Former South African President Jacob Zuma gestures after voting during the South African elections, in Nkandla, South Africa, on May 29.Rogan Ward/Reuters
Richard Poplak is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg and Toronto.
Like a reanimated corpse bursting from a crypt in a cheesy late-night horror movie, South Africa’s wildly corrupt former president, Jacob Zuma, has returned.
For those struggling to keep up with global zombie politics, Mr. Zuma served as deputy president from 1999 until he was dismissed in 2005 during an internecine power struggle. In his first return-from-the-dead party trick, he emerged to lead the governing African National Congress in 2007, becoming president of the country in 2009. A popular (if not entirely populist) figure whose base derives from the large coastal KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, Mr. Zuma pitched left but swung right; nothing he or his party did during his many years of leadership approached a fair deal for South Africa’s struggling lower and middle classes.
Instead, Mr. Zuma repurposed state institutions to hose government funds into a mafia led in spirit by his family, and in fact by a small cabal of private and public associates who became very rich while the country grew very poor. (Export Development Canada played a small role in this process when it “loaned” funds to Mr. Zuma’s associates, the Gupta brothers, so that they could add a Bombardier private jet to their fleet.) A classic if clumsy kleptocrat, Mr. Zuma left the country in economic ruins. By the time he was defenestrated on Valentine’s Day, 2018, he was a whinging and resentful figure, facing dozens of corruption charges and the prospect of a dotage spent in various far-flung courtrooms.
Mr. Zuma’s replacement, the feckless billionaire Cyril Ramaphosa, has proved both incapable and unwilling to bring the ANC’s warring factions to heel. Simply put, about half the party’s leadership wants South Africa to remain a constitutional democracy adhering roughly to the rule of law, while half want it to ditch the constitution in favour of “radical economic transformation” – a supercharged redistribution policy that would advance the circumstances of the Black majority. (Mr. Ramaphosa is in the former camp.) As his tenure advanced, South Africa’s economy, already in cardiac arrest, was declared brain-dead. At the core of the decline was the heavily indebted state-run energy company, Eskom, which was forced to schedule long periods of power cuts owing to decades of looting.
In fairness to Mr. Ramaphosa, who campaigned against endemic corruption, Mr. Zuma’s KZN base was never destined to accept his wan “cleanup” movement. As it happened, Mr. Ramaphosa not only failed to clean up – he made things worse. Fatally, he left Mr. Zuma’s mafia out in the cold. They were not pleased.
In July, 2021, following the deprivations of the pandemic, and after a contempt of court case resulted in Mr. Zuma facing a 15-month prison sentence, KZN exploded. The violence was goosed by members of Mr. Zuma’s syndicate, most notable among them his daughter, Duduzile. Whether the term “insurrection” strictly applies in this case has been a matter for much think-tankery, but more than 300 people were left dead, and billions of dollars of infrastructure and property were destroyed as riots spread further into the interior.
At the centre of the storm, once again, was Jacob Zuma.
As the ANC lurched toward a national election scheduled for May, 2024, it lacked both its usual enthusiasm and swagger. After countless scandals, after controversially remanding Mr. Zuma’s sentence, and after hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash was stolen from his couch (don’t ask), Mr. Ramaphosa increasingly looked like the man who would preside over the greatest electoral loss for the oldest and most celebrated liberation party in Africa. Worse, early in the campaign, Mr. Zuma refused to stump for the movement he had joined more than six decades ago, back when he was a teenaged anti-apartheid activist.
And then, the bombshell. In December, Mr. Zuma emerged as the leader of a breakaway party called uMkhonto we Sizwe, or MK. The name is sacred to the ANC, as it belongs to the party’s legendary, long-defunct paramilitary wing. Other than Mr. Zuma himself, MK was not comprised of veteran liberation warriors – indeed, it was difficult to tell who was a member, who ran it, who funded it, and what they wanted, other than raw power for power’s sake.
Mr. Zuma, clearly the figurehead, declared that he was still an ANC member in good standing. The party disagreed, and eventually expelled him. Then, the ANC hurriedly tried to copyright the MK name. They failed, a rare court case that the former president has won. Then came a legal kerfuffle over whether Mr. Zuma – a convicted criminal, who not so long ago was on “medical leave” from his contempt-of-court sentence – was even eligible to be a member of parliament. The answer, according to the constitution, was a hard no.
Amid all the lawfare, and the inevitable internal squabbling within MK itself, the party eventually published a manifesto. What emerged from the turgid prose was a revanchist ethnonationalist mélange of feudalism, socialism and hard-core paternalism – as 21st-century a phenomenon as iPhones or prestige TV. If anything, MK’s policies resembled the racist National Party, which jealously ruled over the apartheid regime.
It’s laughable to think that anyone would fall for this, but it seemed that resentment was so ingrained in KZN that MK built momentum quickly. By the time polls closed late on the night of May 29, it appeared that for the first time in the 30-year history of South African democracy, the ANC would lose its majority.
It was far worse than that. The party plunged a stunning 17 per cent in the polls, dropping to just over 40 per cent, while MK earned almost 15 per cent, lapping up almost all of the ANC’s shortfall. (While they won big in KZN, they also made inroads elsewhere in the country, and not just with their ethnic Zulu base.) The outcome could hardly have been more catastrophic or humiliating, but what is now clear is that a startup party comprised mostly of underworld figures and social-media celebrities is the third-largest – and perhaps the most powerful – political entity in the country. But this remains an ANC family fight, and as most of us with families know, there is nothing more vicious.
In what has now become a boring trope of postmodern democracy, Mr. Zuma and his cabal declared the election rigged, and demanded first a recount, and then a new vote. The 82-year-old Mr. Zuma seems to have regained some of his former vigour – we can only wonder what moisturizer he uses. While he was once king, he is now kingmaker: As South Africa enters its national coalition era, it’s currently anyone’s guess who will form the core of the seventh national government. Will MK demand full governance of KZN in exchange for compliance at a national level? Will they demand cabinet positions, leadership roles in state-run institutions? The presidency?
It’s too early to tell how all of this will unfold, but what is now certain is that both politically and physically, Mr. Zuma is unkillable. (I’ve lost count of how many times he’s claimed to have been poisoned – on one occasion, by one of his wives.) With close ties to Russian geopolitical mobsters and professional political assassins, Mr. Zuma and his fresh party can do a lot of damage, if they don’t destroy themselves first.
We live in a time of political cults, where the rule of law only further incentivizes charismatic ghouls to crawl from their grave over and over and over again. The stench of the crypt reminds us that something has gone badly wrong with liberal democracy. Perhaps it’s time to find a remedy.