Zuma caught in the middle

Against the background of a massive public sector strike entering its third week, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) finds itself in its most unstable situation since coming to power in 1994. Gone is the hype of the 2010 World Cup that offered temporary respite from the politically inevitable. Testing times lie ahead for the ruling party.

The ANC’s labour nightmare in part arises from its unnatural alliance with labour, but it is largely also a symptom – like violent service-delivery protests in the townships - of the growing inability of the ANC to govern effectively as its own internal instability worsens.

In a sense the public-sector strike, which with sympathy strikes may spiral by Thursday, has become the catalyst that has propelled the ruling party’s seething troubles to the fore.

There is much more at stake than just a strike for better pay. The core issues that have emerged are:

• Growing uncertainty whether President Jacob Zuma will be allowed a second term in office;
• Intensification of factionalism threatening to tear the ANC apart; and
• Parallel pressures that also threaten to break up the ANC’s alliance with labour and the SA Communist Party (SACP).

The strike has rendered the ANC – and Zuma – vulnerable, providing conditions for factional interests to up the stakes. Simplistically put, the major factional interests revolve around:

• The ANC right wing (also referred to as “nationalists”) currently led by the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), which seeks control and redistribution of South Africa’s economic assets through an ANC purged of much of its old guard and its left-wing alliance partners;
• Cosatu, which wants to make labour the dominant force in a purified Alliance that is the “strategic centre of power” or alternatively to go it alone; and
• A small and weak SACP that needs to continue its parasitical existence within an Alliance and ANC purged of its right wing in order to implement its socialist agenda.

Then there are smaller factional interests in the ANC competing in various regional contexts, such as in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Most of it has to do with a fight for the spoils of liberation now that the common enemy, apartheid, is out of the way and the glue that held the alliance together in the liberation struggle has disappeared.

Zuma caught in the middle

Trapped precariously in the middle of these tensions President Zuma is increasingly seen to be a lame-duck leader after riding to power on the back of a collection of disparate forces whose longer-term interests were always going to be irreconcilable.

He has now fallen out of favour with the two main driving forces of his engineered rise to power, the ANCYL and Cosatu. On the one hand he is being publicly ridiculed and almost effectively being told to retire from politics by Julius Malema and his Youth League as the leading force in the ANC right wing seeking to secure control and the redistribution of economic assets.

However, the right wing stands accused from the left of only seeking personal gain. Under Malema’s guidance the ANCYL has in recent months purged itself in a series of provincial conferences of elements opposed to Malema and the direction the ANCYL is taking.

On the other hand Zuma has lost the support of the leadership of Cosatu  – and many in the SACP – because he fails to act against corruption and self-enrichment. In fact he and some of his family members are now being accused in this regard by the very people who were most vocal in defending him previously when he faced charges of corruption.

However, some leaders in both Cosatu and the SACP certainly are themselves no angels. The anti-corruption crusade is also a handy stick with which to try to force the government towards accommodating left-wing policy demands.

Attempts by the ANC “nationalists” recently to use party mechanisms to “discipline” and possibly silence the very vocal critic Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of Cosatu, with Zuma standing by idly, served to further widen the schism and harden attitudes on the left. And the current public-sector strike has further undermined the relationship.

All of this culminated this past week with Vavi’s public warning that a power vacuum and “confusion” over power was making the Alliance dysfunctional, marking perhaps the lowest point yet in relations.

Municipal elections and NGC

Further exposing these serious fault lines in the Alliance this past week, the SACP in North-West province announced it was considering abandoning the ANC in next year’s local government elections.

But after a weekend meeting of the SACP’s central committee, secretary-general Blade Nzimande spoke out against any such move.

Of course Nzimande has little choice but to defend the continuation of the alliance, because without the ANC its best option would be to further position itself as the “vanguard party” of the workers in conjunction with Cosatu … which it does not seem to consider a good option at present. Hence its defence of the alliance.

At the same time Nzimande also hit out at self-serving factionalism in clear reference to the ANC’s right wing. The SACP over recent months increasingly came into conflict with this faction, particularly the ANCYL and Malema.

But the SACP – ever opportunistic – sees a golden opportunity in the current turmoil and leadership vacuum and is therefore unlikely to show its cards too openly or too forcefully. Under the guise of the ANC’s national democratic revolution they could open the back door for the socialists to advance their own socialist agenda.

With the ANC’s all-important national general council (NGC) scheduled for September, the stakes are being raised dangerously.

The ANCYL sees it as a terrain of battle where it will try to seize the initiative and has already urged its members and branches to ensure it sends a “majority” delegation to this important event. It can expect a vicious fight from the left.

While the SACP especially will be hoping to keep the alliance together, Cosatu also sees that as the first move but is anxious to shift the “centre of power” away from the ANC and control by its right wing to the Alliance before it all comes undone.

Succession campaign

Malema and his ANCYL will most likely try to use the NGC to strengthen their succession campaign for the ANC 2012 elective national conference.

They have already given notice that unless Zuma pleases them, he will have to go.

They are openly campaigning to replace ANC secretary-general and SACP chairman Gwede Mantashe with former ANCYL president and current deputy police minister Fikile Mbalula. In the same vein they have, for now, “approved” the retention of Thandi Modise, ANC deputy secretary-general, and Mathews Phosa, ANC treasurer. Both were sympathetic towards Malema when he was hauled before a disciplinary hearing – suggesting that personal retribution by Malema is also playing a role in the proposed axing of the others.