Peter Fabricius wants to know what President Zuma makes of the 10 days following his axing of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister.
Was Zuma high on Focac (the Forum on China Africa Co-operation) when he made his near-fatal decision to fire his respected finance minister Nhlanhla Nene and replace him with the unknown Des van Rooyen?
Analysts have been struggling to figure out what he was thinking. Commentator Rian Malan suggested Zuma had gone “the full Mugabe” in a speech to black business people shortly after.
He talked about slavery and colonialism and how those who had inflicted those pains on Africa were still enslaving the continent economically.
“If they have the economic power and you hold the political power, you are going to dance to their music.
“I am rebelling against (the idea that) what determines the value of a commodity is the law of supply and demand. I am against that definition. The value of a commodity is the labour time taken in production...” he said.
He concluded by summoning his people to “the full liberation of Africa”.
It would be fascinating to know what Zuma now thinks of the events of the past 10 days. Was the immense damage he unleashed a huge wake-up call, a crash course in Economics 101? Did the penny finally drop that the fiscal autonomy of a finance minister, his power to put the brakes on extravagant spending, is objectively important to the markets – and to the country?
Or did it just confirm his view that once again the imperialist global capitalists were forcing South Africa to “dance to their music”? Does he believe the market was assisted in its nefarious aims by treacherous South Africans? By blacks who don’t realise they are open to manipulation? “Those you call your enemy can then divide you and use some of us against us.”
As Malan wondered, was Zuma thinking here of Nene, being tricked by the global capitalists into thinking he was defending South Africa’s interests by questioning the spending of trillions of rand on nuclear reactors and blocking the plans of Zuma’s friend, SAA chairwoman Dudu Myeni, to give a dodgy Airbus leasing contract to anonymous business interests? When, really, Nene was all along doing the dirty work of those global capitalists?
Does Zuma feel he was also betrayed by South African business people? It seems one of his closest advisers, Small Business Minister Lindiwe Zulu, does. She told the Mail & Guardian that if South African business leaders had supported Zuma in his appointment of Van Rooyen – as they should have – all would have been well. The paper interpreted her remarks as implying that business people had deliberately manipulated international markets to try to bring down Zuma, whom they never liked. She later denied it but it’s clear at least that she thinks the business community failed Zuma and the country in their hour of need.
Zuma’s impassioned speech on the day he fired Nene probably expressed what most ANC members really feel deep down – the Marxist notion that labour input rather than the heartless market should fix the true value of production, is in the party’s DNA.
It was one of the nastiest tricks of fate to them that the ANC came to power just as its ideology had been consigned to the archives of global history.
It has had to reconcile itself, though grudgingly, to living in a “neo-liberal” world. You can still feel the nostalgia though and you can see how the rise of the Brics bloc and especially its biggest players, China and Russia, are stirring the embers of that nostalgia.
Zuma sees them as offering the hope of an anti-Western, anti-imperialist, world. He often praises the likes of China for treating Africans as equals and not as “former colonial subjects”.
When Zuma fired Nene, he had just been steeped in a week of Focac and a preceding state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping; a week of Xi “raining dollars” as a senior South African official gushed, on Africa, without any pesky preconditions or efforts to determine how they should be spent.
Maybe Zuma was indeed under the influence of Focac when he made his fateful decision, lost perhaps in a reverie that that glorious history, when the market did not rule, had returned.
Foreign Bureau
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