A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  The Presidency of Jacob Zuma: 100 Years of Struggle and Beyond

  The Polity

  The April 2009 national elections, the fourth since the end of apartheid, were peaceful. As expected, the ANC won a decisive victory, but to the delight of the opposition it took 65.9 percent of the vote, just short of the two-thirds majority necessary for the ANC to amend the constitution unilaterally. Still, it had 264 seats in the 400-seat National Assembly and clear majorities in eight of the nine provinces.175 The DA retained its status as the largest opposition party, winning 67 National Assembly seats and outright control of Western Cape province. COPE won 30 seats, and the IFP got 18. Zuma was easily elected president by the National Assembly the following month with 277 of the 400 votes.176

  Zuma inherited a country that had done much to overcome its apartheid past. Officials pointed to statistics showing a decrease in poverty and hunger, lower unemployment, and greater access to housing, water, health care, and education. Zuma’s inaugural address praised Mandela, Mbeki, and Motlanthe for their leadership and extolled South Africa’s achievements.177 He said the country had to “forge a partnership for reconstruction, development and progress . . . enriched by democratic debate that values diverse views and accommodates dissent.” There would be “unfettered free expression,” including freedom to protest, free media, and a strengthened democracy to check the abuse of power.

  This ringing endorsement of free expression would clash with a more sinister reality. After surviving the negative publicity associated with the scandal of the rape and arms deal corruption trials as well as the challenge to his anointment as ANC president at Polokwane, Zuma displayed a greater intolerance than Mbeki for dissent from within the ANC and in the larger society. Free speech issues came to the fore in a new and sustained way. In 2009, civil liberties groups were “dismayed”178 when the Film and Publications Amendment Act, meant to guard against child pornography and hate speech, adopted the use of tacit or prepublication censorship.179

  The next year, there began the publication of New Age, a paper owned by the fabulously wealthy Gupta family, which had close ties to Zuma.180 The government endorsed New Age as “supportive.” In June 2011, the same month in which Zapiro published another controversial cartoon, the government said that the cabinet had approved a R1 million advertising budget that would be directed toward newspapers that helped spread the government’s message. In November, presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj threatened the Mail and Guardian with criminal prosecution after it ran a story about Maharaj’s alleged involvement in the arms deal corruption scandal of the late 1990s. He then filed criminal complaints against the two journalists who wrote the story, claiming they had stolen records from the government’s investigation.181 The Mail and Guardian censored most of the story because of a 1988 law prohibiting the unauthorized disclosure of a suspect’s testimony in a prosecutorial investigation.

  Zuma continued to use lawsuits as vehicles to attack his critics. As deputy president he had sued newspapers, a radio station, and Zapiro. In 2010, he asked for millions for defamation and injury to his dignity in a suit against Zapiro and Avusa, the parent company of the Sunday Times, where Zapiro’s work had appeared.182 In 2011, Zapiro stirred controversy again, with a cartoon published in the Mail and Guardian. It showed Zuma about to rape Freedom of Speech. Like its predecessors, it drew condemnation from the ANC, but the Mail and Guardian’s editor said he found it ironic that the ANC was so upset over a cartoon about free speech.183

  The most controversial of all the cartoons appeared in July 2012 when Zapiro drew the president as an erect penis and ridiculed his efforts at racial reconciliation. The cartoon’s publication in the Mail and Guardian came just weeks after the ANC went to court seeking the removal from a Johannesburg art gallery of a painting by a white South African artist showing Zuma in the pose struck by Lenin in a Soviet propaganda poster but with his genitals exposed. Besides the court case, the ANC encouraged street protests over the painting. The gallery had taken it down after two men defaced it.184 Now, the ANC’s position was that Zapiro’s latest effort was racist and dehumanized Zuma in the same way apartheid treated all blacks.185 Zuma brought suit over the cartoon but eventually dropped the case because, his office said, even though it was an affront, the president wanted to avoid a precedent that might limit free speech. Zuma’s critics said the cartoon merely reflected Zuma’s personal behavior; Zuma, married six times, calls himself a traditionalist and has four wives and 20 or more children, some from his well-known extramarital affairs.

