After taking power, the ANC implemented its policy of cadre deployment. It sought command of “all levers of power”, from cabinet, through the civil service, down to municipal level. Despite the party recently losing its majority, cadre deployment will ensure that the ANC maintains its iron grip on power and patronage, and it remains fused with the state.
In The Super Cadres, Pieter du Toit, the bestselling author of The Stellenbosch Mafia and The ANC Billionaires, exposes how Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki laid the foundation for complete ANC control of the state, how Jacob Zuma’s ANC exploited it and why Cyril Ramaphosa is complicit in the destruction that followed.
In this extract, Du Toit recounts how Zuma ousted Mbeki and began to undermine state institutions.
BOOK: The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment by Pieter du Toit (Jonathan Ball)
If cadre deployment was a key policy tool for the ANC to gain complete control over the state and society, the assault on the rule of law was a crucial intervention to ensure the party retained command. Nominally, the ANC said it believed in the supremacy of the Constitution, respected the judiciary and believed in the independence of the prosecuting authority. Even Zuma, shortly before being elected at Polokwane, spoke about upholding the Constitution. But there was always a caveat: respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers meant impunity. It meant law enforcement agencies should respect the party and its leader; they were above the law and not to be sparred with.
Speaking at Wits University in December 2007, Zuma told his audience the constitutional order could unravel if the rights of individuals were trampled on. “Our citizens need to maintain careful watch to ensure the separation of powers such that the executive can never exercise undue influence over the judiciary and Parliament. I say this as I believe that turning a blind eye to abuses of state power, no matter how small or insignificant they may appear, will eventually result in the unravelling of our system and the undermining of our rights as shareholders in our democracy,” he said.
Zuma’s statement made it look as though he was guided by a moral or civic duty towards good governance, or that he possessed an awareness of how to maintain a fragile constitutional democracy. There was nothing of that. At Wits, Zuma spoke out of self-preservation, as he so often did. He did not refer to “separation of powers” or the undermining of citizens’ rights because of honestly held convictions about the rule of law. It was purely because he felt threatened by the arms deal investigation and had to attach nefarious motives to it to garner popular support. Zuma was desperate to stay out of jail.
How much damage the ANC’s devilish ploys did to judges, courts, prosecutors and law enforcement would become clear only much later. But in the years immediately before and after the Polokwane conference, Zuma became the totem around which the enablers of state capture congregated. Not yet in executive power, Zuma and his acolytes doubled down on efforts to convince the public he was the victim of dastardly and illegal machinations of the state machinery under Mbeki to prevent him becoming head of state.
Zuma had to become the embodiment of the freedom struggle; the symbol of the revolution that had yet to be concluded. If the state was striking at Zuma, it was striking at the revolution. And that meant the Scorpions, the NPA and the courts were against the people. Only if the public, the ANC’s rank and file, believed that could attacks on the credibility of the country’s legal foundations work. They had to be convinced that the state and its institutions were being abused to target Zuma, that those institutions were in opposition to the democratic dispensation and that they could not be trusted. The ANC achieved this in spades.
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Zuma, Gwede Mantashe and the rest were impatient. They were in office at Luthuli House but Mbeki remained head of state and wielded considerable power from the Union Buildings. Gear remained the government’s macroeconomic framework, directed by the detested finance minister Trevor Manuel, and Mbeki continued to direct foreign policy and travel the world on his Boeing Business Jet in his quest to be remembered as a statesman of global repute. Tension between the two centres of power – Pretoria and Johannesburg – simmered and every NEC (national executive committee) meeting became fraught with debate about resolving the matter. This debate had been central to the Mbeki/Zuma standoff, with the party eventually deciding its leader should automatically be the head of state. Others saw this as a way to undermine the authority of a sitting president, arguing that there had been no issue when Mandela was president and Mbeki ANC leader – why would there be a problem with a similar arrangement between Mbeki and Zuma?
On Tuesday 9 September and Wednesday 10 September 2008, Yunus Carrim and Maggie Sotyu’s parliamentary ad hoc committee held public hearings into the future of the Scorpions. Although there was a raft of submissions in support of the DSO (Directorate of Special Operations) by civil society, academics and opposition parties, the ANC and its alliance partners hammered on the Scorpions’ alleged illegal intelligence-gathering capabilities, its “Hollywood-style” operations, political interference and the need to strengthen the police – a fig leaf if ever there was one.
