The following is the edited and shortened transcript of a panel discussion about the ANC's recent conference, and its implications. Very interesting stuff indeed!

‘Zuma’s most important statement in that acceptance speech was: “Your mandate to me is temporary. You can take it any time you want.” ’ — Adam Habib

‘If there’s any shift on monetary policy that will be one of the first and clearest indications that there will be substantive economic policy change’ — Raenette Taljaard

‘You can be superbly intelligent, have a brilliant grasp of policy, but if you cannot connect with your constituency then it just doesn’t work’ — Steven Friedman
‘Amongst a number of very strong supporters of Mbeki, until the actual vote, they had thought that whatever they had done in the last few days would swing the vote’ — Frene Ginwala

There is little reason to hope that either Thabo Mbeki or Jacob Zuma are ready to put national interests before their own. This was the overriding view of a panel convened by the Sunday Times to analyse the significance of the ANC’s 52nd national conference in Limpopo three weeks ago

The Polokwane shootout between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma rescued democracy and open debate within the African National Congress, but residual hostilities will deliver another year of political sniping with a real risk of collateral damage to critical pillars of the state.

The best thing the two men could do for South Africa would be to put their personal feud aside in the interests of the country, but there is little reason to hope that either is ready to let the national interest trump personal or party priorities, according to a panel convened by the Sunday Times to analyse the significance of the ANC’s 52nd national conference in Limpopo three weeks ago.

The next round will be fought tomorrow, when Mbeki and Zuma attend the first meeting of the new National Executive Committee elected after Zuma had trounced Mbeki in the election of the leader who will preside until after the party’s centenary celebrations in 2012.

If the winner-takes-all spirit of the national conference persists this week, Mbeki is likely to feel very alone in the National Working Committee to be elected tomorrow. He will be there only in his ex-officio capacity as former party president and few members of the Cabinet will be around to back him up.

Zuma’s seconds could be pushing him to go for a quick kill in this week’s meeting and the ANC lekgotla a week later — or they might prefer just to wing the President and leave him less able to manoeuvre.

Veteran ANC member Frene Ginwala worries that Zuma’s new NEC comprises so many different agendas that unity could be impossible; Aubrey Matshiqi of the Centre for Policy Studies fears 2007 might turn out to have been a tame curtain-raiser to the real battle this year; and Rhodes University professor Steven Friedman is concerned that unsettled scores could distract the ruling party from the business of ruling for at least another 18 months.

The discussion, chaired by Professor Sipho Seepe, president of the SA Institute of Race Relations, took place before the National Prosecuting Authority laid new charges against Zuma, but the likelihood that he would again face formal indictment for fraud and corruption shaped the conversation.

For Raenette Taljaard, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, Zuma’s resort to the Constitutional Court in another bid to evade prosecution poses a dangerous challenge to the institution designed to be the strongest pillar of South Africa’s young democracy.

Zuma loyalist Comfort Ngidi, a lawyer in KwaZulu-Natal, believes his man offers the best chance of stabilising the ANC because he is a leader who has grown within the ranks of the party and not, like most of Mbeki’s strong allies, someone imposed from without.

University of Johannesburg professor Adam Habib says the focus of Zuma’s influence will be on economic policy as he tries to address the perception that the ANC has prioritised the interests of a few high fliers at the expense of the poor masses who have seen too little benefit from the transition to democracy.

The following is a heavily edited transcript representing, in words, about a tenth of the discussion.

Sipho Seepe: What would we say determined the outcome of the leadership vote?

Adam Habib: This effectively represented a rebellion against Mbeki’s administration and leadership of the ANC. There’s a powerful layer within both the tripartite alliance partners and in the ANC that feels that this transition has benefited the rich more than it has the poor and the marginalised. This is an issue of a more inclusive transition — not socialism, not communism but a kind of economic agenda that is much broader than this. I think, also, there was a strong feeling in the party that there was manipulation of state institutions, that institutions are used against some people much more vigorously than they are used against others and there’s a feeling very strongly in the party that rules were deployed differentially against different people. So for instance you charge Jacob Zuma, but you don’t charge Jackie Selebi immediately. I think both at the level of crime and also on health there was a feeling that the President actually was not identifying with mothers whose children were dying.

Raenette Taljaard: We actually have an anti-hero that’s been elected. It’s as if we have the antithesis that’s been elected as opposed to actually having a person elected fully on their own merits.

Steven Friedman: I didn’t find a single person in Polokwane who told me that they were going to vote for Jacob Zuma because of economic policy. Unless we have institutions of governance in this country which connect with people and respond to people, we can have 53 rocket scientists per square inch and it won’t make a darn bit of difference.

