South Africa’s future will not be civil war but sad decay

Rian Malan, acclaimed author of My Traitor’s Heart, says that the rise of Jacob Zuma as a serious presidential contender is a terrible symbol of his country’s inexorable decline into disorder, political corruption and maladministration When the winter rains closed in on Cape Town I thought, bugger this, I’m selling up and moving somewhere sunny. To this end, I asked the char, Mrs Primrose Gwayana, to come in and help spruce up the house. We were scrubbing and painting and what have you when Primrose’s broom bumped the dining table, and crack — a leg snapped off, its innards hollowed out by wood-borers. I thought, uh-oh, here’s an omen. Something awful is going to happen. And it has.

Nine months ago South Africa seemed to be muddling through in a happy-go-lucky fashion. The economy was growing, albeit slowly. Trains ran, if not exactly on time. If you called the police, they eventually came. We thought our table was fairly solid, and that we would sit at it indefinitely, quaffing that old Rainbow Nation ambrosia. Now, almost overnight, we have come to the dismaying realisation that much around us is rotten. Nearly half our provinces and municipalities are said to be on the verge of collapse. A murderous succession dispute has broken out in the ruling African National Congress. Our Auditor–General reportedly has sleepless nights on account of the billions that cannot be properly accounted for. Whites have been moaning about such things for years, but you know you’re in serious trouble when President Thabo Mbeki admits the ‘naked truth’ that his government has been infiltrated by chancers seeking to ‘plunder the people’s resources’.

I knew in my bones that it would come to this, but somewhere along the line I got tired of stinking up my surroundings with predictions of doom, so I shut up and went with the flow. Ergo, I cannot say I told you so. But I have a pretty good idea why things went wrong, and it all began with ‘transformation’, a euphemism for ridding the Civil Service of whites, especially white males. Under apartheid, those chaps ran everything. Clearly this had to change, but white males carried the institutional memory in their brains, and the blacks who replaced them tended to flounder. This led to what we call ‘capacity problems’, a euphemism for blacks who couldn’t or wouldn’t carry out the jobs for which they were paid. Capacity problems in turn led to crises in electricity supply, refuse removal, road maintenance, healthcare, law enforcement and so on. Again, white malcontents have complained about such things for years, but you know you’re in trouble when an eminent black journalist like Justice Malala dismisses the Mbeki administration as an ‘outrage’, characterised by ‘a shocking lack of leadership’ on the part of a Cabinet riddled with ‘incompetent, inept and arrogant’ buffoons.

In short, we’re in crisis. Everyone acknowledges it, but somehow we never see firm corrective action. Previously we were told it was awkward for a black liberation movement to purge black appointees, even if they were useless. This year a new excuse emerged.

Back in April, around the time of the ominous table-leg incident, the actress Janet Suzman and I dined with a bossy American woman who bit my head off when I opined that our recently deposed deputy president, Jacob Zuma, would one day step into Nelson Mandela’s shoes. For a foreign feminist, it was unthinkable that a man with four years of schooling and rape and corruption charges pending should become president of anything. My explanations to the contrary were dismissed as racist rubbish, but let me air them anyway.

Zuma is a Zulu, and when he became a target for criminal investigation, many fellow tribesmen suspected he was being stitched up by President Mbeki, who was reputedly keen to eliminate him as a potential successor. Conspiracists noted that Mbeki was a Xhosa, and that various members of what we call the ‘Xhosa nostra’ had become billionaires as a result of their political connections, whereas Zuma’s allegedly improper payments were limited to a trifling £100,000. They found it even more fishy that the sad and desperate young woman who invited herself to spend a night in Zuma’s home, only to accuse him of rape in the aftermath, was acquainted with the minister of intelligence Ronnie Kasrils, a KGBtrained master of the dark arts of espionage, presumably including honey traps.

Zulus are a warlike bunch, as we know, and the Zuma affair got their blood up. Thousands turned out to cheer their homeboy at his rape trial, and to denounce his accuser as a harlot bribed to bear false witness. Zuma’s acquittal sparked riotous celebrations, and when his corruption trial started last month the crowds were even larger. ‘100% Zulu Boy’ T-shirts were still evident, but now there were red flags too, because radicals had started rallying to the Zuma cause. First to join were the young lions of the ANC Youth League. They were followed by the Young Communists, then by large sectors of the trade union movement and the Communist party proper. All that remained was for Winnie Mandela to take sides, and lo: when the judge dismissed Zuma’s corruption charges in late September, she materialised among the jubilant masses, praising the Lord for answering her prayers.

These developments confounded naive left-liberals, who had repeatedly assured us that Zuma was politically dead. Feminists recalled the dalliance with Ms Lewinsky that almost destroyed Bill Clinton. Aids activists were scandalised by Zuma’s failure to use a condom during the rape-case escapade, even though the woman involved was HIVinfected. Moralists contended that even though criminal charges had proved unsustainable, there were enough facts on the table to show that Zuma was sorely lacking in probity. For such people, it was unhinging to see Zuma become the leading contender for South Africa’s presidency, greeted at every turn by adoring supporters who informed reporters that the Ten Commandments were an alien invention that didn’t apply to African males. Their campaign song was even more unnerving: ‘Bring me my machine gun.’ A Serbian journalist living here took one look at this and wrote a piece headlined, ‘Time to Panic’.

