affairs. In making this assessment, we do recognise that South Africa finds itself in a quandary in the region; its history of aggressive destabilisation during the apartheid era is an unfortunate backdrop to contemporary debates and its greater economic and military weight vis-à-vis its neighbours generates predictable concerns about South African hegemony. Those realities necessitate a pragmatism and sensitivity in South Africa’s regional behaviour, but ‘quiet diplomacy’ is rooted in a culture of over compensation for the past, one which is inhibiting South Africa from playing a more dynamic role as the shaper of a new regional consensus built around democratic values. Instead, as the Zimbabwe case has graphically demonstrated, African peoples continue to be sacrificed on the altar of an African-regime solidarity which is being forged within the supposedly progressive framework of ‘multilateralism’.
ZIMBABWE AND THE PATHOLOGIES OF ONE-PARTYISM
In addition to its economic meltdown, there have been three defining features of Zimbabwe’s descent into authoritarianism. First is an entrenched political culture of ‘liberationism’, by which we mean a belief, on the part of those who prosecuted the liberation struggle, that they should now be considered uniquely privileged political actors and able to operate largely unconstrained by the norms and conventions governing competitive, multiparty politics. In this worldview, the liberation movement can never be perceived as ‘just another party’ in a post-liberation setting. It is entitled to rule and to speak indefinitely on behalf of ‘the people’. The popular will is interpreted by the party and not by the people. Voting against the party is intolerable, unacceptable and a sign of false consciousness to be remedied by a programme of ‘reorientation’ – and the Zimbabwean experience between April and June 2008 underlined the precise meaning of that term to brutal effect. This is, in effect, the politics of divine right and it provides a salutary lesson in the degeneration to which ‘liberation politics’ and liberation movements can be prone.
The second feature is a militaristic cult of the warrior, prominent in both ANC and Zanu discourses, which takes a masculinist view of the nation and the struggle for national liberation (Suttner, 2010). The struggle is identified as a ‘conquest’ and violence is viewed not as a regrettable and tragic necessity but as something positive in itself. In Zimbabwe, such a politics is now flouted openly with only token nods in the direction of multiparty democracy or pluralism per se. To both Zanu and Mugabe, the MDC is ‘a Western project which must be buried’ (Jongwe, 2010), effectively a declaration of war on the opposition in which the leader claims for himself the right to stand above the choices made by actual voters and for the ruling party’s interests to transcend the verdict of the ballot box (Hamill and Hoffman, 2008).
The third distinguishing feature of Zimbabwe’s decline is the extent to which the state itself has become a compliant instrument of the ruling party. The state media is slavish in its veneration of Zanu PF, particularly the Herald newspaper which has abandoned even the pretence of independent journalism, while the judiciary has been fully colonised by party loyalists. Most servile of all is the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, an organisation which delayed the publication of election results for five weeks under orders from a defeated ruling party, and rewrote its own rules at the behest of the same party. The demarcation lines between Zanu PF and the security forces have been eroded, with the army and police required to serve as partisan forces to be deployed against opposition structures (and voters) as well as joining the drumbeat of propaganda against them, an action inappropriate for supposedly neutral servants of the state. It was police chief Augustine Chihuri, and Constantine Chizenda, the most senior commander of Zimbabwe’s army, who said that they would never salute a ‘sell out’ or a ‘British stooge’ (Sokwanele, 2009), a statement typical of the anti-colonialist invective which has now become an ideological comfort blanket for Zanu PF and its sole means of responding to the country’s wider political and social crisis. It was the same security forces who announced in 2002 that they would not accept any result that ‘went against the revolution’ (Amnesty International, 2006). Currently they have thrown their weight behind Gideon Gono and Johannes Tomana, the reserve bank governor and the attorney-general respectively, unilaterally appointed (or reappointed) in violation of the terms of the September 2008 unity accord between Zanu and the MDC, which clearly states that all senior government appointments must be made with the consent of the three principals (namely, Mugabe, and the leaders of the two MDC factions, Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara), and that these appointments include those of the reserve bank governor and the attorney-general.
ZANUFICATION AND SOUTH AFRICA
So, how far are such malign trends visible in contemporary South Africa? Some of the early symptoms of the ideology of liberationism are certainly apparent. The ANC has been able to draw upon a genuine and overwhelming popularity in its four general election victories to date, and has had no need for recourse to the violent intimidation and electoral chicanery of Zanu PF. However, an authoritarian mindset or mode of organisation is still visible in various forms and it has tended to cut across the post-2005 polarisation within the ANC between its Mbeki and Zuma camps. The Mbeki government – and indeed Mbeki as an individual – had a distinctly authoritarian flavour in its attitude to criticism from beyond and from within its own ranks.
The stigmatising of legitimate dissent as ‘racist’ became a routine response of the Mbeki administration to opposition criticism. While this intolerance was most pronounced under Mbeki, it is not an exclusively Mbeki phenomenon. Jacob Zuma is not free of this contagion. As deputy president he denounced criticism of the government in the media as ‘unpatriotic’ (Business Day, 8 February 2011) and stated that the ANC would rule ‘until Jesus comes again’ (Business Day, 21 June 2009), a clear manifestation of the ‘divine right’ mindset. He also once described the ANC as more important than the constitution (Politicsweb, 2008). In February 2011, while campaigning for the municipal elections, Zuma told an audience that an ANC membership card provided an automatic pass to heaven and that ‘when Jesus fetches us we will find (those in the beyond) wearing black, green, and gold; the holy ones belong to the ANC’, before adding that to desert the organisation would mean that ‘the ancestors of this land … Hintsa, Ngqika and Shaka will all turn their backs on you’ (Times Live, 2011).
Another factor reminiscent of the Zimbabwean situation is the growing influence in the Zuma era of the liberation war veterans’ associations. This has seen the ANC, like other liberation movements, tending to play ‘the struggle’ as its trump card in its conflicts with the opposition and the media and it allows the ANC to demonise (and delegitimise) its opponents as seeking a ‘return to the past’ or for opposing ‘transformation’ and the ‘new South Africa’ per se when they merely oppose ANC policies and the ANC’s model of transformation. The Congress of the People (Cope) party, which broke from the ANC in December 2008 in protest at the Zuma ascendancy and Mbeki’s removal, threatened to pose a challenge to this established means of engaging opposition parties because its own leadership had impeccable liberation credentials, and its 7.42 per cent of the vote in the April 2009 election seemed to provide a solid bridgehead from which it might make further electoral advances. However, the post-election period has witnessed the squandering of this historic opportunity as factionalism and leadership disputes have sent Cope into probable terminal disarray.
In the ANC’s polemical spats with Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) which now governs the Western Cape, there have been ugly accusations of racism and the gender card is played to grotesque effect. On 1 May 2009, ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema (Mail and Guardian, 1 May 2009) referred to Zille as ‘a racist little girl’ – a sentiment which perfectly captures the unity of the two although some elements in the ANC have gone even further in levelling the most poisonous