Frene Ginwala: In the last five years we began to have more and more extended national executive meetings, when all the ministers, all the deputy ministers started attending. These people came without a vote, but they started introducing the policy debates. And all the NEC policy sub- committees, with one or two exceptions, were also headed by members of the executive.

Comfort Ngidi: Because of the distance between the President and the ordinary branch members, the President could not hear branches. Because he is no longer capable of listening to his members, he can’t understand the language that they talk.

Aubrey Matshiqi: Their appropriation or invocation of certain traditions in the ANC, or misappropriation of certain traditions of the ANC itself, had an alienating effect. For me, the economic explanation is much less compelling than the argument around political management and style of leadership.

Friedman: Obviously not everybody can be a Cabinet minister, but if you don’t craft your Cabinet so that all the major elite groups within the ANC are included in it, then you’re going to have trouble, which is precisely what happened.

Taljaard: The electoral system we have has allowed a leadership echelon to develop that hasn’t needed to be rooted in structures, because that is not necessarily a fundamental requirement of becoming a political leader in a pure, proportional representation electoral system.

Ginwala: It was a vote about perceived sides, which makes reconciliation much more difficult because it had a kind of all-or-nothing perspective.

Habib: What will happen when comrade Zuma phones ’braMbeki and says, “Howzit ’bra Mbeki, can I suggest that the following is done,” and ’bra Mbeki responds as he has in the last 13 years: “Sorry, I am State President, I shall determine that.” You could have a conflict emerge.

Where the crunch comes is: how do you do it when it comes to interest rates, how do you look at inflation targeting? Do you look at a more expansive environment or do you focus on employment? That’s the first crunch.

Friedman: It doesn’t matter what the motives of the people who were temporarily democratising the ANC were, the genie is out of the bottle and will be very difficult to put back again. If you look at history, most democratic breakthroughs have not been achieved by high-minded people trying to introduce great social visions. They’re usually produced by grubby people who mobilise the masses and try to put them back in the box and find they won’t go into it.

Ginwala: The people in politics today are not the people who were in the struggle pre- 1990. They see politics as a career, also a way of personal advancement. So it’s no good hankering after something, where your whole life was the struggle, where you sacrificed families, careers, everything. Sometimes, when President Mbeki speaks, he really thinks in those terms and it is not feasible.

Taljaard: Polokwane is stage one. There will be other stages leading into the 2009 election. We are looking at at least 18 months of a very steep learning curve, in which the unpredictability of politics is always present. We are a country that deals well with uncharted terrain — we have up to now, in our transition, done relatively well, but it really is seriously uncharted terrain.

Habib: It might be simply the NPA making a decision on its own, but it will be perceived in a particular way and reaction to that will create its own dynamics. If we think 2007 was bad, actually 2007 might simply become a curtain-raiser to 2008.

Taljaard: Irrespective of whether there are new charges brought, we already have the Zuma case before the Constitutional Court. So, especially after the nature of what happened in Polokwane, we have another constitutional institution that is only a few years old in the crucible of this struggle. There are rule of law implications, there are fragility of institutions implications when you bring a body as important as the Constitutional Court into the heart of a political battle.

Matshiqi: Aspects of the Zuma case, in my opinion, have been representative of a misapplication of the rule of law and aspects of how the NPA has handled the Zuma affair have been embarrassing. But, having said that, I really hope we’ll not make the mistake of thinking (of) the Zuma affair as the totality of how we have applied the rule of law in this country.

Seepe: The issue is really about state power versus political power. Zuma commands political power; he’s got the political base, the political advantage. And you have the President with the state power. And when you have control over state power, you have control of the state organs, you have access to the repressive machinery of the state. So this period is a period of vigilance, where you make sure that state organs are not used to settle political scores.

Matshiqi: There is going to be another battle in 2009 because I do not assume that these calls for unity will necessarily translate into automatic consensus that Zuma should become head of state in 2009. And I’m factoring in the NPA and the possibility of charges.

Friedman: We need to be concerned as a society that a whole variety of actors are compromising our prospects of building a really independent judiciary in this country. And if we are going to have 18 months of trench warfare between the party and the state, the country is going to be the loser quite substantially.

I think this leaves a new leadership of the ANC in a situation where, having led a rebellion against a particular person, having mobilised the delegates, the branches, are they going to continue to respect the branches? Because if they don’t there is going to be a problem. And, secondly, having complained that they were marginalised, are they now going to do to the people who lost yesterday what the people who lost did to them; because if those things happen you can kiss ANC unity goodbye and this democratisation is simply going to lead to an indefinite period of trench warfare.

