The State of South African Politics

I'll be the first one to admit that I tend to see most social phenomena through a political lens. Those of us who work on politics are akin to the guy with the hammer who looks at most problems and sees nothing but nails. That said, South Africans tend to be a politicized lot. Everything is political. Even those things that are not.

These are fascinating times to be an observer of South African life. There is a divide within the African National Congress that can only vaguely be attributed to policy differences or even to ideology, at least in the broadest sense. That divide has manifested itself in two personalities: That of President Thabo Mbeki and that of ANC president and presumptive successor to Mbeki, Jacob Zuma. Of late the rhetoric from Zuma's most ardent supporters , most notably the leadership of the ANC Youth League , has been heated, indeed dangerous. When future generations of leaders begin talking about killing and dying for their leadership you either have inordinate loyalty or a dangerously volatile political climate. Most South Africans fear the latter.

Furthermore, the country's legal culture reflects the Mbeki-Zuma divide, with high-level judges falling on one side or the other and thus making the judiciary a potential political flashpoint, if it is not at that stage already. With Jacob Zuma still very much caught up in corruption charges that could derail not only his political aspirations but also his freedom, and with the possibility that such an event would cause
South Africa to convulse.

And then there is the litany of issues that the country faces, and that no leader is going to have an easy time addressing: Inter alia, Crime (the new fad among South Africa's bad guys is blowing up ATM machines and looting the contents), corruption (among the political class but also other elites , think the recent arms sales scandal), poverty and the entire economic apparatus tied up with it, and foreign affairs (Zimbabwe now, Darfur, the role of China on the continent, and then the usual putting out of fires that is the role of a regional superpower). 

The reality is that the Mbeki-Zuma divide has little to do with differences on how to approach any of these issues and everything to do with internal divisions in the party that for now is the only viable source of political power and patronage in the country. Theoretically Zuma's support comes from the left, from the COSATU-SACP wings of the tripartite alliance, where Mbeki's comes from the center (there really is no right-wing of the ANC, no matter what the left would have us believe), the party's putative mainstream, though the fact that Zuma benefits from significantly more support than does Mbeki throws the idea of what exactly the ANC's mainstream is right now.  

I have long argued that the only way there will ever be a serious challenge to the ANC will come if COSATU and SACP break away and form their own leftist party, at which point the ANC would probably garner a plurality of the country's votes, but not a pure majority, which would bring with it the interesting spectacle of a party such as the Democratic Alliance becoming kingmakers in what would become a coalition government along the lines of those in many parliamentary systems. But with Zuma's status as a longstanding ANC stalwart, that break has been tabled for the foreseeable future.

[Crossposted at the FPA's South Africa Blog.]