  More ominous than the wrangling over the cartoons and the painting was the Protection of State Information Bill, popularly called the Secrecy Bill,186 whose purpose was to replace the apartheid-era Protection of Information Act of 1982. First introduced in 2010, the bill was to regulate the classification and dissemination of state information, balancing state interests with transparency and freedom of expression. It gave the government the authority to classify information using vague criteria and to restrict the disclosure of information so classified. There was no “public interest” defense, and penalties included lengthy prison terms for violators. It engendered unprecedented shrieking from the media, the opposition, and Right2Know, a coalition of some 400 civil society and community groups. COSATU and the Nelson Mandela Foundation were among the critics. Demonstrations were frequent in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. The bill also drew international attention from the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. Human Rights Commission.187

  The ANC reacted by criticizing the “vitriol, vilification, name-calling . . . and blatant lies” about the bill.188 The minister of state security, Siyabonga Cwele, even claimed in Parliament that the bill’s opponents were local proxies for foreign spies. The bill passed the National Assembly in November 2011 by a vote of 229 to 107, with two abstentions.189 The abstainers were both ANC members, and the party immediately referred them to its disciplinary committee. The National Council of the Provinces (NCOP) passed it a year later with amendments favoring press freedoms.190 Incongruously, in April, just in time for the nineteenth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections, the National Assembly passed the bill, voting 190 for and 75 against, with one abstention.191 In a heated debate before the voting, some ANC MPs insisted that various opposition members were “foreign intelligence agents” or “foreign spies.”192 Zuma would still have to sign the bill. The DA, COSATU, and the Right2Know Campaign said they would use the legal system to attack the law’s constitutionality. Internationally, the controversy had already damaged South Africa’s reputation as an open society. The Reporters Without Borders 2013 World Freedom Index dropped South Africa ten spots to fifty-third, part of a pattern of slippage that placed it beyond the list of freest countries.193

  By the time the ANC held its 2012 national conference in Mangaung, at the end of its centennial year, which had begun with great fanfare and self-congratulations,194 the party, in the absence of a unifying apartheid enemy, began to show fissures even more pronounced than those that had led to Mbeki’s removal. Before Mangaung, Motlanthe had indirectly criticized the party as well as Zuma and his followers. In 2009, he had attacked the corruption attendant to “the sins of incumbency.”195 Now, in an assault on the Zuma camp, Motlanthe, whose name was floated as a possible ANC presidential candidate,196 lambasted Zuma’s web of political patronage.197 He also decried the authoritarianism in the organization, particularly in its electoral practices, which he likened to SACP and COSATU rubber-stamping that nullified any need for elections in the first place.

  Unlike Zuma, Motlanthe did not campaign actively, but his name was put forward for three positions—president, vice president, and member of the NEC. Eventually he ran only for the presidency and withdrew his name first from the vice presidential slot, which was won by Cyril Ramaphosa, the antiapartheid trade union lawyer and activist who had gradually withdrawn from politics after his disappointment that Thabo Mbeki and not
he had become Mandela’s deputy president. Ramaphosa had spent the intervening years becoming a tenderpreneur billionaire and one of South Africa’s richest men. Given the pattern of the ANC vice president becoming the ANC president and then the country’s president, speculation began immediately about a Ramaphosa presidency. Some in the media described him as “the best president South Africa never had,”198 but others cautioned that his business interests and presence on the boards of many of South Africa’s largest companies likely had led him far from his populist past.

  In what the press called the Mangaung Massacre, by a three-to-one margin Zuma trounced Motlanthe, who then withdrew from consideration for an NEC position. Zuma’s faction swept the NEC places, too.199 Motlanthe’s political career was not the only victim. Several prominent ANC leaders who had backed Zuma against Mbeki five years before at Polokwane found themselves purged from the party leadership. Zuma, reveling in his consolidation of power, humiliated his opponents by wondering aloud “how it must be to be outside the ANC.”

