JUSTICE MALALA | We underestimate Zuma at our peril

You would be terribly misguided if you chose not to believe former president Jacob Zuma when he says that he intends to merge all “black” political parties in South Africa and then, as a final act, take over the ANC. Zuma almost always carries out his threats — unless he does not want you to know what he intends to do next

In January he told us, out of the blue, that it was “wrong” that vote counting was being done in secret in South Africa. This is a man who had been elected president twice in 2009 and 2014 without a murmur of complaint from him. Not once in those elections did he lie that counting is done in secret because, as he well knows, all elections are watched by party agents and independent observers.

What Zuma was doing then was preparing to contest election results on May 29 when he knew he would lose. Predictably, on May 31 he made the claims of election fraud without presenting a single piece of evidence.

Now he has told Sunday Times political editor Sibongakonke Shoba that he plans to bring the EFF (EFF) of Julius Malema and other “black parties” under the umbrella of the MK Party and then use his status as a member of the ANC to mount a reverse takeover of that organisation. Zuma was expelled from the ANC last week, and he is fighting to keep his membership, which he sees as pivotal to his plan of being present at ANC national conferences as a member.

“Once we take over the country, we’re in charge. Right? One of the things we’ll do will be to honour our ancestors by putting back their ideas — and policies. We will take over from the ones who are selling out — [but if you’re not a member you can’t say ...] give us our ANC,” he rambled to Shoba.

The whole idea is preposterous, facile, nonsensical and borderline demented. This is a man who leads a new party, the MKP, and runs it like a dictator. He, alone, can be a member of other parties. Others are barred from holding dual membership. He is the last word on who stays and who leaves. He has hired and fired scores of secretaries-general of the party. He has kicked out the entire cohort of those who registered the party last year.

And he wants to take over the EFF, a party with an effective machinery, a million and a half voters, and a charismatic, independent, ambitious, leader in Julius Malema. Zuma also wants to take over the ANC, a party which holds regular conferences and elections, and which has expelled him after diligently following due process.

At any other time in world history, many of us would be giggling into our glasses of sauvignon blanc at the idea that Zuma, a discredited leader at all levels, could pull off such a reverse takeover. I know now that our politics globally and locally are so vulnerable to a charismatic, cult-like leader like Zuma that I will not today write the man off. If Donald Trump can do it, then Zuma can do it.

Many like me have written Zuma off in the past, and here we are today with his party very likely to take over the levers of power in KwaZulu-Natal ahead of a crucial local election in 2026. Controlling that province would give Zuma the resources and the base to launch a full-on assault on the ANC across the country. We underestimate Zuma at our peril.

It would be easy to blame ordinary citizens for giving a man as flawed as Zuma their votes in the May 29 election. What were 2.3-million people thinking when they cast their votes for a man implicated in so much scandal and with so many ongoing court cases? It becomes easier to understand when you consider the ANC’s spectacularly massive ethical, moral and crucially economic failures of the past 16 years. Until 2009 and the rise of the Zuma crowd, many South Africans believed in a better South Africa under the ANC. They don’t any more and they want to tell its leaders that they are gatvol. Zuma, in his many statements, projects himself as an alternative even though he is patently not such a thing.

Zuma’s plans will ultimately come to nothing though. This is because he is old and losing his grip and soon his children — who see the MKP as their inheritance — and the likes of Floyd Shivambu and others will be jostling to replace him. His grip on power will continue to wane. The infighting in the MK Party will be significant and will break it. Without Zuma, MKP is nothing.

That break is not happening soon, though. Between then and now, expect Zuma to do what he does best for the ANC and the country: cause huge trouble.

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