South Africa: What ANC stands to gain by turning Zille into ‘racist enemy’ (opinion) - Being pushed into the cold

May 19th, 2009

   

 

Johannesburg (South Africa) - Democratic Alliance(DA) leader Helen Zille was right on Friday to suggest that her row with the African National Congress (ANC) about President Jacob Zuma’s personal life was “manufactured”. She was wrong, however, to blame the news media.

The leaders of the ANC and its alliance partners appeared to be behind the initial escalation of hostilities. The ANC Youth League creatively described Zille as a “destractor of gender struggles” who had once been dropped on her head, before claiming that she had surrounded herself with concubines and boyfriends. Umkhonto we Sizwe Veterans’ Association chairman Kebby Maphatsoe developed precisely the same theme, denouncing Zille’s alleged appointment of “sex boys” to the Western Cape provincial cabinet “to satisfy her well-evolved wild whore libido”.

The synchronised character of these assaults suggests that ANC leaders had deliberately unleashed their youth league and veterans attack-poodles upon the new premier of the Western Cape.

The decision to attack Zille initially seems curious in the light of Zuma’s avowed determination to improve relations with opposition parties. Three reasons can be advanced for this quick reversal.

First, the ANC realised it needs an enemy. Without someone to fight, it was quickly returning to the pre-campaign default position of backbiting and conflict between provinces and centre. Zille’s provincial cabinet selections suddenly provided an unexpected opportunity. Even if alleged sex pests and burly right-wing farmers are broadly representative of the DA elite in the Cape, as some cynics claim, Zille’s capitulation to their demands for cabinet positions left her exceptionally vulnerable to demonisation.

Second, the ANC seized an opportunity pre-emptively to close down media criticism of its exceedingly vulnerable new president. The movement’s communications professionals do not need instruction in how to exploit popular sensitivities where race, sex, and presidential authority intersect.

In 2001, then president Thabo Mbeki had already shown what could be achieved. When shocking allegations emerged that he might be a “womaniser”, Mbeki’s team went on to the offensive so aggressively that they stifled critics for years to come. A “senior official in the Presidency” even told the Mail & Guardian’s editor to “expect a personal hell” if his paper carried any further references to “the president’s sexual habits”. It must have felt like spin-doctor heaven in the Union Buildings when Zille ventured that “Jacob Zuma is a self-confessed womaniser with deeply sexist views”.

Third, the new national government is united in only one thing: its project to combat what the ANC’s January 8 statement wittily described as “new tendencies” of patronage, corruption, and careerism. This project is circumscribed in scope. It does not encompass the ANC’s national leadership because this stratum is presumed to have been enriched by entirely legitimate means. Rather it is targeted at certain local and provincial barons, whose corruption, cronyism and patronage systems are destroying ANC institutions, generating violent service delivery protests, and creating electoral vulnerability at local level.

In Zuma’s first few days, the ANC’s national executive committee sidelined various entrepreneurial provincial politicians, and imposed premiers who adhere to more or less orthodox accounting and tendering conventions. Luthuli House promised to discipline and recall nonperforming cadres everywhere.

Within the state, ministerial heavyweights such as Collins Chabane were appointed with the task of evaluating the performance of officials in all three spheres of government against the template of a transparent national plan. Mbeki’s similar attempts to regulate the lower reaches of government had generated a furious ANC counter-reaction that contributed to his downfall. By turning the DA into an enemy, however, the new ANC leadership may hope to pre-empt such internal dissent.

The DA is the governing party in the Western Cape and in Cape Town, and it will fight tooth and nail, using every legal and political instrument available, against proposals to strip power from the two lower tiers of government. Zille has already castigated a draft constitutional amendment bill that would allow national institutions to encroach on local government competencies.

Across the vast majority of provinces and municipalities — those that are ANC-controlled — local barons will now feel obliged to support the Presidency’s unwelcome encroachment on their former prerogatives. After all, they will not want to ally themselves with the “racist” DA regime in the Western Cape.

As ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe observed last week, after he had characterised Zille as an “enemy” rather than an opponent: “When the DA criticises what we are doing we must always take it as a compliment. And we must be worried if they ever acknowledge anything as good.”

* Butler teaches public policy at UCT .

source.Business Day (South Africa), by Anthony Butler *