10 Jul 2007: ISS Today: South Africa: My President, My Patron?

10 July 2007: South Africa: My President, My Patron?

 

“A battle between bulls” is how Mmatshilo Motsei author of the book ‘The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court’ recently depicted the leadership race within the ANC. It is represented as a battle between men, fought in the shadows, about who will be the power behind, or on, the throne of the South African Presidency in 2009. Here lies the rub: the contest for the leadership of the ANC is emerging as an anti-democratic process that is neither directly shaped by ordinary South African voters nor by the hundreds of thousands of members who make up the ANC.  It is squaring off into a three-way contest between Mbeki, Zuma and Tokyo Sexwale. Anyone who dares enter the bullfight, we are told by the apparatchiks, is acting against the tradition of the ANC, which favours leaders to ‘emerge’ through consensus. Naturally this assumes that tradition is both static and answerable only to those who have voice and power. The result is the promise of a nameless ‘compromise candidate’ who waits in the wings and, once identified by some unknown force, will be delivered to the people in the days before the trek begins to the party conference in Polokwane. The hard question that the majority of South Africans, as bystanders, need to ask is: how democratic is this? Does it favour a popular president or a patron?

 

Surely the hallmark of an open process would be that those politicians who wish to lead their party should not fear presenting themselves to the public as a candidate. This would give us, the people, an opportunity to engage with their ideas and, importantly, how they interpret the policies of the ruling party. The protest from those who favour backroom deals is that the leader is merely an instrument and therefore somebody who gives effect to policy. They could not be further off the mark.

 

If tradition is anything to go by, we should not forget that GEAR, Thabo Mbeki’s macro-economic strategy that the Left has come to hate, was foisted upon the party not through exhaustive consultation but silently, like snow upon the highveld; it was a fait accompli that unexpectedly arrived at the doorstep of the party. The truth is that politics has come to trump party policy. It is the party leader who sets the tone and effectively shapes policy in South Africa. The recent party conference clearly illustrated this, and even though Mbeki made a few concessions, these were mere nods towards reform on key issues such as money in politics. Tellingly, it was left to his SABC interview, in the wake of the conference, to declare that he will make himself available to lead the ruling party for a third term: an opportunity for supporters to break into song that Mbeki is indeed ‘fit to govern’.

 

These factors should raise suspicions when analysts and others promise that an appropriate ‘compromise’ candidate will somehow emerge. The truth is that this, almost mythical, individual will not be someone who has presented and debated their interpretation of policy with party structures in Diepsloot, or in Durban or, for that matter, amongst mineworkers and their bosses.

 

Rather, if a compromise candidate should emerge, we are at the mercy of the outcome of a backroom deal between competing factions within the ANC. Although the tradition of elite pacts is not new to South Africa, it does not serve attempts to build a genuinely sustainable culture of democracy in this country. Instead, it has a profoundly alienating function, as ‘important’ decisions are left to those who are somehow better equipped to govern. The impatience of people with backroom politics that is neither participatory, nor delivers on basic services, is exemplified in the latest wave of service delivery protests reported in the media. The reasons for such protests are complex, but the truth is that people are demanding more robust engagement with leadership. The country’s leaders would be foolish not to listen. The demand is that they learn to do so more intently.

 

Part of that engagement with the people has to do with the values that a future leader of the ANC represents. This is another juncture at which the compromise option fails. A dealmaker will allow us little space to understand his/her approach to alleviating poverty, unemployment, and HIV/Aids. Rather it is reduced to the bland debate that we have at the moment – we know that Jacob Zuma is supported by sections of the Left in the tripartite alliance – but still have little understanding of what kind of South Africa he envisions.

 

The concern is that such leaders become beholden to the narrow factional interests that ushered them into power. This entrenches a system of patronage, a system that has been the undoing of politics all across our continent and is a fast-track to corrupt rule that largely benefits the only the ruling elite and its entourage. Zuma provides an example: he may not have been involved in a generally corrupt relationship – but the image of Shabir Shaik pressing envelopes of money into his hand is surely not the stuff that modern African presidents should be made of.

 

Others argue that Sexwale is in a league of his own when it comes to patronage – the manner in which he has awarded share options in his company to senior judges and politicians is a case in point. Although respected political analyst Xolela Mangcu has described Sexwale as the “next Kennedy”, he protests that the shares he received from Sexwale had nothing to do with influence buying. His defence that he is but “one in a million” beneficiaries is trite considering that Sexwale has made him a multi-millionaire. How many of the ordinary folk who benefit from broad-based black economic empowerment can say the same? It’s a more refined, but no less insidious, form of patronage from that of which Shabir Shaik was found guilty in the Durban High Court. That Zuma is heaped with scorn while Sexwale receives only muted criticism from his peers in business and government points to the fact that we have not developed a principled response to rejecting patronage.

 

On the other hand, there is a real danger that Mbeki’s claim to a third term at the helm of the ANC will culminate in a puppet presidency – somebody who owes more to Mbeki, as political patron, than to the electorate. The lesson from Namibia is that such a set-up sees either the President of the Republic kept on a tight leash or engaged in destructive defiance of the party leader. Surely this is not the culture of accountability Mbeki has come to champion?

 

It is time that the leadership race for the Presidency of the ANC was thrown wide open so that candidates can present their vision of a South Africa post-2010 to the ANC branches and the public at large. Are there only three men capable of this task in a nation of 48 million? South Africa needs a leader of integrity to govern, not a patron as President. The people are ‘fit’ to decide. We exclude them at our collective peril.

 

Hennie van Vuuren, Head: Corruption and Governance Programme, ISS Cape Town