Addressing an audience in London, Tony Leon — the former leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) — expressed fears that under Jacob Zuma as president, South Africa could revert to a stereotype of “Big Man”, African-style kleptocracy replete with redistributive and populist economics with lashings of demagoguery.
He said on Wednesday at the International Policy Network in Covent Garden that it now seemed possible that the next democratically elected president of our country would be a criminal accused — charged but not convicted — who, Houdini-like, might escape the chains of the looming trial and continue his gravity-defying political resurrection right into the presidency.
But Leon suggested that one effect of the African National Congress (ANC) succession struggle was perhaps unintended: a limit on the scope of the presidency.
“I was one of many who bought into the myth that Mbeki was an Africanised version of Machiavelli — a master of the dark arts of political survival, and a ruthless but successful backroom manipulator. The endgame at Polokwane proved that I [and the bulk of the media and the political classes generally] had believed in a false analogy,” Leon said.
“Mbeki, in the end, resembled the Wizard of Oz: he had intimidated people with the giant shadow he cast from behind the screen of power. When this was ripped away he proved in some ways the local equivalent of the old man from Topeka, Kansas, who when revealed in his weakness responded to the charge, ‘You are a bad man’ with the meek rejoinder: ‘No, I am just a bad wizard’.”
Leon pointed out that should Zuma prevail, most South Africans have no clear idea where he will lead the country.
“For some, the words ‘President Zuma’ are an unnerving prospect,” he said. “But he was recently rushed around investment centres in South Africa, London and the United States, assuring nervous financiers that he will not change our reasonably successful, if job-crushing, economic policies.”
However, he added, his union and communist allies chafe at the restraints imposed by the current economic orthodoxies implemented by Mbeki. They want both looser monetary and fiscal policies with less inflation targeting — and are deeply opposed to any further trade liberalisation.
The former leader of the DA, now its spokesperson on foreign affairs, said that on such crucial issues as HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe, Zuma and his allies in the Congress of South African Trade unions and the South African Communist Party ranks are more democratically mainstream than Mbeki’s essentially denialist, narrowly Africanist and politically tone-deaf approach.
“On crime, for example, Zuma had been far more frank than Mbeki, who routinely rounded on critics, and even victims, of the country’s crime wave as being actuated by either racial malice or ignorance, Leon said. “Zuma, by contrast, correctly identified violent crime as ‘a threat to our democratic order’.
“On such matters Zuma appears plugged into the real concerns of his country’s people. This would be a welcome departure from Mbeki.” — I-Net Bridge