Hmm. My friend Steve, a capitalist who golfs with the black elite, says this is nonsense. ‘Zuma is charming,’ he says. ‘If he actually gets the job, things will settle down and it’ll be business as usual.’ Maybe so, but the next general election is three years away, and meanwhile government is incapable of acting against the borers in our woodwork.

Let’s look at law enforcement, one smallish aspect of the growing problem. After years of slow decline, crime surged earlier this year, with insurance companies reporting a 20 per cent rise in claims. Some blamed a strike by security guards, who took to looting shops they had previously guarded and throwing scabs off trains. Others pointed the finger at feral refugees from Zimbabwe. ‘Capacity problems’ in the police were certainly a factor, too. In the middle of all this, a convoy of expensive cars carrying senior ANC dignitaries rolled up at a prison outside Cape Town. Uniformed warders swarmed out of the gates, and the gathering turned into a revolutionary song-and-dance extravaganza in honour of Tony Yengeni, a popular ex-MP about to start serving four years for fraud.

Is this not bizarre? A politician accepts a discounted Mercedes from an arms contractor, lies about it, gets nailed — and several of the ruling party’s most prominent leaders hail him as a hero, a staggering insult to their own criminal justice apparatus. In her eagerness to charm the rabble, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete went so far as to claim that Yengeni had never committed fraud, even though he pleaded guilty to same. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), termed her behaviour ‘disgraceful’, but there was no retribution.

Why? Because a crackdown by Mbeki might cause figures like Mbete to defect to Zuma, who is not particularly punctilious about whom he accepts as allies. Don Mkhwanazi, for instance, got into hot water after hiring a ‘well-known crook’ to assist him in his duties as boss of the Central Energy Fund. Mkhwanazi claimed racists were defaming him, but fell silent when it emerged that his bent chum (who earned £300,000 a year) was channelling money into a bank account that paid Mkhwanazi’s mortgage in a posh Jo’burg suburb. Mkhwanazi resigned in disgrace. Today he is a trustee of Zuma’s unofficial election campaign.

My pal Steve says one shouldn’t take such things too seriously, noting that respectable people have also cast their lot with Zuma. Maybe so, but Zuma’s core supporters are scary. The other day they put on a spectacular display at a conclave of Cosatu, South Africa’s mighty Congress of Trade Unions. Whenever an incumbent cabinet member appeared, delegates rose to their feet, waving red flags and chanting, ‘Tell us, what has Zuma done?’ One minister was jeered off the podium. The deputy state president was ‘humiliated and degraded’ by hecklers, who went on to sing, ‘It is better for us to take over this country, we will go with the Communists.’ President Mbeki wisely kept his distance, but they had a song for him too: ‘We will kill this big ugly dog for Zuma.’ Alas, poor Thabo. I’m no great fan of our remote and autocratic president, but the charges emanating from the red brigade — ‘betraying the poor’ and ‘tolerating inequality’ — are asinine. A former communist, Mbeki saw the light in the late 1980s and cajoled his comrades into a historic compromise with capitalism. His saturnine manipulation of business and labour led to a massively increased tax harvest, which in turn financed the creation of a welfare state, with 11 million poor now receiving subsistence grants of one sort or another. This is amazing. A welfare state in Africa!

Unfortunately, such goodies are the fruits of gradualism, and I can’t see us staying the course. Jacob Zuma wants the big job, so he promised to resurrect the ANC’s revolutionary tradition, whereupon the movement’s most dedicated activists immediately rallied to his standard. As I see it, the only way for Mbeki loyalists to block Zuma is by promising even more loot to the masses, and once they do that, Zuma will surely move even further leftward. Nobody (save DA leader Tony Leon, who is white and therefore irrelevant) is going to stand up and say, ‘Sorry, folks, this isn’t the answer, we have to work harder, exercise self-discipline and bring white technocrats back into government so as to make things work again.’ And besides, if by some miracle Mr Leon started swaying the electorate, would our rulers put up with it? The ANC dominates almost everything else, but it has never won an election here in Cape Town. This enrages the city’s black power faction, which has prevailed upon the ANC to oust DA Mayor Helen Zille and impose a multi-party government. The stated reason for this initiative, launched two weeks ago, is that Zille’s coalition is weak and unstable. Maybe so, but we all know it’s really a power grab, inspired at least in part by fears that Africa’s last whiteand Creole-controlled city will continue to prosper while all else hurtles into a black hole of dysfunctionality. What can we do? Some in the ruling party have a peculiar view of democracy. They see it as a system designed to put themselves in power. If voters fail to understand this, their mistakes must be corrected by fiat.

No, there won’t be civil war. Whites are finished. According to a recent study, one in six of us has left since the ANC took over, and those who remain know their place. For apartheid-era law and order minister Adriaan Vlok, this turned out to be on his knees, washing the feet of those he sinned against during the struggle. Truly! He carried a briefcase and a basin into various government buildings and performed acts of abject contrition in public. No doubt Mr Vlok’s bones were warning him to repent before the end came.

Ah well. Let’s look on the bright side. Osama bin Laden has no beef with us, we are not sinking into a Mesopotamian quagmire and the weather is wonderful in summer. Anyone want a house here?