The Revolution must be defended ‘till the end’

Some of Jacob Zuma’s supporters would feel at home in Robert Mugabe’s cabinet, given their threats of violence and attacks on the highest court in the land.

Jacob Zuma’s victory over Thabo Mbeki at Polokwane last year was hailed as a triumph of democracy. It has, however, unleashed forces that imperil both parliamentary democracy and the judiciary, and therefore the Constitution. Perhaps, some day, people other than Mbeki and his supporters will regret the fact that he was replaced by people so full of menace.

Firstly, the new leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) intends to subordinate both Parliament and the Cabinet to party headquarters as the single centre of power. This will introduce the Soviet model of governance into our political system.

The second threat, directed at the Constitutional Court, is even more serious. It follows threats by Zuma allies such as Julius Malema of the ANC youth league and Zwelinzima Vavi of the Congress of South African Trade Unions that they will shoot to kill and that they will die ‘in the defence of the revolution’. Far from repudiating such threats, the secretary general of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, amplifies them when he says the revolution is in danger from counter-revolutionary forces on the Constitutional Court against whom it must be defended ‘till the end’.

He makes this accusation because the court went public with a complaint against Judge John Hlophe that he thinks it should have kept private. Even if this was an error, there is no reason to believe it was not made in good faith. Mantashe’s allegation that the Constitutional Court is part of some sort of plot is even more ludicrous than the allegations in 2001 by Steve Tshwete that Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Mathews Phosa were involved in a plot to overthrow Mbeki. But it is also dangerous.

What is under attack here is not only the Constitutional Court, which has yet to decide on various Zuma cases, but also the Judicial Service Commission, whose duty it is to pronounce on the complaint against Hlophe. Connect the dots, and what we see is not merely angry and paranoid rhetoric but a threat of violence.

Courts have previously had to make decisions which they know will be vociferously attacked or while mobs are toyi-toying in the street outside. Threats of violence from people in senior party or union positions or so close to the person aspiring to be the country’s president take us across a threshold.

Until now, Zuma has followed non-violent processes in efforts to stave off his trial. Not only do Mantashe’s menacing remarks introduce a new element in attempting to intimidate the judiciary, they also strengthen the growing fear that Zuma and his allies will stop at nothing to win him the presidency of the country. And what if he does win it? Will he stop at nothing to retain it either?

From the early days when President Mbeki refused to criticise President Robert Mugabe, and the ANC cheered him, the real reason is that the ANC and Zanu-PF are two peas out of the same pod. Zuma has been more publicly critical of Mugabe than Mbeki was, but the killing talk emanating from his camp suggests that it contains people who would feel at home in Mugabe’s party and cabinet.

In one sense, of course, Mantashe is right. The revolution is in danger. It is endangered by the restraints imposed by the Constitution and the rule of law, which were supposedly its end products. It is endangered by the checks and balances provided by the Constitution to prevent the abuse of power.

Revolutions are lawless, violent, and often open-ended. The revolutionary violence the ANC launched in South Africa supposedly came to an end with the constitutional settlement in 1994. When senior party officials and their allies still talk of revolution 14 years later, and suggest using violence to defend it, they are in practice renouncing constraints upon the power they seek to exercise. They are talking perpetual revolution. They prompt the suspicion that terms such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, and ‘liberation’ were a smokescreen for the real agenda, which was simply the pursuit of power. Where to next? If a court were to find the Expropriation Bill unconstitutional, for example, would that also be construed as ‘counter-revolutionary’? *