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Two centres of power in South Africa?

— FILE PHOTO: AFP

South African President Thabo Mbeki (left) and ANC president Jacob Zuma.

Jacob Zuma’s election as African National Congress president in December 2007, defeating South African President Thabo Mbeki, seeking an unwarranted third term as party leader, has resulted in a situation that may lead to the emergence of two rival centres of power — ANC as the ruling party and the government headed by Mr. Mbeki. Mr. Zuma had been dismissed by Mr. Mbeki as South African Deputy President in June 2005,

This is not the first time that the country’s President is not also conterminously ANC president. Nelson Mandela quit as party president at its 50th National Conference in Mafeking in December 1997 while continuing to be South Africa’s President till June 1999. However, there was then none of the acrimony, with its roots going back to well before the dismissal of Mr. Zuma as the country’s Deputy President that preceded and accompanied the recent succession battle in the ANC. These have led to important organisational changes, initiated and implemented since the victory of Mr. Zuma, reaffirming the supremacy of the ANC, a corrective to the personal dominance of Mr. Mbeki.

The brief disconnect of December 1997-June 1999 was, in fact, no disconnect at all. Even without Mr. Mandela saying so during the Mafeking session, it was common knowledge that Mr. Mbeki, his successor as ANC president and who had been South African Deputy President since the advent of democracy, was more or less running the administration especially during the later years of the Mandela presidency, and would seamlessly succeed him also as President of the republic at the end of his term.

Since the ANC is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future the fountainhead of political power and, as the dominant political party, has also been at the helm of government since the first democratic elections in April 1994 both in Pretoria and now in all the nine provinces, the ANC president being the country’s President also has come to be an axiomatic given. Unlike before 1997 when the ANC president was elected to a three year term, the term is now the same as that of the President of the country — five years.

The 18-month overlap between the election of the ANC president and that of the country’s President did not matter earlier because the differences, if any, between the incoming and outgoing ANC presidents were subsumed under the memories and reality of the shared struggle for democracy. The last 18 months of the Mandela presidency were hardly affected by the fact that he was not also ANC president during that period. That is not the case now — which is a tribute to internal democracy in the ANC and should be no cause for worry.

Further, such a situation where the head of the government is not also head of the ruling party is more the rule than the exception in any democratic polity, particularly in a parliamentary democracy. Whenever the head of the ruling party has tried to dictate to the head of government, the latter has invariably prevailed. When the Labour Party in Britain won a famous victory in the post-Second World War elections in 1945, Labour Party chairman Harold Laski wanted, indeed expected, Clement Atlee, who had led the party to victory and had duly become Prime Minister, to be guided by his advice. What Laski failed to see was that as an elected Member of Parliament and leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Atlee as Prime Minister was answerable to these structures, not to the Labour Party as such. Atlee’s brush-off is well known; and Laski ceased to be the party chairman soon thereafter. In corresponding instances in India, whenever the Congress president did not see eye to eye with Jawaharlal Nehru or Indira Gandhi, two of the dominating Prime Ministers, it was the Congress president who blinked first or was eased out.

The situation in South Africa is different, though not unique. The head of state is also the head of government. As Executive President and not a Prime Minister who is accountable to Parliament all the time, he has a lot of power. Indeed, in South Africa, the President, on his election to that office, resigns his membership of Parliament and attends Parliament (when he does) in his capacity as President, not as an MP. His immense power is however derived from his membership — and leadership — of the ANC. This is the case with every member of the ANC, from the president downwards, who holds political office. ANC MPs and indeed MPs of every political party are not directly elected by the electorate from area specific constituencies but nominated by their parties. This is ensured by a rather complicated electoral system, entailing a modified proportional representation with individual political parties, not individual members of political parties, on the ballot papers. The voters vote for political parties, not individual candidates.

This primacy of the political party is not unique to the ANC; it is accepted by other political parties as well, even those like the Democratic Alliance (formerly Democratic Party) that constantly carp that the ANC and its partners in the Tripartite Alliance, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, had devised a ‘Stalinist’ model to perpetuate themselves. With the horrible experience of the fraud called elections and an elected parliament under apartheid where all the formal and normative requirements of parliamentary democracy were adhered to only to legitimise the exclusion of more than 90 per cent of the population from this process, the system of constituency-based parliamentary elections as practised elsewhere is, and will be for the foreseeable future, under very bad odour.

So, despite all the internal tensions played out in the public by structures of the ANC and its allies on the Mbeki-Zuma issue, there is no way these tensions can be taken beyond the point where they can crystallise into rigid antagonistic positions of rival centres of power. When the chips are down, there is for the foreseeable future only one centre of power — the ANC. This has been stressed by its newly-elected Secretary-General, Gwede Mantashe. Indeed, given its history and political culture, this is the view held across the board in the ANC. When Mr. Mandela used to say that without the ANC, he was giving expression to a deeply held article of faith — and discipline — internalised by ANC members at all levels.

The internal struggles in the ANC will, however, continue but within its structures. Mr. Zuma with his unresolved legal problems is not out of the woods; nor is Mr. Mbeki in the doghouse. What happened at Polokwane was only the assertion of the supremacy of the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance, something by which both Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Zuma swear.

Those hoping for a split or a destructive fight between rival centres of power in the ANC, and looking to pick up the pieces, will wait in vain. After all, this is not the first time that the ANC organisational elections have been so robustly, even virulently, contested.

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