Opinion

'Regime change' takes its cue from apartheid's sultans of spin

Zuma's claim that he is 'saving SA from the West' exposes the fear and paranoia in ANC ranks

16 July 2017 - 00:02 By IVOR SARAKINSKY and EBRAHIM FAKIR

"Regime change" is a scaremongering hoax. What the ANC is afraid of is the threat of losing power. Blaming "external forces" is an old apartheid trick where anyone advocating for progressive change was considered an external instigator. Their usual suspects were "Russian-backed communists". According to President Jacob Zuma, it is again external instigators, "the West", that are driving change. This trickery didn't work then, and it won't work now.
"Regime change" is an ambiguous term referring to the replacement of one government by another. This is routine in a democracy. But it can also refer to a change of government through extrajudicial and illegal means - by force and imposition. Regime change can also be benign, meaning a government reconfigures the organisation and systems by which public institutions function. In this latter sense, it seems a case can be made for the ANC to change the regime by which the government it presides over functions, so that it achieves socioeconomic and developmental goals that it currently is not.
The only evidence the ANC has thus far proffered for a regime change agenda is the loss of government in three metropolitan municipalities.
But losing government should not be unexpected following an election where party allegiances change because of declines in trust.The other "evidence" proffered is that local organisations receive foreign funding.
Such organisations carry out credible work and all openly disclose who their funders are and what their activities entail. None of this is secret or nefarious.
Quite the contrary, they make for a vibrant civil society and robust democracy.
History of suspicion
Further, the ANC has identified a range of actions as signalling a regime change agenda: court action, community protests, student uprisings and mass mobilisation, as well as calls at funerals and commemorative events for the president to step down.
There would be no resort to court if there were no violations of the law. Community protests are demands for democratic government to actually function.
If democratic government was responsive and accountable, it would obviate the need for the roughly 700 protests a year. Students and other formations are making legitimate, if misplaced, claims on policy and the public fiscus - as any organised constituency in a democracy would. Other mass formations are engaging in a standard feature of democracy, requesting an increasingly unpopular and recidivist president to step down. None of these acts are anathema to a free and open society founded on democratic norms.
To characterise these as cogs in a regime change agenda exposes deep suspicions about the exercise of democratic citizen agency. It renders the governing party susceptible to fear and paranoia. Most startlingly, it suggests that the ANC believes that it has an ordained, rather than an earned, right to rule. It is because of this mistaken belief that the ANC sees any challenge to it as illegitimate. The ANC as a movement has always been suspicious, even of independent anti- apartheid political activity. Under the more inclusive guise of the mass-based United Democratic Front in the 1980s, internecine battles raged in some townships between ANC (warra warras) and black consciousness (amaZim-Zim) activists. Now, after 23 years in control of the instruments of government, the ANC appears paranoid about a loss of power.
In its fear, the ANC has made false comparisons between protests in South Africa with the "colour revolutions" and elements of the Arab Spring.
In those instances, mass protests were aimed at an illegitimate, authoritarian and quasi-dictatorship government, where their right to exist and the legitimacy of their exercise of power and authority were questioned. In South Africa, the ANC government's right to exist is unquestioned: protests are aimed rather at the credibility of its operations, and the questionable beneficiaries of its use of power. This, too, is pretty standard in a democracy.The mobilisations demanding that the president step down are premised upon fair, substantive and procedural grounds. The first requests a voluntary resignation following his ruinous leadership of the ANC and government.
The second, a recall by the ANC. The third, a motion of no confidence through parliament and lastly, an impeachment. None of these seeks to remove a government through extrajudicial, nonparliamentary or unprocedural means.
There is one other condition under which regime change can occur: state failure - the extent to which state institutions are hollowed out and governmental decision-making is manipulated to serve private ends, rather than the public good.
The lax approach to ill-discipline among political and administrative leaders of public institutions such as the National Prosecuting Authority, police, Hawks, SABC, Eskom, Denel, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa and a host of others erodes public trust. The energy and cost spent pursuing bogus charges against former finance minister Pravin Gordhan, contrasted with the lack of enthusiasm to pursue charges laid for improper conduct and decision-making related to Gupta business interests within state-owned enterprises and other state departments, lead to a loss of confidence. In this case, regime change - benign or otherwise - starts looking like the right thing to do.
Regime change has already occurred on Zuma's watch. He has done nothing to stop the Guptas from taking control of important resources and institutions.
Perhaps he has even overseen this. The South Africa of 2017 is a far cry from the country of 1994. Power has moved away from citizens. The ANC appears no longer to be the locus of power.
Influence has shifted away from legitimately elected and appointed officials to a small clique elsewhere, aided, ironically, by a Western colonial PR firm in its pursuit of a faux-radical policy agenda attacking "white monopoly capital"...

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