Taljaard: What I see in this instance is the revenge of what somebody has called the coalition of the disgruntled. How is internal democracy ever going to be seen as having resurged on a credible basis if it has purely resurged on the basis of revenge — which is clear in the block voting for the top six and the NEC outcome?

Ginwala: It is also very important to see to what extent this can be a unified leadership anyway, because it’s a strange coming together and I don’t know how it is going to work.

Habib: I had a fascinating conversation with a number of people who were unhappy with both candidates and what they said was: “We are throwing in our lot with Zuma because we think the momentum is there, we think they are raising important questions around democracy, but we are hoping that the case itself will resolve the Zuma dilemma in the sense that he will no longer be a candidate for the president.” So what they are saying is: the mere fact that there is a case happening disqualifies him from the presidency and therefore what could come into play is a Motlanthe presidency of the state.

Ngidi: The reality is that the Scorpions have made their case worse than it was because how are you going to charge a corruptor and a corruptee differently? Apart from the merits of the case having been weak, you have witnesses who have made statements to the police, they’ve made statements to court and you then imagine the attorneys having a field [day] with witnesses who have made three statements.

Taljaard: My great fear is that in this potential scope for disunity, which is very much there after Polokwane, we’re not ever going to go into discussion about values, whether as they are espoused in the Constitution or how they go forward in post-apartheid phase two.

Matshiqi: I think what tended to happen throughout the succession battle was the emphasis of certain values to the extent that such an emphasis advanced your interests. But I think it would be an error to assume that this NEC list represents a complete absence of values and much more accurate to say there was a selective approach in the values that people emphasised in the political choices they made.

Friedman: Either it’s trench warfare to determine who will be the next presidential candidate of the ANC or it’s some kind of attempt to deal with difference. If unity is based on an attempt to deny difference then it’s going to fail.

Ginwala: The South African court system being what it is, there’s no way that case is going to finish in 18 months. So I think we are going to have to live with the fact that Zuma would be the next president.

Habib: If Jacob Zuma is not charged, or if he wins the case, I think he is a shoo-in for the presidency. If, on the other hand, he is severely compromised, whether found guilty or not, I don’t think he is going to be a candidate and then I think the person to watch here, who came out fantastically at the conference, the man of the conference, is Kgalema Motlanthe. If (Zuma) gets charged but the thing drags on and you enter into a campaign I think there’s a body in the collective that will go to him and say, “In the interests of the party, given the fact that we are in the middle of a campaign, you can remain president of the ANC but can you agree not to be the candidate for the president.” Whether that succeeds or not, I’m very dicey.

Matshiqi: It will depend on whether the ANC achieves unity over the next 18 months and my view is that it’s going to be very difficult. I think the best the ANC may be able to achieve under Zuma’s leadership is the absence of open conflict. On the trial, if the evidence that is adduced during the case is seen to be politically damaging in terms of internal dynamics, it is not inconceivable that Zuma will be forced to withdraw by the collective leadership.

Ginwala: You see, this collective leadership, that’s why I say what’s crucial is whether it can unify, because there’s so many different interests amongst it.

Taljaard: Depending on how the two individuals behave, depending on what is going to happen in those 18 months to party and state, that will determine what will happen in the list process leading into 2009 — and the outcome of the list process chooses the president in legal terms, nothing else.

Ginwala: Jacob Zuma has also, consciously or unconsciously, got obligations and there is no way he can satisfy all the demands. These are dynamics that still have to be played out.

Ngidi: As far as achieving the unity of the ANC, I say Zuma stands a better chance of achieving that.

Friedman: Whatever you think of the outcome, a process in which the president of the ruling party was replaced by somebody else in a free ballot, in a democratic process, is immensely important for the future of this country.

Habib: What did open up, over the last two years and in this conference, is a debating culture that allows for a plurality of views to be expressed and not de-legitimised by labelling ... that’s a fantastic benefit.

Ngidi: We should be grateful that Mbeki and Tokyo (Sexwale) contested the election. It cemented democracy and changed the ANC, at least for the next 20 years.

Ginwala: What’s positive is empowerment of the ordinary ANC member.

Matshiqi: The gender lobby, they went in there demanding 50-50 parity and they got more than that because what they got was a minimum of 50%.

Taljaard: Another positive of the conference is that floor crossing is to be scrapped, which I intend to do countless jigs about and break open the champagne the moment [the] law goes through Parliament.

Seepe: One could actually say it’s a victory for the ANC, it’s a victory also to South Africa, but also a victory to the commitment to transparency.