Don't miss Mark Gevisser's concise, insightful assessment in The New York Times of the succession struggle and the state of South African politics.
But whatever happens, the fissure in the A.N.C. brings a long-overdue logic to South African politics. Since the early 1990s, the left and center have been held together by the skein of a joint struggle for freedom ‚ and, of course, the allure of power. One of the best possible legacies of the current political turmoil would be the collapse of the de facto one-party state ‚ and its replacement by a real choice for South African voters.
Here Gevisser echoes something I’ve been arguing for a while about the way South African politics are likely to break in years to come:
I have said it for years. The dominance of the African National Congress will not wane as the result of a challenge from the right. The days of the National Party and its inconsequential successors is past. There is room and a need for true conservatism (which I will then heartily oppose) in South Africa, but it cannot rise from the ashes of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) or the Nats, new, old, gereformeerde or otherwise. The challenge, then will come from the left. More accurately it will come as the result of a break in the tripartite alliance that makes up the ANC — the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). I am certainly not an original thinker on this point, but these are observations I have been making since 1997 so I feel some sense that my construction of the discussion, at least, is my own.
[. . .]
It is in recognition of this that the ANC has bent over backward to accomodate, or at least pay lip service to the SACP and to the socialist-sympathetic unions of COSATU. Plus the ANC has always known that keeping these groups in the fold maximized their own power. But times are changing. This relationship that for so long has been fruitful is wearing out its usefulness. It may finally be time for a change.
[. . .]
South Africa has a parliamentary legislature that the ANC has dominated since 1994. I surmise that even after a break of the alliance the ANC will continue to do so. But its support levels will surely drop to or below where they were after the 1994 elections when the Nats and Inkatha Freedom Party, the one defunct the other irrelevant, drew support. This is to my mind a good thing. The ANC with too much support, which translates to too much power, frightens me. I’d like to think that South Africa is different from other African states, its leaders more sage, its democracy more stable, its juduciary and military more independent. But power is power, and when too much of it is consolodated for too long, such power becomes dangerous. Such a break would be especially good if it could be amicable — if COSATU and SACP can maintain an alliance on a large number of issues while pursuing their own course where there is divergence.
This is all by way of description — what I see happening — rather than prediction, though I have long held that in the long run the alliance would be untenable if the partners ultimately chose to care about more than simply maintaining their grip on the levers of control. It is a dynamic well worth watching in the weeks, months and years to come. [. . .] (From June 2006)
It is quite possible that the unintended consequence of the current ANC succession struggle will be to create a total reordering of South African politics. The irony will be that the break may come as the result of the schism between two former allies and friends, Mbeki and Zuma, and the drive for power among the mainstream elements of the party's power nexus.