  Zuma and the newly anointed set about making authoritarian changes to the ANC constitution. While the ANC had justifiably expelled Julius Malema, president of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), earlier in the year because he had displayed racist behavior divisive for the nation as well as the party, now the ANC sought to stop even measured dissent. There would be disciplinary action against any ANC member, officer, or public representative bringing or possibly bringing the ANC into disrepute. Zuma criticized members who publicly challenged its decisions, particularly via the judicial system. There were intense attacks on the media and those ANC members who used the media to express dissent. On the last day of the conference, the SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande condemned the press. Ramaphosa, given the chance to showcase himself, read the conference declaration at the closing session. He praised Zuma effusively and then extolled Nzimande’s speech.

  In mid-March 2013, at the ANC’s NEC meeting in Irene, outside Pretoria, there was blood still to be drawn over Mangaung. The NEC voted to disband the Limpopo Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) and remove the Limpopo premier, as they had not supported Zuma’s presidential bid. The NEC also disbanded the ANCYL NEC.200 There was perhaps a fear of history repeating itself. After all, it had been the young Mandela, Sisulu, and Tambo generation that once had taken control of the ANC after dissatisfaction with the tactics of their elders. Zuma praised the NEC decisions.201

  Nevertheless, there was fighting aplenty, and not just at the very top. There were frequent physical attacks and assassinations by ANC members involved in power struggles. Graft was ubiquitous. The Los Angeles Times described an ANC transition from “liberators to exploiters.”202 Known as Nkandlagate, the scandal surrounding the use of R30 million in state money to renovate Zuma’s private residence at Nkandla reinforced the ANC’s image as a gigantic sponge. The government justified the vast expense by relying on an obscure apartheid-era security law that said the president’s personal dwelling was a “national keypoint.” Thus, the improvements were for security purposes and the public had no right to know how the government used the moneys. Many high-ranking ANC members of the government defended Zuma. One minister argued that critics did not understand African values and lifestyles. Mac Maharaj, Zuma’s spokesman, said that calling the walled residence a compound was racist. This prompted political analyst Justice Malala to respond incredulously, “Racism? Is this what the ANC has been reduced to? When looting takes place in front of our eyes, the only argument the presidential spokesman can make is that this is racism?”203

  The scandal continued in 2013 when the minister of public works and his deputy told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts that total Nkandla spending had increased by R2 million, to R208 million. While the department insisted all improvements were security related and could not be discussed publicly, there were widespread reports of an elevator being installed, various upgrades, and a snack shop run by one of Zuma’s wives.204 Eventually, in July, after continued pressure on the government, reporters from the Mail and Guardian’s Centre for Investigative Journalism, amaBhungane, managed to use PAIA to get the government to release thousands of pages of Nkandla files.205 The documents revealed Zuma’s complicity in a hugely corrupt procurement process.206

  In April 2013, the Gupta family, publishers of New Age and the employers of at least two of Zuma’s children in very high-paying jobs, became the subject of a scandal, pejoratively called Guptagate. The family held a decadent four-day-long wedding at the Sun City entertainment complex’s garish Palace of the Lost City, which they rented for exclusive use. A national uproar followed the revelation that the family had landed 200 private wedding guests from India in a private plane at the military Waterkloof Air Force Base. The affair sparked allegations of Zuma’s abuse of the national patrimony for private purposes, which he and a subsequent official report on the incident denied.207 The press and many private citizens were skeptical. It seemed the marriage that deeply concerned many South Africans was not the Guptas’ but that between government officials and their capitalist partners.

