Gleason+Torque+on+Succession,+Monday+26th+Sept




 * Gleason Torque, 26 September 2005**


 * The Torque column**

=**Oh dear, what a mess…**=

Missing for some time, my wandering albatross reappeared earlier this week on the balcony, labouring under a pile of new information.

Will former deputy president Jacob Zuma actually be brought to court to face charges of corruption? Or will the case be launched only to be withdrawn at some convenient point down the line? On the basis of what I’m hearing – from highly-placed sources, I might add – this scenario, or a variation of it, looks increasingly likely.

And that internal commission of inquiry initially proposed by President Thabo Mbeki appears a dead duck. It was, in any event, nothing more than a strategy devised to provide Mbeki with what his advisers hoped would be a tidy exit from a situation that was frankly untenable.

Two intriguing stories have emerged in the last few days, and they converge to produce a tale that points, quite aside from its obvious duplicity, to a retreat that some in the African National Congress (ANC) devoutly hope won’t become a rout.

The first of these – Zuma in court, or rather, not in court – signals the extent to which Mbeki has lost effective control of the ANC. I understand the latest tactic is to defuse the prosecution process by leaning heavily on the National Prosecuting Authority (of course, they don’t do this, do they?). This will oblige the hapless national director, Vusi Pikoli, to conclude he has no alternative other than to admit that serious procedural errors have been committed.

What is ironic about this is that Mbeki, or so I am told, himself knew in advance of the raids on Zuma’s home, and the offices of his legal advisers and supporters. Effectively, therefore, he gave these the nod (though another good source says emphatically that this is not so). And I understand that Mbeki’s personal legal counsellor, Mojanku Gumbi, played a major role in drawing the charge sheet against Zuma.

Yet another intriguing aspect is the presence in all this of what I call “old order” functionaries. Krappies Engelbrecht, for example, better known for his involvement in the apartheid regime’s dirty tricks brigade, played an important role, apparently, in those now-infamous raids on Zuma and others.

They obviously hoped that, presented with this wall of determination, Zuma would fall over and the exit strategy would be executed with clockwork precision. What they didn’t reckon with was the venom their actions inspired from the ANC’s grass roots, fed up as the “masses” are with the emergence of an indecently wealthy grouping of elitists and the all-too conspicuous failure to deliver basic necessities to most poverty-bound communities.

What followed was the development of a classical “old order” tactic. If it could be presented that the prosecution against Zuma was bound to fail on the basis it would be impossible to organise a “fair” trial, then withdrawal of the charges – not necessarily immediately but at some convenient point down the road – would be a logical outcome. That would leave Zuma free but out of the government and with a miasma of doubt hanging over him.

In any event, if the trial does indeed proceed, the probability has to be high that Zuma would summons Mbeki and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel to give evidence on oath on hitherto secret matters related to the arms deal. And further revelations on this damaging episode is the one thing the ANC’s inner cabal definitely does not want to see the light of day. This is absolutely consistent with what they have been doing up to now.


 * Packaging Phumzile**

The next story concerns the country’s new deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. This may not be of her making, but there can be no doubt that she is being pushed at an unseemly rate into the limelight. Only a fortnight ago, she was lauded at a major (read hundreds in attendance) and larney dinner (in the Sandton Convention Centre) where her virtues were extolled at such length that it became positively embarrassing.

Phumzile is, apparently, the next best thing to Mother Christmas. She is being touted as the heir apparent to Mbeki’s throne. Whether she wants this is beside the point – those who know better are doing their damnedest to make sure she inherits.

And she brings with her considerable baggage. There is the little – and unresolved – matter of Oilgate, the comprehensive mess she has left behind in the Mines Department with foreign companies leaving in droves (and now being begged to return), and her (in)famous utterances about taking a page out of Robert Mugabe’s book on how to nationalise land.

Finally, of course, she has to live down her husband, the profoundly iniquitous Bulelani Ngcuka, the former national director of public prosecutions, another of Mbeki’s forgettable appointments.

Meanwhile, businessman and multi-millionaire Saki Macozoma is running around the commercial, banking and investment community with the sage wisdom that Phumzile might not be a shoe-in but will beyond a doubt be the next President. She is, says Macozoma, Mbeki’s choice, who considers her the best prospect to advance South Africa’s economic agenda.

