma to stand down from his party responsibilities, thus condemning him to some sort of political purdah. In other words, his political career would come to an end. Zuma was later to tell the party faithful that this was done without his consent.
It was Zuma’s good fortune that his dismissal came immediately before a meeting of the party’s national general council, a body that has the power to overrule the leadership. Zuma’s supporters came fully prepared, and it was here that Mbeki lost the party.
A rebellion from the floor forced Zuma’s reinstatement as party deputy president. Mbeki tried to play the unifier while at the same time standing by his dismissal of Zuma. It didn’t work. Instead the differences between the two men escalated into open warfare between the Zuma and Mbeki camps. Zuma’s fortunes were resuscitated. It was at the end of that conference, in an interview with the SABC, that Mbeki indicated he was prepared to serve another term as party leader.
Zuma supporters saw red. At last the reason for what they saw as the persecution of their leader was out in the open — it was to frustrate their man from becoming party leader, leaving the way clear for Mbeki to stay at the helm and probably change the constitution to allow him to serve a third term as the country’s president. It was a political conspiracy.
Also fuelling the animosity was the person Mbeki chose to replace Zuma as deputy president.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is married to Bulelani Ngcuka, who, after Mbeki, is probably the most hated man among Zuma supporters.
They see him as the source of all Zuma’s woes. Mbeki, as is his wont, never explained why he saw Mlambo-Ngcuka, fairly junior in the party, as an adequate replacement for Zuma. It was left to his foes to offer their own explanation.
Zuma’s options were clear: it was either to roll over, play dead and end up in prison, or take on Mbeki, defeat him and use his position to quash the corruption charges. He chose the latter. Having been relieved of his governmental responsibilities but still ANC deputy president, a ceremonial position with little responsibility, he had all the time in the world to use party structures to campaign for the leadership against Mbeki.
Mbeki’s biggest blunder, which played into Zuma’s hands, was to believe in his own political immortality. He just could not bring himself to believe that ANC members could reject him in favour of somebody he’s always regarded as a bit of a buffoon.
But reject him they did.
While Zuma, with little to do, was attending every party function or meeting on offer, no matter how inconsequential, Mbeki was usually out of the country as if he was unaware of the leadership challenge from Zuma. Mbeki didn’t campaign. He didn’t even see the need to lay out his case to the party membership as to why he should be re-elected party leader, especially given that the constitution didn’t allow him to serve a third term as the country’s president.
Thus suspicion was allowed to fester that Mbeki wanted to remain party leader either to anoint a sycophant as president who he would be able to control from Luthuli House, or, at worst, to change the constitution to allow him a third crack at the presidency.
What it means
But going into the elective conference in Polokwane in December 2007, Mbeki was already dead meat, a beaten man. Weeks earlier, Zuma had handsomely trounced him in provincial elections. But Mbeki could neither appreciate nor understand the depth of feeling against him in the party.
A more politically astute man would have thrown in the towel long before Polokwane, thus avoiding the humi-liation he suffered, and possibly Zuma’s triumph.
There was no raison de’être to Mbeki’s candidacy. He simply assumed that the delegates would vote for him once they were out of the clutches of their minders in the branches. It was, after all, their duty. That’s how he thought.
It’s this thinking that, for instance, underpins the ANC’s deployment policy. You do things not because it’s in your own interest to do so, but because it’s your duty to the party. It’s the mind-set that ruled the party in exile. But the party membership has moved on, and left Mbeki — and some of the exile brigade — behind.
If Mbeki was in tune with the thinking in the party he would have known that by staying in the race, he was helping Zuma’s cause; that the only way to stop Zuma was for him to step aside and allow some of the attractive candidates on offer — such as Cyril Ramaphosa, Trevor Manuel, Mosiuoa Lekota, Kgalema Motlanthe — to enter the race.
Zuma’s strongest selling point was the fact that he wasn’t Mbeki.
Many party delegates who were not too enthusiastic about Zuma voted for him just to prevent Mbeki from hanging on to power. Maybe Mbeki wanted to follow the example of his hero Robert Mugabe and cling to power forever. They just didn’t know. They were not prepared to take that gamble. And so Zuma profited.
In a strange sort of way, Mbeki is the chief architect of the coming Zuma presidency. He plucked him from anonymity when few people thought much of him. And when the two fell out and slugged it out legally and politically, Mbeki made so many blunders, which effectively smoothed Zuma’s path to power.
That is Mbeki’s legacy. — Financial Mail