President Thabo Mbeki himself is to blame for the destructive power struggle that is going on in the ruling African National Congress, says official opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon.
In his regular internet column, South Africa Today, Leon said South Africa is facing a potential constitutional crisis because of the struggle for power within the ANC itself.
The faction that has formed around former deputy president Jacob Zuma has earned the condemnation of many South Africans, ”and rightly so” for its demonstrations outside a Durban court where Zuma was facing trial for corruption.
But Mbeki had led the arms deal cover-up that turned a legal crisis into a political and possibly a constitutional one.
”It is he who centralised power within the ruling party and the government, shutting down debate on important policy issues.
”It is he who extended the control of the Presidency over every single state institution, such that a party rivalry has become a national conflict, pitting one law-enforcement agency, one minister, one citizen against another.
”It is Mbeki who controls the process of ‘deployment’ through which loyal ANC cadres are placed in charge of state institutions that are meant to be non-partisan and independent. This renders them less effective in their duties and compromises their integrity.”
Leon argued that Mbeki has also triggered his own political problems by mistreating his allies in the tripartite alliance. Though he clearly despises the official opposition, he seems to despise the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) — and those whom he derides as the ultra-left — even more.
”By refusing to compromise or even to meet with leaders such as Cosatu secretary general Zwelinzima Vavi, President Mbeki created an internal opposition that lay dormant until Zuma presented himself as the first senior figure willing to oppose the president.”
Leon said while he was the first to call for Zuma’s resignation when the National Directorate of Public Prosecutions announced in 2003 that it had a prima facie case of corruption against him, ”yet there appears [now] to be a double standard at work”.
Zuma is being prosecuted appropriately, ”but several other individuals involved in the arms deal are being let off the hook”.
”In the Zuma case, one of the key pieces of evidence was the former deputy president’s misleading answer in 2003 to a parliamentary question about whether, when and where Zuma had met executives from French arms company Thomson-CSF, one of the bidders in the arms deal.
”The DA tried to ask President Mbeki a similar parliamentary question this year, after uncovering and releasing evidence that then-deputy president Mbeki had also allegedly met with executives from Thomson-CSF while the bidding was going on.”
Among the outstanding questions about Zuma is whether he accepted a bribe from Thomson-CSF.
”But the speaker [of the National Assembly], in her normal partisan fashion, having initially approved the question, then reversed her decision and ruled it out on the spurious grounds that it was not of ‘national or international importance’.” — I-Net Bridge