And, back wherever it is that these things are planned, and while the tentative truce between Mbeki and Zuma holds good, the decision appears to have been made to get on with factionalising the ANC. Given that it is, in any event, such a curious collection of groups with very different agendas, this won’t be difficult.

Indeed – and almost as an aside – I am bound to note that Mbeki himself predicted this more than 10 years ago. Ahead of the ANC’s National Conference in December 1994, he penned a paper with the formidable title: “From Resistance to Reconstruction: Tasks of the ANC in the New Epoch of the Democratic Transformation – Unmandated Reflections.”
 * Time to say Goodbye?

Writing at length about how the opposition would seek to destroy the ANC from within, he was also pretty disparaging about what he called forces in the party’s ranks which “having draped themselves in the cloak of radicalism (read Cosatu), objectively act to discredit and weaken the government.”

And he went on to say, and this is critical: “Change also demands that the ANC and the democratic movement as a whole should be able to shed some of its “members” regardless of how this might be exploited by our opponents to discredit the movement.”

In other words, Mbeki has long recognised that the fractious nature of the ANC, far from being the monolith many suppose, is unusually disparate in nature. Some might even argue that he has long prepared himself to superintend divisions that might result in the ANC becoming rather slimmer, and that he would be sanguine about Cosatu and the SACP riding off with empty saddle bags into the night.

What he would not have reckoned with, however, is the extent of the disaffection of the ANC’s essential, and life-giving, grass roots. Notice of exactly this was served on him during the rambunctious July meeting of the ANC’s national general council. Whatever other gloss might be put by the spin doctors on the toyi-toying and pro-Zuma t-shirts, there is no getting away from the fact that it was a mighty slap in the face for the Stop Jacob campaigners.

The problem for Mbeki is that he has chosen to be close to the new elitists. By and large, these are people who have become rich, sometimes extraordinarily so. And their timing has been dreadful. They have arrived, as it were, too early and they are having difficulty explaining to the rank and file – those unfortunate “masses” – how and why they have become so wealthy and what justification there is for this.

Even within the rather limited ranks of Mbeki’s personal supporters, I hear that problems are beginning to surface. Defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota (remember when he liked to be known as “Terror?”) and Private Enterprises minister Alec Erwin are both being said to share the Zuma syndrome – which is that they have some rather shady advisers in their respective closets.
 * Just to make matters worse

The deal-that-isn’t between Sandile Zungu’s Umthunzi Telecoms consortium and Transnet, which he claims was entered into on a handshake 18 months ago, unravelled in brutal fashion two weeks ago. Purportedly, Transnet agreed to sell a 6,6%% stake it held in MTN at the (now) knock-down price of R2,4bn (current value north of R4bn).

Zungu, it is being said, was Jeff Radebe’s gopher when Radebe was minister of public enterprises. Now that he has been diverted to the transport portfolio and Erwin has his hands around Radebe’s previous fiefdom, public enterprises, notably Transnet, this presented a good opportunity to put the kibosh on that deal.

What is certainly becoming clear is that the Umthunzi-Transnet deal has much less to do with whether a verbal undertaking was entered into than whether it has now become another political football. Why has it taken so long to emerge in the way it has? Someone (Zungu or Radebe or both) obviously didn’t have the bottle to push it through.

Perhaps this is why, in that whispered way that has become the signature of the ANC, tales are spreading about goings-on involving Erwin and Lekota. Whether they are true hardly matters. What is clear is that another and major knife brawl is underway.

What a curiosity – and mess – it all is. Here we have the ruling party intent it seems on damaging itself, in the long run perhaps irreparably, while the South African economy, always robust even in poor political environments, is revving itself up to whiz along at something approaching full throttle.

Meanwhile, these two stories – the plan to escape from the Jacob Zuma problem and the push to enthrone Phumzile – come together in the equation that reads, on the left: trouble with Zuma (rank and file), so scuttle away from the high court action and leave him high and dry; and on the right, promote Phumzile for all it is worth and secure for her the Presidency; equals problem solved. -JZ + PMN² = Alleluia.

How Mbeki must be praying he has got his maths right.


 * David Gleason

From: http://www.gleasontorque.com/gleasonTorque.co.za/ArticleDetails.aspx?ArID=168**