Showdown in South Africa

Fred Bridgland reports from Johannesburg
Sunday Herald International

SOUTH AFRICAN democracy, born with huge hope and global goodwill when Nelson Mandela was elected state president 15 years ago, enters its fourth all-race general election next month in a fragile state.



Political commentators bewail the fact that there is no real election debate and that the campaign is proving dirty and intellectually arid. There is much head-shaking about the probability that Jacob Zuma, facing extensive graft charges, will become state president, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, given prison sentences for fraud and kidnapping teenager Stompie Moeketsi and beating him to within an inch of his death before he was murdered, will be one of his top lieutenants.

"Never before have so many people been so scared by the words of so few," said the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, who added that some of Zuma's militant supporters make former white Nazi leader Eugene Terre'blanche look like a liberal democrat.

Few political campaigners are addressing the terrifying statistic, recently highlighted by leading academic Dr Mamphela Ramphele - a former World Bank vice-president and mother of two children by murdered Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko - that 60% of South Africans aged 18 to 35 do not have jobs. What motivates them and how they will vote is the big unknown factor in the most unpredictable election since racial apartheid was buried in 1994.

"The crisis of our swelling numbers of poorly educated, unskilled and unemployed youth is central to this country's many problems," said veteran journalist Allister Sparks, former editor of the Rand Daily Mail. "It is the taproot from which other problems sprout, from crime to delinquent social behaviour and poor economic performance."

With no apprenticeship system, amid rigid labour laws that discourage employers from taking on unskilled workers, more than half a million young people leave the creaking, mismanaged education system every two years with no certificates of any kind. Many begin their adult lives by slipping into careers of petty crime before drifting into the ranks of the big criminal syndicates that have set up in South Africa because they know policing is weak and there is a big pool of desperate labour willing to do the violent hit-work.

Perhaps the only certainty in the election is that the African National Congress (ANC), the former main liberation movement, which has ruled with big majorities since 1994, will win again.

How big that majority will be (and allied to it, the future health of South Africa's still stripling democracy) is the crucial issue for ANC stalwarts, who want to see their party's rule entrenched, and for ANC opponents, who fear democracy will be undermined if the liberation movement-turned-political party is given too big a majority.

William Gumede, author of a critical biography of former president Thabo Mbeki and a professor at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of London, warned: "The problem with liberation movements is that they create liberation aristocrats who do what they want.

"This time, before and after the election, is our tipping point. From here things will go downhill. No liberation movement has moved upwards from this point. The ANC coalition is only holding because there's an election to be won."

Gumede's widely shared argument is that the ANC is an alliance formed with a single agenda - to fight and topple whites-only rule - that cannot hold long-term and is already dividing the party.

Late last year several leading lifelong ANC activists defected and formed a breakaway party they named the Congress of the People (Cope), after a giant gathering in Johannesburg 54 years ago of people from four movements opposed to apartheid rule. From the Congress of the People in 1955 emerged the Freedom Charter, characterised by its opening demand, "The People Shall Govern", which became the ANC manifesto. Nelson Mandela, then in his thirties and on the run from the security services, attended the congress disguised as a milkman.

Gumede believes that further tensions will emerge within the rump ANC. Jacob Zuma rose to power as the party's leader at the last electoral congress with the support of the ANC's long-serving trade union and South African Communist Party allies who saw in his populist ability to communicate with ordinary black people a means to entrench their views in government. Above all, they hoped that he would abandon the conservative economic policies of former President Thabo Mbeki.

But while Zuma wants to retain Trevor Manuel in the job of finance minister that he has handled deftly for the past 13 years, achieving an annual growth rate of nearly 5% and keeping the country on an even keel between high expectations and economic reality, the president-in-waiting's union and communist backers want Manuel out for pursuing policies they label "too conservative."

Zuma, when he becomes state president next month, will be in a cleft stick. Manuel is the one person left in the South African government with a high international reputation. His sacking would accelerate the drop in world confidence in South Africa's future. If he remains, Zuma's leftist backers will use him as a stick with which to beat Zuma and large parts of his support might drain away. "This is a postponed fight," said Gumede.

The splits within the ANC are perhaps the least of Zuma's problems. He will take office, assuming the ANC wins, with serious criminal charges hanging over him. In August his long-delayed trial is due to begin on 783 counts of corruption, fraud, money-laundering, racketeering and tax evasion in connection with the country's graft-ridden £5.5 billion arms deal with British Aerospace and other west European arms manufacturers.

