I am battling to understand why the ANC top brass was “particularly offended” by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema’s comparison of President Jacob Zuma to his predecessor Thabo Mbeki.
For months now I have been making the same comparison myself and have come to the same conclusion that Zuma is indeed not different from Mbeki.
If anything, he is perhaps less sophisticated.
I also cannot understand why Cosatu and the SACP were taken aback by the similarities between the two men.
Anyone who knows Zuma’s politics will tell you Mbeki and Zuma are two sides of the same coin.
After Zuma’s maiden State of the Nation address in February, I called a few Cosatu leaders who said they were as shocked by Zuma’s address as the rest of the nation.
I wondered; shouldn’t Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and its president, S’dumo Dlamini, have received a draft of Zuma’s speech and perhaps even had a say on its content?
These are the same people who crisscrossed the country and praised Zuma at every turn as a man who consults and who would take the labour force and other parasites like the SACP and SA National Civics Organisation into his confidence.
How could they have been in the dark about the content of Zuma’s speech?
The fact of the matter is that Zuma gave the left the exact same treatment they used to receive from Mbeki.
He disregarded the resolutions made at the alliance summit and paid little attention to the ANC lekgotla resolutions.
The labour force had expected Zuma to announce a ban of labour brokers in South Africa.
One member of the Cosatu national executive said Zuma was treating the workers like Mbeki.
The two-million strong labour force, which does most of the ANC legwork ahead of elections, was also in the dark about the contents of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s Budget speech.
The Zuma regime was again sending Cosatu House a clear message that they are nothing more than voting cattle.
Gordhan’s announcement of a planned wage subsidy by the Zuma government baffled the unions across the country.
Despite Cosatu objections, Gordhan is forging ahead with the white paper on the wage subsidy.
Vavi and Dlamini went around the country, using every platform available to them to convince the nation that Nxamalala was different to Zizi.
Sadly, they believed their own propaganda.
Very few ANCYL members and those of the alliance could disagree with Julius Malema when he said: “I was shocked by what happened … even president (Thabo) Mbeki, having differed with the youth league and the youth league taking such firm radical positions against him, I have never seen him doing that before.”
Malema said this after his faction rigged an ANCYL election in Limpopo and after Zuma publicly rebuked him for expelling a BBC journalist from an ANCYL press conference.
In this case Malema was right, Zuma did something worse than Mbeki would have done.
The fact is that there is no fallout between Zuma and Malema, the ANCYL and the Zuma administration, and no contention over policy.
Yet Zuma felt the need to haul the youth league president to a disciplinary hearing.
On the contrary, Mbeki never took Malema’s predecessor, Fikile Mbalula, to a disciplinary hearing despite Mbalula, completely challenging Mbeki at every turn and the youth league declaring Mbeki an “autocrat” and a “dictator”.
Mbalula actively campaigned against Mbeki yet the latter never hauled the younger man to a disciplinary hearing. Zuma has yet to realise just how similar his politics are to Mbeki’s.
How can they not be the same, they both cut their teeth in ANC politics at a time when centralist politics was the order of the day.
Under OR Tambo, information was dispatched on a need-to-know basis, compelling the rest of the organisation and all its structures to rely on the leadership-making decisions that were in the greater good of the ANC and the nation.
“In exile and in the underground things were run tightly. Information was supplied on a need-to-know-basis. If information was leaked into the wrong hands it could cause problems for the movement. People had full confidence in the leadership. They believed that even if they did not have all the information, the leaders who did, had the best intentions,” said former MK guerrilla and deputy finance minister Jabu Moleketi (William Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC).
This is the ANC embraced by Zuma so you can’t blame the man for yearning for the dark ages when cadres walked the straight and narrow.
Deepening democracy in the organisation is not part of his plans — it’s as foreign as transforming the party from a revolutionary body to a ruling political party in charge of a 21st century economy.
Zuma needs to look around him because his legacy — like Mbeki’s — will be tainted by his tendency to surround himself with “yes men” and “yes women”.
So, Malema was not completely off the mark, his analysis was perhaps too blunt for the ANC top brass.
* This article was first published in the Sowetan of 06-05-2010
If Cosatu and the Commies don’t like it they should start there own party instead of eating off other peoples plate, unless they are willing put up then they should shut up and continue bringing the sheeple to the slaughter and be happy with the scraps the bosses of the ANC throw them from the table….
I disagree, they are polar opposites.
Mbeki surrounded himself by yes-men.
Zuma is a yes-man.
Mbeki knew well to ignore the ignorant
Zuma spoils them rotten with attention.
Mbeki governed to the best of his ability, but forgot the masses and never promised anything.
Zuma is everywhere, making friends with the masses with promises, but forget to govern and deliver on the promises.
I do agree with you that Zuma is selling us out to communism. If he has his way, you will not be able to write articles like the one aboves soon. It would probably have to be cleared by the ANCYL first.
Mbeki was a practical man aware of the dictator moniker attached to him. The attcak was on his Presidency and persona using among other tactics de-legitimisation of his incumbency’s leadership of the party. His grievance would at best been seen and framed in the personal as borne out in one of his letters. Besides even if Mbalula had criticised his position or ANC position on Zimbabwe he knew the extent to which the faction ridden ANC would have been reluctant to act.
Even his firing of Madlala-Routledge in the context of insurbodination and potential for bad rapport between her and her superior is under critical analysis reasonable and not personal. Even the quiet diplomacy with regards to Zimbabwe under honest critique has merit (after all Condeleeza Rice also used lots of it on key American foreign policy issues).
Zuma does not have a case of Malema attacking his presidency and it is not him who is the complainant in Malema’s case. In other words vacillating Zuma has not hauled Malema before the disciplinary organ of the party. In this regard and only in this regard maybe he and Mbeki are similar.
Besides Mbeki taking Mbalula to ask would have been putting himself on trial
Honestly speaking, I’m seriously missing the days of Mbeki’ abstract thinking.
The current idiot is working very hard to please the media, his tainted reputation… and he’s doing absolutely everything to crwatwe enemies as he dances-by.
Maela will come back… and nail Zuma in his very weak point, Just wait and see. 2017 is around the corner (if not earlier anyway).
Matthews Phosa, Lindiwe Sisulu, Tokyo Sexwale,Fikile Mbalula, Baleka Mbethe and Thandi Modise are ready to lead. Tony Yengeni is ready in the sidelines as well…
Both are equally inept. What else matters?
Yes the two are alike in that they are both totally incompetant to run a country. I don’t have to point out the failings of the ANC as in every single sphere they have failed, other than finance and the Reserve Bank. They have resounding successes in corruption, softness on crime, raiding the treasury and jobs for equally incompetant friends and relatives. Just because you can fight in the bush does not qualify you to run a business and South Africa is a huge business. Malema has already proved that he will be 10 times worse than Mbeki and Zuma put together.
@me on May 7th, 2010 at 10:14 am
I guess what you are saying is it would be nice if the alliance could split. You know the “Divide and Conquer thing”?
@Zukile.
Please tell Juju we are behind him. We want him to talk about the uncomfortable issues that some of us employed in corporate SA can’t say. Tell him we know that he has an option to shut up and make money in the background and not bring attention to himself like the Motsepe’s and the Tokyo’s of this world, but because he really cares about everyone he is talking about these things and he is not doing all the looting in the background by being a quite Non Exec director or a chairman of some racist corporate.
“la lucha continua no termina facilmente”
“Transformation in our Lifetime”