NATASHA MARRIAN: The warm embrace of a crocodile

“Our love began to be unconditional and therefore illogical.”

So says former Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi of his fervent support for former president Jacob Zuma, dating back to the early 2000s. His recollection of that time is a stark illustration of the maxim that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Two decades later, Zuma is still facing corruption charges linked to the arms deal, he is still promising to emancipate the masses from poverty, unemployment and inequality and his platform is still built on racial division and ethnic chauvinism. 

This after eight years as the country’s first citizen and commander-in-chief, and running the ANC as a ruthless factionalist.

Now, as patriarch of the fledgling MK Party, he is carrying on where he left off.

“He is fooling these comrades,” Vavi tells the FM.

“I am watching it and it is playing out in exactly the same way it did in 2005. He draws this unconditional love and loyalty that is completely illogical.

“He has even gone so far as to say to them that if he had been allowed to finish the nine months he had in office, he would have turned things around. He says he would have expropriated land without compensation, nationalised the Reserve Bank and all the banks and nationalised the mining industry. 

“And they believe him,” he laughs. 

Zuma’s re-entry into mainstream politics late last year resulted in an electoral drubbing in May for the ANC, which shed 17 percentage points. It also marked his re-emergence from the relative political obscurity into which he had sunk after being outed as the godfather of state capture and becoming involved in innumerable legal battles.

These include attempts to privately prosecute President Cyril Ramaphosa, whom he blames for his multiple woes.

It’s a familiar narrative, Vavi says, recalling Zuma’s acrimonious relationship with Thabo Mbeki, who fired him as deputy president in 2005 as the arms deal suspicions began to mount. Zuma’s anti-Mbeki campaign gained traction among others who found Mbeki’s leadership style aloof, arrogant and downright disrespectful.

“Mbeki treated us allies like toddlers,” Vavi says.

“Our grievance with Mbeki drove us straight into Zuma’s arms. He was warm, a people’s person, he had time for everybody. We were close to leaving the alliance under Mbeki, but it was Zuma who said ‘Never walk out over a bad leader’; he told us this was a passing moment.”

Zuma’s “warm people’s person” persona was on display when Julius Malema visited Nkandla for tea and a chat early in 2021, and during his tenure as deputy president, when confidantes and favour-seekers would line up outside his Forest Town home. He  would work through the night clearing those queues. It reached a point where even his PA became a recipient of “gifts” to ensure access to him. 

“We told him Mahlamba Ndlopfu [the presidential residence] must not be like Forest Town, where you go there and find old Toyotas and shiny Hummers waiting outside,” Vavi says.

“We heard stories that people were using access to him to make money … The sad thing is, it did continue when he became president.”

After Zuma took office in 2009, the bubble quickly burst for Vavi and others. Among Zuma’s first trips abroad, in 2010, was one to Buckingham Palace for tea with Queen Elizabeth. During that trip he assured potential investors there would be no dramatic change in the policy course set by Mbeki.

“Zuma failed that first test … It was not long afterwards that some of us in Cosatu began to oppose him, maybe six months after the 2009 election,” Vavi says.

“He was an elected president and he didn’t have enough fire in his belly to tell the queen and investors that you cannot forever have black people as the face of poverty in South Africa. At his first meeting with the colonisers, he collapsed; second thing, he started zigzagging. When he spoke to us, he maintained left-wing rhetoric, [but] would say the opposite when meeting business.”

He tailors his message to his audience, and easily discards those who are of no further use to him. Vavi can attest to that, and so  can the MK Party MPs who are constantly being shuffled out of parliament to make way for a rogues gallery of the unlovely such as John Hlophe,  Brian Molefe, Floyd Shivambu and Siyabonga Gama.

When Zuma was removed as deputy president, Mbeki’s ANC believed he could do no more harm.

He proved his opponents wrong then, and did so again in May when the MK Party defied expectations by winning the third-largest share of the national vote. Here he is again, promising his supporters an alarming cocktail of populist measures including scrapping the constitution as the supreme law of the land. 

But South Africa can take consolation in the fact that if or when he regains power and clout — and history shows this is not impossible — he is likely to disappoint his misguided minions all over again.

It is after all who he is.