The trial, whether it goes ahead or is abandoned as the result of a widely anticipated stitch-up, is bound to plunge the country's legal and political processes into turmoil.

"Many ANC leaders think this case will simply disappear," said Gumede. "It is not going to go away. This is a major crisis. It will suck in the ANC and it will become more and more damaging to the ANC as information emerges."

The surest way for the ANC to get Zuma off the hook would be for the party to win a two-thirds majority in the proportional representation-only election on April 22. A two-thirds majority would allow the ANC to alter the constitution and grant immunity from prosecution to a serving head of state.

However, the Cope split virtually ensures that the ANC will not be able to secure the necessary majority. Cope, led initially by former ANC defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota and Sam Shilowa, former ANC premier of Gauteng, South Africa's economically most important province, said it hoped to win 51% of the vote in its first electoral outing. The best early estimates suggest Cope will win somewhere between 8% and 15% of the national vote - not enough to fulfil its wildest dreams, but sufficient, combined with votes for other opposition parties, to deprive Zuma of a two-thirds majority.

The ANC faces another problem - the worldwide credit crisis. Its impact on South Africa was delayed, but now the country is in deep recession, with workers being laid off from the mines and the automobile industry, which supplies parts to manufacturers in other parts of the world, and bank profits dropping. With real unemployment growing beyond 40%, Zuma's main strategy boast has become a chimera: "At the core of our economic programme is to grow the economy and create more jobs at a faster rate The ANC government will lead a massive public investment programme for growth and employment creation."

Zuma will instead find he needs to deal with an economy shrinking at 2% annually, according to independent economists, and explain to the electorate and his trade union and communist partners why the campaign promises now have to go in reverse direction.

Zuma, already handicapped by his impending trial, may also be handicapped by the sensational re-emergence from the political wilderness of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Madikizela-Mandela, the 71-year-old ex-wife of Nelson Mandela, is fifth on the list of ANC parliamentary candidates, virtually assuring her of a ministerial post in a Zuma cabinet should she want it. Her political career has appeared dead many times, and few gave her a chance of a comeback when she was forced to resign as an MP and as president of the ANC Women's League following a 2003 conviction for fraud.

South Africa's constitution states that a person sentenced to more than 12 months in jail without the option of a fine is barred from parliament. In the sensational case of Stompie Moeketsi, found with his throat slit on waste ground after the then Mrs Mandela oversaw him being beaten to a pulp, her long jail sentence in the 1990s was reduced inexplicably on appeal to a mere 15,000 rand then worth £3000 fine. Her jailing for fraud was reduced on appeal to a five-year suspended sentence, later reduced to three and a half years.

Opposition parties face a dilemma in deciding whether to challenge Madikizela-Mandela's eligibility. Her popularity among ANC activists was confirmed at recent elections to the ANC national executive committee, in which she came top. But her wider popularity is doubtful. It may prove politically advantageous for the ANC's opponents to see her front the ruling party's campaign alongside a leader facing serious criminal charges.

Already the ANC is acting as though there will be no legal challenge, arguing that Madikizela-Mandela never served a single day of her total sentences of 11 years' imprisonment. The party's first TV campaign advert shows Nelson Mandela in iconic footage walking free from prison in 1990, with his right hand a fist in the air and his left clasping the hand of his then wife, a vivacious 52-year-old Winnie.

The advert omits the fact that Nelson later divorced her, citing her multiple adultery, which had left him "humiliated and lonely"; her hypocritical expressions of affection for him at public gatherings; and her lavish spending. Mandela said Winnie had refused to sleep with him on his release, and added: "I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her. If the entire universe persuaded me to reconcile I would not."

Winnie Mandela was for a long time one of the most famous women in the world. Tall and beautiful, she was revered and honoured at home and abroad as the mother of the nation and wife of the imprisoned Mandela. She achieved the status of international political martyr when she was sent by the apartheid-era police into internal exile in a grim country town that was South Africa's equivalent of the Soviet gulags.

When she returned from internal exile she formed her notorious bodyguard, the Mandela United Football Club, which never played a match but was involved in scores of assassinations in the giant black township of Soweto. Slogans began to be painted on township walls calling her the "Mugger of the Nation".