Johannesburg - “What blinded us?” newly installed ANC Chief Whip Jackson Mthembu asked this week, reflecting on the Constitutional Court finding that Parliament had failed its constitutional duty to hold President Jacob Zuma to account on Nkandla.
As pressure on the party to ditch its tainted president reached a fever pitch and signs of internal division over the question mounted, a few theories were on offer as to why even those in the ANC admired for their integrity would choose to continue supporting him.
Many suggested Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini hit the nail on the head when she claimed everyone in the national executive committee had their own “smolanyana skeletons”, preventing them from speaking out for fear of being exposed themselves.
An equally uncharitable view was that the MPs who voted down a motion to impeach Zuma were protecting their jobs, not so much their president.
EFF leader Julius Malema called them “voting cattle”. Clearly, the insults hit a nerve.
“Some have called us sycophants, people who do things without even reasoning,” Mthembu observed at a sit-down with parliamentary journalists. “We are not sycophants.”
But he appeared to contradict this argument somewhat when he admitted that the fact MPs and members of the executive, including the president, came from the same party may have played a role in their reluctance to question the absurd report of Police Minister Nathi Nhleko on Nkandla, which exonerated Zuma.
“It’s something we should reflect on, because this court judgment says, as an important forum of debate established by our people through their sweat and blood, we must say, what do we do differently?” Mthembu said.
“Did we at times conflate the role of the executive and the role of Parliament because at times we all come from the same party? It’s something we must look at critically. The problem of a governing party being expected to crack the whip on its own leadership in the executive is not unique to this country.”
But, said Professor Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, it was true that the proportional representation electoral system here did not lend itself to the independence of MPs.
In this system, the party compiles the list of its representatives, giving the leadership a strong hold over them.
While the ANC expressly insists on the concept of democratic centralism, which allows issues to be debated inside the party but not in public, Friedman said it was not alone in enforcing this kind of discipline.
Despite mounting evidence that many ANC branches oppose the party’s official acceptance of Zuma’s apology for the “frustration” caused by the scandal, this would not necessarily lead to a change of heart.
“The reason is that the pattern in the ANC over the last few years is that you go to the elective congress and whoever is in the majority elects an NEC consisting entirely of their people, with a couple of tokens, and that’s the NEC for five years,” Friedman said. “Given that that’s the reality, if you’re an unhappy person in a branch, what do you do about it? There’s nothing you can do.”
While branches could “make a noise” or even pass resolutions calling for Zuma to go, there was nothing in the party’s constitution obliging the NEC to take their views on board. This also explained why even people in the party who might want to see the back of Zuma were choosing to hold their fire, despite the public clamour for them to speak out. They don’t have the votes in the NEC, so what is the point of coming out publicly?” Friedman said.
“If I was an ANC politician who was opposed to Zuma, I’d make the argument to say you don’t challenge Zuma, you try to make sure you elect the next ANC president, because if you elect the next ANC president you also get to choose the next NEC, which will consist entirely of your people rather than their people.
“That’s a far more rational approach than trying to win a few cheap cheers by making bold statements about how the president ought to go when you know you don’t have the votes to make him.”
This was the strategy of Zuma’s supporters when they sought to topple Mbeki.
“That tells you two things - that that is the way the game is likely to be played this time, and that some shock or unexpected event can come along and change that. But that hasn’t happened yet.” One such shock could be a significant loss of support in the local government elections, which might provoke sufficient ferment in branches for the NEC to drop its support for Zuma.
In the meantime, there was little prospect of a flowering of accountability in Parliament, despite Mthembu’s promise to “do things differently”.
Sunday Independent