Scorned+populists+parodied+at+SAs+own+peril,+B+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 05 July 2005
=Scorned ‘populists’ parodied at SA’s own peril=


 * Vukani Mde**

WHAT do analysts and newspaper columnists mean when they say the defining fault line in the African National Congress (ANC) is one between “rationalists” and “populists”? Moreover, why do they suggest President Thabo Mbeki represents one side of this divide and Jacob Zuma the other?

Why do these commentators speak in such derisive terms about “populists” and approvingly about “rationalists”?

Who are the “populists” in the ruling ANC and its alliance? And what do “populists” do?

Besides Zuma, the name most bandied about as a “populist” is that of Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of labour union federation Cosatu. Now, Zuma and Vavi are not really ideological soul mates. They are at best “fellow travellers”, to use a quaint McCarthysim. They do, however, share a common personal and political background. Both come from deprived rural communities marked by penury and lack of opportunity. Both overcame these early obstacles and rose to the top echelons of politics. Neither received a formal education.

But, to the elite commentators, the one commonality that renders Zuma and Vavi offensive is this: in their different ways, both cling stubbornly to values characteristic of their unlettered backgrounds. Zuma, a shepherd boy from Nkandla, has turned out to be a socially conservative Zulu traditionalist happily practising polygamy, hence his easy rapport with the feudalists of the Inkatha Freedom Party. Vavi, a nomadic sharecropper who embraced the workers’ movement, has morphed into a worker militant thoroughly disdainful of elites.

Thus, from radically different positions, Zuma and Vavi find that they fit uneasily into the power dynamics of the new order, but for surprisingly similar reasons they are disdained by the beneficiaries of that order. They are so held in disdain because they are, at best, an embarrassment to the new (read black) elite. At worst they are dangerous.

Loose talk about “rationalists” and “populists” in the ANC denies this reality about the politics of class in the new SA. What we have before us are darkies who do not speak proper English, cannot manage their financial “portfolios” after we’ve worked so hard to make blacks bankable, and make the rest of us look bad at the Group of Eight. They are caricatures of the kind of black subject we had hoped we’d left behind.

A view is expressed openly in the ANC that Zuma has risen much higher than he had any right to. For him to aspire to the very presidency is downright presumptuous. Where is his university degree? What does he know about managing a complex, modern democracy?

I once heard a senior political editor ask in reference to Zuma: “When will formal qualification ever count as a criterion for advancement in this country?” The person is usually an intelligent speaker on politics, a masters graduate of Yale. He speaks highly of the “rationalist” Mbeki, a masters graduate of Sussex.

Another editor wondered how Zuma would “run” the economy since he patently knew nothing about economics. Two leading weekly newspapers have painted horror scenarios of what a Zuma presidency would be like. Their disapproval was not centred on suggestions that he might be ethically compromised, since there is no evidence that the black elite disapproves of corruption. The editor of Business Day has openly called his behaviour stupid. The nicest thing these elite assailants are able to say of Zuma is that he is “nice” and “affable”.

In the new SA, it seems, the only open prejudice permissible is that based on class, and the only people we can patronise are our class inferiors. Herein lies the inability of our elites to explain the supposed anomaly of Zuma’s popularity, which they deride as populism. How can we have intelligent comment from people with a blind spot about their subjective positions?

Zuma is loved not because he is “left” or “populist” or “nice”. It does not have to do with the fact that “he is not Mbeki”. Nor has it to do with the libellous insinuation that he has promised patronage to supporters. Ordinary people see in the public excoriation of Zuma by the state, the business lobby, ANC elites and their ideological handmaidens in the media evidence that “people like us” are under attack. Ignore this psychological dimension of the Zuma phenomenon at your peril.


 * Mde is political correspondent.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A64222