It’s been a wild week in South African politics, but surely one plot twist nobody saw coming was that Jacob Zuma would have his house saved from repossession by FW de Klerk and the apartheid regime.
To be fair, it had some stiff competition.
On Wednesday, for example, I was deeply shocked to see Cope members attacking each other live on national TV: I didn’t know Cope had more than two members, but having seen the footage, I now have to concede it’s possible they have anywhere up to six.
I was also very surprised to read a report claiming Patrice Motsepe is the ANC’s largest donor, since everyone knows you and I have been the ANC’s largest donor for decades. Perhaps they meant he’s their largest individual donor, now that Russian oligarchs are having to budget a little more carefully.
According to the report, Motsepe has snuck around party funding laws, using his companies as intermediaries to bulk up his contribution to the ANC from the legal maximum of R15m per donor to R21m.
The reason that the house (Nkandla) is off limits to the repo men is that it is built on land owned by the Ingonyama Trust, a vast swathe of real estate in KwaZulu-Natal run by trustees including the Zulu royal family, certain traditional leaders, and some ANC politicians.
In Motsepe’s defence, it’s not a huge amount of money — roughly 0.05% of his net worth and probably the amount his brokers make for him on a good morning playing the markets. In fact, back in the golden era of state capture, R21m was barely enough to cover the canapés at the Saxonwold Shebeen.
The times, however, have a-changed, and these days the ANC will take anything it can get, as all sorts of taps run dry and all sorts of chickens come home to roost.
The long arm of the law even seems to have reached Nkandla, so much so that any chickens trying to come home to roost there are in for a nasty shock: thanks to a ruling by the Pietermaritzburg high court this week, they’re very likely to find themselves, their eggs, and possibly even their coop repossessed by VBS Mutual Bank, as it tries to claw back some of what it’s lost after Zuma defaulted on a R7.8m loan taken out after he was ordered to #PayBackTheMoney to the Reserve Bank.
The order to seize Zuma’s assets, however, only extends to movable property. The compound itself can’t be repossessed and auctioned off. And this is where things get properly bizarro.
According to reports, the reason that the house is off limits to the repo men is that it is built on land owned by the Ingonyama Trust, a vast swathe of real estate in KwaZulu-Natal run by trustees including the Zulu royal family, certain traditional leaders and some ANC politicians.
On paper, these trustees are supposed to administer the land for the benefit of all who live on it. In practice, however, there are allegations that it has devolved into a semi-autonomous fiefdom, a place where unelected rulers use access to land as a weapon and deny many residents the rights they are entitled to under South African law.
In short, it sounds like the sort of thing Jacob Zuma’s ANC would have cooked up. And yet the ANC had almost nothing to do with its creation on April 24 1994, just three days before the first democratic election.
That honour goes largely to FW de Klerk, who, in the final hours of apartheid rule, and after several secret meetings that specifically excluded Nelson Mandela and the ANC, signed over the land, effectively buying the participation in the election of the Zulu monarchy and the IFP, and averting the looming spectre of Zulu secession and full-blown civil war.
The reason for De Klerk’s haste and secrecy was clear: the ANC would never have agreed to losing a large chunk of the country it was about to take over, especially not to the IFP-aligned Zulu monarchy. Had it been included in those last-gasp concessions, it would almost certainly have vetoed the creation of the trust on principle.
But it wasn’t, and it didn’t, and here we are, gazing at one of the strangest spectacles yet: an ANC president saved from homelessness by a legal framework set up for a Zulu king by an apartheid president.
How the wheel turns.
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