It may, perhaps, still be too soon to conclude that the fruits of South Africa’s liberation struggle have been squandered and that the architect of the country’s transition to black majority rule, the African National Congress (ANC) now appears unsteady on its feet, though there are unmistakable signs that amongst black South Africans the ANC has lost much of the magnetism that it once had.
Up until his death last December Nelson Mandela – though not every member of his family – had avoided the storm clouds of nepotism, graft and corruption that kept billowing around the leadership of the ANC and particularly around the country’s serving President, Jacob Zuma, whose alleged indiscretions are said to include sexual misconduct and misusing public funds.
When Zuma attempted to speak at a December 2013 funeral service for Mandela which was attended by President Barack Obama and three former US Presidents, he was booed by a section of the crowd gathered for the event.
Almost a year after Mandela’s death there is little doubt that both the ANC and South Africa have had to surrender the exalted status and attendant global attention which both enjoyed during his (Mandela’s) post-apartheid years.
The most recent evidence of the current travails of the ANC materialized last week. After the country’s Parliament had exonerated Zuma over allegations of misuse of around US$24 million in state funds to upgrade his private residence, an opposition launched a tirade against the President repeatedly referring to him as a “thief,” an outburst that triggered an ugly brawl both inside and outside the House that reportedly resulted in injuries to at least four parliamentarians and that warranted the attention of the police. That was not the first time that accusations of a proclivity for ‘high life’ at the state’s expense had been made against the South African President.
By the weekend the jaded ANC administration was looking further serious embarrassment in the face after it appeared that the sentiments emerging from the Commission of Inquiry into the Marikana Massacre – the killing by police in May 2012 of 34 striking miners employed by the British platinum firm Lonmin – had suggested that the killings resembled an execution squad operation, the insinuation being that the killings may have been ordered ‘from above’ a day after two policemen had been killed in an earlier incident relating to the same strike.
No less damaging for the Zuma administration was the accusing finger pointed by an attorney close to the enquiry at one-time, high-flying trade unionist Cyril Ramaphosa, a serving Lonmin Board member and a Vice-President in Zuma’s cabinet. Ramaphosa, so his accuser says, was the state official who had called for police intervention ahead of the killings after the strike had become increasingly disruptive.
As was mentioned earlier, the seeming unravelling of the ANC is happening after the passing of the ANC’s icon and its most important moral credential, Nelson Mandela. Indeed, it was clear that ill health had robbed Mandela of the vitality necessary to exercise his unquestioned authority, so that the meltdown would have begun some time before his death.
Once the full outcome of the Commission of Enquiry into the Marikana Massacre is made public early next year, the ANC’s democratic credentials will come under even closer scrutiny in South Africa with what are likely to be calls for heads to roll and criminal charges to be instituted against senior police and security officials, and perhaps even politicians. Were the ANC administration not to heed such calls it would likely be running the risk of still further erosion of its support base amongst South Africa’s black majority, which, as this year’s elections results that returned Zuma to office have shown, has already been slipping.
There is, however, still a cushion in the numbers. Two decades after its accession to office the ANC’s most formidable foe appears to be its own propensity for self destruction. In those circumstances the road ahead cannot be predicted with any certainty.
Given what would appear to be its present unsteady course, how would the ANC respond to a genuine democratic threat to its right to rule? Is it conceivable that the ruling party might be tempted to ‘protect its gains’ by resorting to undemocratic measures?
Two points should be made here. First, we need to continually remind ourselves that this is no longer ‘Mandela’s South Africa’ where the sheer weight of his authority served – for a time at least – as a moral and political compass. In the absence of a successor – in terms of what he symbolized for black South Africa – the ANC could well edge closer to the slippery slope.
The second point is that high ideals which are the product of people’s struggles for freedom can become unsustainable in the face of familiar human frailties like a desire to wield power and to exploit its attendant privileges for personal gain. Here, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe comes readily to mind. Somehow, the ANC must find a way of arresting its own slide or risk reversing the gains of its liberation struggle. How it handles the outcome of the Commission of Inquiry into the Marikana Massacre may serve as an important indication of its commitment (or otherwise) to democratic governance.