  Zuma had problems beyond accusations of financial chicanery and abuse of official powers. There were multiple examples of thuggery by his security detail, including police misconduct. Zuma also displayed a gift for offensive remarks. Before his election he upset gays and children’s rights advocates. As president, in 2010, he insulted the British. The next year he offended Christians. In 2012, he made a series of objectionable comments. At the ANC centennial celebrations in January, he sang the antiwhite “Shoot the Boer,” the very thing for which ANCYL leader Julius Malema had been convicted of hate speech. During Women’s Month he told a television interviewer that women must marry and have children. Three weeks later, speaking to the National Assembly, he shared his unorthodox perspective on democracy by declaring minority groups had “less [sic] rights.”208 In December, he managed to distress animal lovers by insisting that owning a dog was un-African, as it was part of white culture. Further angering Christians and the political opposition was Zuma’s assertion that the ANC governed by divine right. Already in 2004 and 2007 Zuma had expressed the belief that the ANC would remain in power indefinitely by using what many Christians felt was blasphemous language about the Second Coming. In May 2008, he insisted that the ANC “will rule until Jesus comes back,”209 language he would repeat at a political rally the next year. By 2011, this language had become acceptable among the members of the ANC leadership.

  The Judiciary

  Zuma’s dealings with the judiciary also stirred controversy. In August 2009, he nominated Sandile Ngcobo as chief justice. The DA, COPE, the IFP, and the ID criticized Zuma for not consulting them properly in advance. They expressed a preference for the more experienced deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke and urged Zuma to reconsider.210 He ignored them, and on October 1 Ngcobo, who was close to mandatory retirement age, was confirmed.211 In 2011, Zuma sought to extend Ngcobo’s term for an additional five years. There was a furor. Three legal justice groups challenged the constitutionality of the law Zuma had relied upon, claiming that the president had exceeded his powers.212 Before the court ruled, Ngcobo withdrew in order to preserve the integrity of the office of chief justice.213

  Ngcobo’s retirement brought an even more disputed candidate to fill the position, Constitutional Court judge Mogoeng Mogoeng, nominated by Zuma in August 2011. Well-known jurists, including the judges of the Constitutional Court, COSATU, gay rights organizations, and women’s groups all rose in opposition. Critics noted that Mogoeng, an ordained minister, belonged to a church that was vehemently opposed to homosexuality.214 Particularly worrisome were a number of egregious rape cases in which Mokoeng had given light sentences.215 The ANC was particularly unhappy with the Constitutional Court’s opposition. The ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said the judges threatened the stability of the government and their resistance was racist.216

  Shortly thereafter, on November 1, 2011, Zuma gave a speech
to both houses of Parliament to bid farewell to Ngcobo and to welcome Mogoeng. Zuma expressed a truncated view of the judicial role antithetical to that enshrined in the constitution and objected to judicial involvement in policy formulation.217 He affirmed the position he had taken earlier in the year at an Access to Justice Conference.218 Later, in 2012, the minister of justice and constitutional development released a discussion document on the transformation of the judicial system. Meanwhile, there was a row over reverse discrimination in judicial appointments and the role of the JSC. By October 2012, there had been a huge change from the apartheid era in the composition of the judiciary, with Blacks now outnumbering Whites and the presence of many women.219 Nevertheless, prominent lawyer and JSC member Izak Smuts wrote a memo claiming that for transformation’s sake, the JSC unfairly passed over for appointment or promotion highly qualified candidates who were not African, especially white males.220 He then raised the elephant-in-the-room issue of the rationale for having such a “largely unaccountable judicial appointment authority” in a democracy, and resigned. The media obtained the memo—some said it was leaked or that Smuts had distributed it before the JSC could discuss it—which renewed the public debate about the judiciary’s role and composition.

  At the Eighteenth Commonwealth Law Conference held in Cape Town in April 2013, Mogoeng dismissed Smuts’s arguments, insisting that “the surest way to weaken, and ultimately destroy, democracy is to weaken the country’s legal profession and delegitimise its judiciary”221 If criticism was tantamount to delegitimization, it was already too late. Freedom Under Law announced it would bring legal action against the JSC over the question of reconciling the constitutional provisions on judicial appointments, which required candidates to be fit, proper, and appropriately qualified, with those that demanded racial and gender equity.222