Jacob Zuma has named his new cabinet, giving some insight into what sort of President Zuma might make, which comes as a welcome diversion from the cult of personality aspects that tend to predominate South African politics. Naturally, finger pointing seems to rule the day.
Critics are wary of Zuma’s “New Blood” cabinet, which includes only two holdover members from the Mandela years. Of course Mandela left office a decade ago, and so such turnover should not be especially surprising, especially given that in the interregnum the party was deeply divided by the Zuma-Mbeki factionalism. If there is a rejection of the past it comes in the form of showing Mbeki appointees the door and ought not to be seen as a rejection of Madiba. And it is far from clear that South Africans speak in a unified voice in support of the performance of Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet, and to the contrary, there is substantial enough evidence that many feel quite the opposite.
In any case, choosing a cabinet is one of the spoils of victory. And Zuma’s critics can say what they will, but he and the ANC upon which he has so clearly put his stamp clearly won the recent elections. The further irony in all of the criticism of Zuma rejecting the country’s recent past is that most experts identify the cabinet as representing considerable continuity with recent ANC policy. One surprise (and exception to the theme of continuity) does come in the form of the establishment of a Department of Economic Development. The DED will be headed by trade unionist Ebrahim Patel, and is likely to usurp some of the responsibilities of the finance minister and the Department of the Treasury and indicates a leftward policy shift in economic policy.
But the ire is not exclusively aimed at the ANC. Partisans of the, let’s face it, otherwise irrelevant Freedom Front Plus (FF+) are outraged that their Pieter Mulder has accepted a deputy minister post in the restructured Department of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. In what qualifies as a nice little irony, the FF+ equivalent of the ANC Youth League is most outraged at Mulder’s “unilateral decision.”
Meanwhile Democratic Alliance head Helen Zille, meanwhile, is rediscovering that leadership carries with it a certain level of accountability. Zille is facing criticism that her Western Cape cabinet is too white and too male. Zille responds with the seemingly paradoxical assertion that her hands were completely tied and she had no choice in her candidates, which seems dubious, while at the same time rejecting “race and gender bean-counting,” indicating that perhaps she does have more of a choice than she first allowed. Apparently affirmative action is alive and well in precisely those precincts that ordinarily reject affirmative action. Irony, thy name is Democratic Alliance! That said, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and in the Western Cape, the DA won and thus the party’s leaders get to determine the composition of the provincial cabinet, however unrepresentative it is of the province’s demographics and however nakedly it reveals the hypocrisy of much of the white political center.
And as with most political arguments, those related to the composition of the cabinet(s) are temporal. The proof will be in the governing. And for that, only time will give us some sense of whether Zuma’s (or for that matter Zille’s) is a good cabinet, responsive to the needs of South Africans and the demands of these difficult times.