Buti Manamela, the leader of the SACP Young Communist League (later a deputy minister under Zuma and Ramaphosa), told MPs the DSO had “lost credibility” and was “riddled with apartheid diehards”. John Jeffery, an ANC MP who also became a deputy minister under Zuma and Ramaphosa, lashed out at the DSO and its “intelligence-gathering activities”. But Carrim was the ANC’s main battering ram. With him at the helm of the parliamentary process, the end of the Scorpions was a foregone conclusion. “The way the DSO had conducted its work had given rise to legitimate perceptions, particularly within the ranks of the majority party and its voters, that senior ANC politicians had received undue attention from this unit as against other aspects of organised crime,” he said.
Listening to the process unfold in the stinkwood-panelled Old Assembly in Parliament, where apartheid premier Hendrik Verwoerd had been assassinated 42 years earlier, I was struck by the ANC’s intransigence. Carrim led the committee with aplomb, sticking to meeting times, involving parliamentary and state law advisers and giving the opposition enough time to state its case. But there was no way through. And Carrim was the quintessential deployed cadre: loyalty to the party, first and above all. On 30 January 2009, Kgalema Motlanthe, the caretaker president after Mbeki’s ouster, signed the two amendment bills into law, and dissolved the Scorpions.
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Two days after the ad hoc committee met, everything changed. On Friday, 12 September, Judge Chris Nicholson delivered a blow at the high court in Pietermaritzburg that not only knocked the stuffing out of the NPA but emboldened the Zuma faction to remove Mbeki in what amounted to a coup d’état. Nicholson found the NPA’s decision to prosecute Zuma on corruption charges invalid and made wide-ranging findings of serious political interference in the prosecution process by members of the executive. He also agreed with Zuma that there seemed to be a conspiracy related to the timing of charges.
Nicholson made “scathing observations” about the motivation for the prosecution and the political influence on the process, pointing his finger straight at Mbeki, justice minister Brigitte Mabandla and former NDPP Bulelani Ngcuka. “Is it really possible that the president did not know?” asked Nicholson, referring to his finding that there was political interference.
The judgment was a political earthquake. It gave the Zuma faction everything it needed to remove Mbeki and take power, confirming what it had been telling its supporters all along: that state institutions were being manipulated and used to wage a political campaign – and the sitting president was behind it. The judgment was political gold and it wasn’t only the Zuma faction who jumped at it like a lion to red meat. Helen Zille, the DA leader, said Mbeki “clearly violated the Constitution” and the party’s parliamentary leader, Sandra Botha, said the DA would table a motion of no-confidence in the president.
Outside court, an elated Zuma sang as thousands of supporters cheered. He repeated his claim that he was the victim of a political conspiracy and added that he was a “wounded warrior”. “When I sat in court, I remembered one of my learned friends saying he was [as] sober as a judge. Indeed, this judge was sober,” Zuma said, to laughter. “My view is, today’s judgment will help South Africa.”
Zuma was always surrounded by supporters, singing and dancing with him outside court as he took aim at the constitutional order. Mantashe was a constant, as were Zwelinzima Vavi and Blade Nzimande. Kgalema Motlanthe regularly appeared, as did Fikile Mbalula, and eventually Julius Malema too. “Chris Nicholson is not a counter-revolutionary judge,” Mantashe said. Find in Zuma’s favour and you’re a good jurist, was the message. “The problem in this country is [President] Thabo Mbeki and his people … We don’t want him,” said Malema. Vavi: “Today we feel absolutely vindicated. We want to see who are the rapists of the judicial system.” And Nzimande completed the trio: “We are happy for Msholozi [Zuma’s clan name] and we did say we would support him until the end.” Jessie Duarte, the ANC spokesperson and a vindictive apparatchik, called the judgment a “victory for justice and the Constitution”.
Zille, who succeeded Tony Leon as leader of the opposition in 2007, believed the country’s foundations to be under threat after a meeting with the president in which he opened up to her: “It showed me then what the war between him and his opponents was like and that it was a war over controlling the institutions of state. It was a war over controlling the police. It was a war over controlling the prosecuting authority. Because all of these institutions of state were seen as proxies in the political war.”
Listen to the audiobook of The Super Cadres here.
