Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that “the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected”.
This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance:
The 30th anniversary on the weekend of the founding of our democracy has bred no shortage of legends and mythologising alongside some incontrovertible facts.
The facts are plain enough and embedded in the endless loop of Cyril Ramaphosa’s election campaigning – a combination of self-congratulation, a retro tour of the worst excesses of the apartheid past and an elision of the car crash failures of state and party on his watch.
A basic summary of the case: our multiparty democracy is far better than the exclusionary and vicious system of apartheid, the dignity of every citizen is recognised by our Constitution and the rule of law has replaced the iron fist of the repressive state.
A cynic could argue that when the basis of comparison is one of the most reviled systems of government in the post-1945 world, this is hardly a high bar to clear. But since Ramaphosa is campaigner in chief and the best asset for his failing party, this is no big surprise.
But far less partisan and far more thoughtful commentators than the president have entered the lists and encrusted a few more myths on to our national story and in some cases taken a holiday from history.
A good first 15 years
For example, a writer I deeply admire, Jonny Steinberg, whose extraordinary iconoclastic book, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, has been garlanded with awards, penned a long essay in the Financial Mail titled “A Tale of Two Countries”.
In his excellent analysis, Steinberg writes in our three-decade democratic journey, “the first 15 years were good”.
He provides a welter of statistics to back up this claim on how, until the ascent of Jacob Zuma, the ANC lived up, more or less, to its old slogan, “A better life for all”.
Commendably, he also takes issue with what he terms the “usual Zuma-is-the problem story”. And asks the essential question, “what allowed Zuma to rise”?
He answers the question by suggesting it can be found in a slew of cleavages, cultural discontents, economic deindustrialisation, all masked by the relatively high economic growth, decent public finances of the Mbeki-Manuel era and the feel-good factor of the rainbow nation.
Zuma knew how to exploit the political and economic underclasses and “left behinds” and turn their disadvantage to his political advantage. And the rest is history, etc.
I thought that the glaring absence from this account was the democratic deficit built up and cemented during the seemingly benign opening chapters of our democratic story.
Entirely missing from this and similar accounts is the reality that since 1994, there were two parallel systems operating at the same time: the constitutional project with all the bells and whistles of democratic and economic modernity on the one hand.
On the other hand, less visible but far more significant, was the “all power to the party” approach, an essentially Leninist project, which is the unbreakable thread which links the golden years of the Mandela presidency to the dark times – literally and metaphorically – of the Ramaphosa era.
Strangely enough, in the heady early days of the democratic era, the first Speaker of Parliament, Frene Ginwala, whose speakership veered between an independent mindset and deep party loyalty, gave a prescient warning on why loyal struggle cadres often made for poor parliamentary democrats:
When early on our young democracy was stress tested by real events, this warning proved apt.
Ironically it was Ginwala herself who helped ‘close the ranks’ and shield cabinet from scrutiny during the notorious Arms Deal saga, the mother of corruption scandals, which was closed off from parliamentary scrutiny by the strong arms of Thabo Mbeki, Essop Pahad, Alec Erwin et al. All these eminences were Mandela and Mbeki ministers and not Zuma appointees.
It was extraordinary then that at a public conversation this week on Newzroom Afrika, former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela could suggest “corruption under Nelson Mandela and President Thabo Mbeki was minimal and under President Jacob Zuma it was rampant”.
The Arms Deal aside, a big aside indeed, there was Sarafina 2 and Virodene for example, almost now entirely forgotten and the bequest to the body politic of exiting minister Nkosana Dlamini-Zuma, but scandals indeed involving both the abuse of public funds, cover-ups, the race card defence and in the case of Virodene, both the purging of public institutions and the misuse of state resources for medical quackery and a rejection of science.
Aids denialism
These two early bookmarks gave birth to the Aids denialism of the Mbeki era. Admired jurist and Aids activist Edwin Cameron, one of the dissenting voices of a time when the refusal of antiretrovirals was state policy at the cost of over 300 000 lives, said Aids denialism was equivalent to Holocaust denialism, with equally baleful effect.
Today, the wrecker of our mining industry, Gwede Mantashe (cue the current potential dismemberment of once mighty Anglo-American PLC), is immovable from his post – for his proximity to the current president.
Back then the minister of health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was exposed by the Sunday Times in 2007, as “a drunk and a thief” – Mbeki kept her in her post.
But the war on science was not confined to the realm of health. Given the dark days of Eskom load shedding (miraculously now suspended in the run-up to the elections), it is easy to forget the electricity blackouts happened first during the “golden era” of the first 15 years of democracy.
In 2006 and 2007 in fact and this was due to the government deliberately ignoring a 1998 Eskom report that predicted Eskom would “run out of electricity reserves by 2007 unless action was taken to prevent it”.
Among steps urged on the government back then was the restructuring of Eskom into separate electricity and power generation businesses, only implemented nearly 24 years later and too late to prevent the wholesale destruction of the economy.
Zuma was not in fact some mutant aberration of the ANC project but in some ways its perfect embodiment.
He might have been corrupting and innumerate and poorly educated, but in the mythologising of recent times it is too easy to remember his wholesale plunder as some bizarre perversion of a noble project.
But the road to ruin he drove was clearly signposted by decisions and policies greenlighted long before his ascent to power in 2009.
Cadre deployment, unfettered government interference in the private and civic realms, the takeover of independent institutions, “reforming the state as an instrument in the hands of the liberation movement”, the casting of democratic opponents as “enemies of the state” and its progress.
You need to go back a long time, to the Mafikeng Conference of the ANC in 1997, to see them all in plain sight in policy resolutions which flew out of that conclave.
Zuma might have corrupted the project with his excesses and plunder, but the capture of the state was not his invention, it predated him by at least a decade. He simply took it to the next level.
Last week, the ANC campaign rolled out Thabo Mbeki to bolster its fortunes in Soweto.
He promised the ANC would purge itself of “rotten apples” despite the adornment of such bitter fruits on its election lists. That part of his speech you can take with a fat health warning.
But what he offered in an interview during his campaigning was incontestably true.
He said:
There you have it, and it is on the ballot on 29 May: cadre deployment, the collapse of the state, the arguments with science and planning, the plunder of the state, load shedding, the deindustrialisation of the country, unemployment – the whole nine yards. The ANC, not Mbeki or Zuma or even Ramaphosa. The party did it all – and the jury is out on its continuance.
