Howard Barrell : Over a Barrel
Nkosazana Zuma, it seems, takes the view that, if you want to bring about far- reaching change, do it early, do it hard and give your opponents no quarter.
The way the tobacco companies, health insurers and drug companies are now bleating to the courts for respite suggests the redoubtable minister of health has given them the legislative equivalent of a knee where it hurts most, an uppercut when they buckled over and a kick to the shins when they looked like recovering their balance. No doubt she also had tea and sympathy in mind, but due process has now deprived her of the opportunity to offer it.
Zuma is tough. She would not, she told me recently, wish her job on her worst enemy. Nonetheless, she said, she enjoys it. She enjoys the challenge and the feeling of getting done what she feels needs to be done to bring equal health chances to 40- million South Africans.
She has had to be tough. She has been, and still is, the target of some of the meanest racist assumptions and taunts from her opponents. “If I had taken it all personally,” she said, “I would have gone mad.”
But, she said: “The strange thing is that some of the people who attack me in public, some of my strongest critics, come up to me afterwards and say: `You know I had to do that – I have to oppose you – but I think you are doing a good job.'”
If the heads of the companies who are now appealing to the courts to protect them from her had done a little research into her past, they would probably not have got into this mess. They would then have known there are few tougher nuts in the Cabinet.
For she has never been expedient. Young black women did not get into medical school in South Africa in the early 1970s – as she did – by being dumb or compliant. Nor, in 1975, did the dumb or compliant break with the black-consciousness movement to participate in the non-racial politics of the African National Congress as she did.
Why? Because it was highly unfashionable to do so. Because at that time the ANC was a marginal group with minimal support and even less organisation. And because joining this peripheral group of self-important malcontents, who then seemed to be on a hiding to nothing, meant risking detention and torture at a time when there was very little support around for people who were in detention getting tortured. Joseph Mdluli, who died at the hands of security police in Durban, was tragically eloquent testimony to that.
Zuma, or Nkosazana Dlamini as she then was, was actually recruited into the ANC by one Thabo Mbeki when, young black-consciousness student leader that she once was, she visited Swaziland in 1975. Mbeki was then a young rising star in the ANC who had recently also spent a period in Botswana trying to deepen the roots of the ANC’s organisation there. Mbeki had clearly already developed a skill he has today: an ability to bring together disparate threads of what he believes is the same political cloth.
The man she subsequently married, Jacob Zuma, now deputy president of the ANC, was in the mid-1970s a recently released prisoner off Robben Island. He, too, was tough and determined. According to his comrades, he had gone to prison 10 years earlier an almost illiterate peasant; he had come out a respected intellectual force in the ANC. When he met Nkosazana Dlamini, he and a handful of other former Robben Island prisoners were rebuilding the ANC almost from scratch in what is now KwaZulu- Natal, travelling backwards and forwards at great risk across the South Africa/Swaziland border.
If any group of people laid the groundwork for the rise of the ANC after the uprisings in Soweto and elsewhere in 1976, it was this group in KwaZulu-Natal; there was another in Gauteng around Joe Gqabi, later the ANC’s chief representative in Zimbabwe who was assassinated in 1981, Alexandra township veteran Martin Ramokgadi and John Nkadimeng, now South Africa’s ambassador to Cuba; and a further group in the Eastern Cape working with the ANC presence in Lesotho, where the late Chris Hani was based from 1974. When first hundreds and then thousands of students began fleeing South Africa in search of military training after June 1976 these three networks were the ones that channelled so many of them to the ANC in exile.
So the minister of health has connections. She also has a history. She is not still in search of a real-life experience. She was not flying a desk in exile or conducting a bureaucratic paper chase between London and Lusaka. And she has garnered strong political backing for her health reforms from her colleagues and from the top of her party. It shows no sign of waning.
Whereas some other Cabinet ministers in other “delivery ministries”, such as education’s Sibusiso Bengu, have dithered away the initiative they had a few years ago, Zuma – who finally qualified as a doctor at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom while in exile- has pushed through an agenda with admirable force and will.
We may disagree with her – I, for one, enjoy passive smoking -but it is very difficult not to admire her. She has taken on vested interests and admirably fouled up their featherbed.
Those who support her commonly criticise her for her bluntness and for her unwillingness to compromise tactically. Her own assessment is that perhaps she has in her time as health minister made perhaps one big mistake. “I think I may have taken on too many hornets’ nests at once,” she says. Personally, I fear for the hornets.