Jacob Zuma’s MK Party is unravelling more rapidly than expected. The former president has never been one for meticulous organisation-building; his penchant for discarding those in the ANC who disagreed with him or were no longer useful is legendary.
His list of enemies is long, from Julius Malema (now a bestie again) and Zwelinzima Vavi to Kgalema Motlanthe, Pravin Gordhan and Cyril Ramaphosa.
He is prone to paranoia, self-importance and a sense of victimhood — which he relishes, displaying it at every opportunity.
But whereas in the past he was buttressed by a century-old liberation movement with committed, reputable leaders, his new political vehicle is a one-man show.
Even during his years in the ANC, Zuma’s attempts to strengthen the organisation did more harm than good. In the wake of his drive to recruit 1-million new members, former president Thabo Mbeki’s verdict — issued two years ago — was that for the ANC to renew itself, it would have to audit its entire membership. Mbeki said the party had been “infiltrated” by people with nefarious and criminal intent.
And faced with the soaring post-Marikana popularity of the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union (Amcu) — a breakaway from Cosatu’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) — Zuma resorted to his usual tricks.
Instead of supporting NUM in trying to rebuild, as you might think an ANC president should do, off his own bat and without consulting the union Zuma tasked his clandestine intelligence structures with forming a new union to counter Amcu.
Typical Zuma. But the union his spooks built in 2014, the Workers Association Union, was an unmitigated flop — its figurehead, Amcu defector Thebe Maswabi, subsequently launched a civil claim for R120m against Zuma and three cabinet ministers. The money channelled to him from the intelligence and state coffers had dried up, leaving him with mounting debt.
Though Ramaphosa triumphed against Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma at the ANC’s 2017 conference, Zuma’s backers remained well represented in the national executive committee.
Ahead of the 2019 polls, a number of small parties began emerging to take on the ANC, among them the African Transformation Movement — which later drove the push against Ramaphosa in parliament over Phala Phala. Despite denials by its leader, Vuyo Zungula, evidence keeps mounting that the party was a project of Zuma and Ace Magashule.
Zuma’s MK Party is chaotic, dictatorial and unstable. We care because its members may soon be elected to legislatures in at least four provinces
After the 2019 election, the ANC suspected that many of the new parties were aligned to Zuma and Magashule, but it chickened out of launching a formal investigation. It was aware of the formation of the MK Party last year but sat on its hands until Zuma openly backed it. He lied even then, saying he would vote for the party but remained a loyal member of the ANC. It was of course his brainchild all along.
The ANC is about to face the consequences of putting up for more than a decade with the shenanigans of a leader who was clearly unfit to govern and was never going to build anything except his own corrupt empire.
So what does an organisation fashioned in Zuma’s image look like? Like the MK Party, which just expelled four leaders, including the man who registered it, Jabulani Khumalo.
Rapport reported over the weekend that Lennox Ntsodo, a senior Western Cape member of the MK Party, has opened a case of fraud against the party, confessing to police that he had forged the qualifying number of signatures required by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC).
In an affidavit, now also seen by the FM, Ntsodo admits that as convener of the party in the province he failed to gather enough signatures on time, so he faked them on instruction from higher-ups in the party.
“All provinces had been instructed to use the job seekers database to obtain the personal particulars of individuals and forge their signatures and that we in the Western Cape must do the same,” he says in the affidavit. The police are now investigating and the IEC says it will decide what to do depending on the outcome of that probe.
Zuma’s MK Party is chaotic, dictatorial and unstable. We care because its members may soon be elected to legislatures in at least four provinces: KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, the Free State and Mpumalanga. Taxpayers will once again foot the bill for Zuma’s misadventures.
Fortunately, the disintegration has already begun. Not so long ago, the Zuma faction’s incompetence and deviousness in the ANC almost brought down the country. Now Zuma’s wrecking ball is swinging wildly within the MK Party. Held together by the whims of an ageing, paranoid narcissist, the party is unlikely to withstand the battering for long.
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