The ANC got a bloody nose. And that’s a punishment richly deserved. Nobody guilty of what the party’s done to this country should be able to get away with it. Karma should catch up with you; and it has. It can’t claim not to have been warned. And the fact that it’s Jacob Zuma who delivered the coup de grace is simply delicious irony.
As Thabo Mbeki said rather boastfully a few years ago, the people have spoken. Loudly. They’ve had enough of the hubris, arrogance, darkness, looting, poverty, joblessness. The list goes on.
The country is, however, by no means out of the woods yet. The worst may yet be to come. The next few weeks will be decisive. But this is a seminal moment, a break with the past, the end of the lure of liberation politics, the monopoly of power and its attendant abuses and entitlements. There have, obviously, been splits and breakaways before — COPE and the EFF for instance — but they never threatened the ANC’s hegemony. It always regrouped and seamlessly regained its mojo after every split. But now we are in uncharted territory, hence the uncertainty and apprehension.
This outcome should be truly chastening. What must be particularly galling for the ANC is the fact that it is Zuma, its erstwhile messiah, who’s turned executioner, gleefully plunging and twisting the knife. Zuma after all is the reason the ANC is in such a sorry state. The party expended its currency defending him even as he and his cronies plundered and destroyed the country. Now he’s profiting from the parlous state he got the party into. The ANC may not recover from this calamity. The wilderness could be its ultimate destination. Power — and the perks that come with it — was the only glue that held this rabble together.
This, if it were to materialise, would be a coalition from hell, and would be extremely bad for the country
The ANC is deeply wounded and obviously in mourning, and recriminations must be flying from all sides — a party in search of a scapegoat. All eyes will be on President Cyril Ramaphosa as he stands up to speak this weekend: the high fives of elections past and the gloating about the achievements of the so-called glorious movement will be conspicuously absent. He bears a stigma that none of his predecessors has faced: the first party leader to preside over such an abysmal performance. This fall from grace is his. He owns it. It will be his yoke, his legacy. He will always be remembered as the man who led the party out of power. He better watch his back. The vultures are circling.
But it didn’t have to turn out this way. Ramaphosa has been the architect of his own misfortune. For a man who came into office with the reputation of a consummate strategist, he’s made blunders at every turn. The ANC was destined to face its reckoning in the last elections five years ago. It was staring down the barrel, and could easily have lost its majority after nine calamitous years of Zuma.
But Ramaphosa came in promising to crack down hard on corruption. There was palpable excitement and optimism in the land as a result. At last, people thought, a grown-up had taken the reins and the country could only prosper. And they rewarded him and his party at the polls. He was walking on water. Apart from Nelson Mandela, he’s perhaps the only president who came to power with the blessings of both business and labour. He had everything going for him and could have done wonders for the country; but he chose not to.
Instead he arrogantly told all and sundry that his chief mission was to unite his party. And so instead of cracking down on corruption, he embraced the looters. And his star dimmed. The fact is he never rectified or redressed Zuma’s egregious wrongdoings, he merely presided over their continuation. He became the acceptable face of a party that had never changed. People simply feel cheated, conned.
Irony of ironies is that, with the MK Party breaking away, he’s not only failed in his stated mission of uniting his party, he’s now also led it to defeat at the polls. And the looters he protected are going to turn their guns on him, blaming him for the loss. Zuma would never have been able to wreak as much havoc as he has had Ramaphosa not foolishly favoured him with misguided benevolence by using every subterfuge in the book to remit his sentence. Zuma has now returned the favour.
All Ramaphosa had to do was crack down hard on corruption and run a clean and competent government. That probably would have split the party as he feared. But the whole country would have rallied behind him, and the results in these elections would surely have been different. He would have eventually left office with the undying gratitude of his compatriots as the man who turned the country’s fortunes around. Now he’s stranded in no-man’s land, with some of his comrades eagerly sharpening their knives. A precious opportunity has been wasted.
There’s hardly any time for the ANC to lick its wounds or cry into its beer. The party will have to quickly decide on allies to form a new government. The wound is still raw and egos are still bruised, but this is also a fantastic opportunity to unite the country, bringing every race and every skill into its government.
A tie-up with the DA could offer a relatively stable and uncomplicated coalition that could be replicated in provinces such as Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and so on — though such an arrangement may not sit well with the ANC’s communist allies. It’s hard to see a possible coalition with either the MK Party or EFF with Ramaphosa still at the helm. He’s become a lightning rod for both parties. But this, if it were to materialise, would be a coalition from hell, and would be extremely bad for the country.
One would hope that as the ANC takes stock of this defeat, it will leave partisan matters aside and put the country’s interests first.
That could be the first step towards its own redemption.
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