In the run-up to the ANC’s 52nd national conference, fake news peddlers fed us two contrasting sides of Zuma and Mbeki, writes Molifi Tshabalala.
Along with populist misnomers, such as “radical economic transformation” and “white monopoly capital”, fake news - otherwise known as information warfare - has become a buzz phrase. It is not a new phenomenon, though.
In South Africa, one could trace it from the early 1970s when the then-government established The Citizen under covert propagandist projects to portray the apartheid system in a good light against the Rand Daily Mail and international news agencies that influenced English public opinion with exposés such as the Information Scandal, also known as Muldergate.
Besides this, the Rand Daily Mail broke the news that freedom fighter Steve Biko did not die of a hunger strike, as the government had claimed, but of severe beating while in custody, a story filed by then-journalist Helen Zille, now Western Cape premier.
For starters, information warfare is the use of information to gain a psychological advantage over an opponent. The information does not have to be accurate, but it is useful to get the better of an opponent. In fact, information warfare is the nature of the politics.
In the post-colonial South Africa, fake news existed long before President Zuma’s factional-propagandist mouthpieces, the ANN7 and The New Age newspaper - both of which are owned by businessmen and his alleged captors, the Gupta brothers, as well as Andile Mngxitama’s website, Black Opinion, had come into existence.
The phenomenon gained more currency in the run-up to the ANC’s 52nd national conference.
The fake news peddlers fed us two contrasting sides of Zuma and his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. They painted a picture of Zuma as a leader who would unify a divided ANC, which the “power-drunk” Mbeki, said the police minister, had brought to “the edge of an abyss”.
Congratulating Zuma on his election as ANC president, Nelson Mandela said: “Our experience of Comrade Zuma is of a person and leader who is inclusive in his approach, a unifier and one who values reconciliation and collective leadership. We have no doubt that he will bring those well-known characteristics to his task of leading our organisation.”
In contrast, former Limpopo premier Sello Moloto and the public at large knew the aloof Mbeki, who was said to have centralised power and suppressed intraparty debates.
Debunking the perception that he had done so, Mbeki told an anecdote of how Moloto, who had become a national executive council member following his election as provincial chairperson, “after listening to and witnessing the subsequent vigorous and comradely discussion spoke out against the propagation of the fabrication that open debate in the NEC was and had been suppressed”.
Moloto, said Mbeki, “expressed his profound concern that an absolute falsehood he was convinced had originated from within the NEC gained currency in the media, and was presented to the public as how the NEC conducted itself”.
Concerned that some members might feel unease at expressing themselves with his chairing the political overview, Mbeki said he had asked other members to chair it and spoke last “to avoid inserting my view into the debate before all members had their say, being very keen that all points of view should be canvassed and debated freely”.
This, he said, happened for two meetings, as members “unanimously” agreed he should continue chairing the political overview because it “denied them the possibility to engage the views of the president who, speaking last, had, in some instances, advanced a perspective which nobody else had presented”.
Nobody disputed his claim. It seems as though Mbeki did not necessarily suppress the debates, but spoke above their heads.
After his tenure, the intraparty debates should be frank and robust under the unifier in Zuma. Jackson Mthembu, Makhosi Khoza and other prominent ANC members should not resort to Facebook and Twitter to express themselves on matters that should be aired within the party structures.
No one disputed Mbeki’s claim that he did not centralise power. In appointing ministers and deputy ministers, as well as premiers, Mbeki said he had compiled a list and sent it to the party’s top five to consider before their meeting to finalise the names, including who would serve in which positions. The same, he said, happened with cabinet reshuffles.
In informing appointees of their appointments, Mbeki said he had sat down with the party secretary-general to hammer it home that they were ANC deployees in government.
Again, the practice changed under Zuma. For example, his decision to remove Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister and replace him with an economic nonentity, Des van Rooyen, caught the party’s top five by surprise (presumably not deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte).
The least the ANC could do, as a damage-controlling measure, was to hide behind the president’s “constitutional prerogative” to reshuffle his cabinet.
Yet the top five forced Zuma to appoint Van Rooyen as Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs minister and re-appoint Pravin Gordhan as Finance minister.
Reacting to Zuma’s latest cabinet reshuffle, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa echoed ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe’s revelation that he came with a ready-made list - probably compiled, along with the cabinet reshuffle, in (the Gupta home in) Saxonwold - while treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize said the ANC was no longer a centre of power.
The supposedly “inclusive” Zuma does not run the country through the ANC, if ever he did. He runs it through the ANC Youth League, especially the one in his home province, KwaZulu-Natal, and outside party formations such as the Black First Land First (BLF) and the Progressive Professionals Forum (PPF).
Government decisions are taken in Saxonwold and Zuma, as a figurehead thereof, uses the ANC to rubber stamp them.
If Mandela’s description of Zuma is anything to go by, then the ANC should be more united. He is indeed a unifier, but now one who has unified opposition parties and civil society organisations, as well as the millions of South Africans across different walks of life, rather than the ANC.
For the first time since 1994, opposition parties speak with one audible voice against rampant corruption, perception of the state capture by the Gupta brothers, and many other pressing issues the country is grappling with under Zuma’s presidency, and calling for his resignation or recall as state president.
After the Mbeki era, the ANC has had two major splinter parties in Cope and the EFF, both of which contributed to its continuous loss of support.
In the run-up to its 54th national conference, yet another major splinter party looms large on the horizon. Technically, the ANC has split.
As seen from the past two national conferences, a triumphant faction sweeps clean and then marginalises and purges losers from state institutions under the pretext of strategic deployment. Left out in the wilderness, losers would withdraw from intraparty engagements, quit the politics, join other parties, or form a new political party.
After the Mbeki-era, the ANC has no centripetal force to keep it intact. Zuma is not that force, not by a long shot. He is, in fact, a centrifugal force, a divisive factor. For example, the ANC instructed its members not to engage in a succession debate until it had officially opened the nominations. Zuma went against the instruction, endorsing his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, to succeed him.
As if this endorsement were not enough to undermine the party, Zuma went to Port Elizabeth to congratulate Andile Lungisa, who had contested a regional chairpersonship, despite a reminder from Mantashe not to stand for a position in a lower structure, as laid down in the party’s the constitution.
The ANC is in chaos. Everyone shoots from the hip, from Zuma to a member at a branch level.
In Mbeki and Zuma, the fake news peddlers sold us the wrong idea of our leaders long before ANN7 and The New Age came into existence.
* Tshabalala is an independent political analyst.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.