In a grumpy statement aimed at cadres who failed to endorse his puppet in the ANC’s leadership race, Jacob Zuma this week unwittingly wrote a perfect, seven-word definition of the last 28 years: “Comrades were overwhelmed by lots of money”.
The statement, released on Tuesday, was a response to the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal picking Zweli Mkhize at its presidential candidate for 2024 and not Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a move that will no doubt have come as a crushing blow to Mzwanele Manyi and Carl Niehaus, who were hoping to have their allowances raised and perhaps even to be given their own bedrooms.
“Comrades must not have short memories,” warned the man who wants South Africans to forget that he’s currently out on the same dodgy medical parole that he organised for his former sugar daddy, Schabir Shaik, and yet feels healthy enough to run for national chairperson of the ANC.
Pressing on, he reminded his readers (presumably Manyi, Niehaus and people like me who follow him for cheap laughs) that the whole reason we were in this pickle was that comrades had been “overwhelmed by lots of money” and “guided by greed to nominate and vote for [an] ANC president” in 2017. Because as we all know, the coterie of KZN hustlers who installed Zuma as president in 2009, were doing it to entrench democratic freedoms and bolster the capacity of the state.
But amid the petulant finger-wagging, and beyond that definitive “lots of money” quote, there was another startlingly honest nugget of truth from Zuma.
The cadres who had succumbed to greed, he insisted, had failed to use their “political conscience”.
Some tired cynics might brush off the phrase as an oxymoron, thinking, as many of us do, that conscience always involves a person’s relationship with right and wrong, and that right and wrong are universal and objective.
Political conscience, however, is dedicated solely and without pretence to figuring out what is right and wrong for the politics one is punting. It has no regard for the greater good, no regard even for basic human decency.
Which means Zuma isn’t being dishonest or disingenuous when he ascribes the decision by some of his KZN comrades to supper Cyril Ramaphosa over Dlamini-Zuma in 2017 to a failure of politician conscience.
It doesn’t matter to Zuma that an NDZ victory would have triggered a financial crisis and sped up the destruction of the state. His political conscience and those of his allies was clear: the right thing to do was what was right for Team Zuma.
It’s important to remember this, as Zweli Mkhize steps forward as Zuma’s heir apparent and the ANC ramps up its election prattle about how it can change and this time it will be different.
It’s important to remember that sometimes politicians aren’t lying. Sometimes they genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing.
It’s just that what’s right for them and their faction can be — and so often is — catastrophically wrong for the rest of us.
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