Time to restrategise: Now that Jacob Zuma is history
NEWS ANALYSIS
A years-long push by opposition parties to have former president Jacob Zuma removed from office may have eventually paid off, but it is likely to result in a scramble among them to restrategise ahead of the 2019 national polls.
Although it is still early days, some social commentators believe newly elected President Cyril Ramaphosa has dislodged opposition parties such as the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters in their quest to improve their electoral showings next year.
At his maiden State of the Nation address last week, Ramaphosa was given a standing ovation by the ANC and opposition parties alike.
For the ANC, the occasion marked a rebirth, with Ramaphosa sharing a message of a “new dawn”.
For opposition parties, the occasion represented a wish fulfilled — Zuma was no longer in office. But it also highlighted the need for a new approach to take towards Ramaphosa, who had made promises to fight corruption and grow the economy.
According to political analyst Somadoda Fikeni, Zuma’s administration made it easy for the opposition to make electoral inroads as they capitalised on sections of the population unhappy with the former president’s leadership.
The opposition’s dependence on Zuma as its electoral ticket would likely come back to haunt it now that he had vacated office — especially so soon before the elections, he said.
“Most of the opposition parties in the last six or seven years have built their narrative around Zuma and corruption, and they made it to be the same equation as the ANC. Now that ANC is speaking of pursuing anti-corruption measures and Zuma is no longer there, it’s quite a nightmare for some opposition parties,” Fikeni said.
During the 2016 municipal elections, the DA caused an upset when it secured control of three key metros and increased its national support from 23.94% in 2011 to 26.9%.
Ramaphosa’s election, however, threatens to see the ANC take back much of the urban black vote it lost in 2016 — the same vote the DA had hoped to capitalise on in 2019. The DA will also have to find ways of repositioning itself as the champion of job creation after Ramaphosa announced plans to convene a jobs summit in the coming months.
The need to create jobs is a narrative that has been pushed heavily by DA leader Mmusi Maimane during campaigning. Political analyst Lukhona Mnguni said, although Maimane had promoted the urgency of creating employment for a while, it would likely hold more weight when advocated by Ramaphosa.
“If you have been listening to Mmusi since he took over, his talk was about the need to create jobs. Ramaphosa is taking that issue and centring it in the ANC in the form of creating a jobs summit. People are more likely to look to a party that is actually in government for that than an opposition party. So, it does harm to the DA and particularly Mmusi,” Mnguni said.
For the EFF, Ramaphosa’s commitment to push land expropriation without compensation, which he said would address South Africa’s “original sin”, will likely push the red berets towards finding ways to reinvent their narrative ahead of elections.
Now that Ramaphosa is in charge, the EFF finds itself being criticised for its combative approach — something for which it was often praised during the Zuma era. The party was criticised last week for refusing to participate in the presidential election and walking out of the National Assembly after it had called for Parliament to be dissolved.
With the country still feeling a spirit of revival following the election of a new president, Mnguni cautioned opposition parties against becoming embroiled in personality politics, which would further limit their appeal among voters.
“If you listen to [Julius] Malema after the recent EFF plenum, there was little said about the plenum itself and it was just him going on about the ANC. His emotional attachment to the ANC is going to compromise the EFF, because there’s a lot of wanting to gossip about what happens in the ANC,” Mnguni said.
“And that’s a problem for the EFF because if its leader is preoccupied with goings-on in the ANC and trying to find dirt in the ANC … it’s not enough [to secure votes]. What’s needed is to centre the voice and the narrative of the EFF.”