Cape Town – President Jacob Zuma will not be impeached, nor is the ANC likely to remove him from office following the damning court ruling that he had flouted the constitution in the Nkandla saga, political analyst Steven Friedman said on Thursday.
“Impeachment is a political process, not a legal one,” Friedman pointed out after the Democratic Alliance rushed to lodge a motion for Parliament to remove the president.
He predicted that the ANC would have little appetite for recalling Zuma, following ruling party secretary general Gwede Mantashe’s recent remarks that, in hindsight, forcing former president Thabo Mbeki out of the position in 2008 had not been a good idea.
The certain impact of the Constitutional Court’s unanimous finding on Thursday that Zuma and the National Assembly had failed to uphold the constitution would, according to Friedman, be to strenghten the hand of the ANC faction that opposed Zuma in the bitter infighting in the party that had at its heart a succession battle.
“Mantashe has said it wasn’t all that helpful to push out Mbeki, so essentially this may be used by the faction that is opposed to him (Zuma) in the ANC to weaken his position and make it less possible for his camp to impose their candidate for succession.”
The ANC top six officials were expected to meet later on Thursday to discuss the court judgment, just a fortnight after the party’s National Executive Committee was confronted with the bombshell of Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas confirming reports that he had been offered the post of finance minister by the Guptas shortly before Zuma axed Nhlanhla Nene.
That NEC meeting ended with a declaration that the party remained united behind the President, and Friedman stressed that Zuma, through carefull orchestration, commanded the balance of support in the executive.
If it was clear that his backers no longer included Mantashe, it also did not mean that he, or other opponents, had the appetite to force Zuma out as they could increasingly call the shots with a scandal-weakened President in office. Here he cited the party’s forcing of Zuma to replace his choice for finance minister, Des van Rooyen, with the trusted Pravin Gordhan in December.
“The interesting thing is than in taking over the ANC, you don’t have to get rid of Zuma. Ok, he is still President but does not get to choose the finance minister.”
Friedman said the real risk for Zuma, and the one thing that might yet see his removal before the end of his term of office in 2017, was if the ANC bled support in this year’s local government elections. Branches might begin to push for him to go if councillors lost their seats in numbers to the opposition.
“What will matter is if a lot of ANC councillors lose their seats, because if that happens you get pushed out of the middle class and into poverty and of course those people who lose their seats don’t stop being ANC members or branch members. They are most likely to blame Zuma and it puts pressure on the NEC if you have people at branch level saying ‘this guy has to go’.”
Professor Joleen Steyn Kotze, a political studies lecturer at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitain University, also cautioned that the ANC would have to face the fact that Zuma may prove a liability in the elections.
“Going into the local government elections, Zuma is the face of the ANC, he is on every billboard and poster,” she said.
“The ANC will have to make some tough decisions. Public trust and opinion of Zuma is low, especially after the firing of former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene.
“We are speaking a lot of state capture, we are speaking power that individuals have that creates a perception that individuals can act outside the law, the ANC would have to tackle these issues.”
African News Agency
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