Letter: Axing Zuma doesn’t help the marginalised and excluded

THE calls for the removal of ANC president Jacob Zuma are gaining momentum.

The key question that lingers in one’s mind is whether his axing as president of both his organisation and the country will materially ameliorate the immediate challenges of the economically marginalised and excluded black majority.

Of course it is wrong morally and politically for Zuma, a leader of an organisation espousing rhetoric of concern and care for the downtrodden, to engage in what could best be characterised as social teasing.

This is having an island of opulence existing amid a sea of want, building a lavish homestead in rural Nkandla and dispensing patronage, be it to the Guptas or whoever else he so chooses.

Making the calls for Zuma’s head may benefit the opposition parties as well as a faction of the ruling party, but there’s a long way between calling for Zuma’s recall and actually recalling him. If recalling him is effected, it will be but a Pyrrhic victory for the working class and the poor.

Axing Zuma cannot and will not be a panacea of all the ills that beset the masses. It is the ANC in its entirety that must be removed.

It must be severely punished for betraying the trust bestowed on it by the poor, and for failing to implement policies aimed at democratising all facets of the economy and thus laying a solid foundation to build a relationship of the state, society and markets to obliterate the much touted triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality. The left-leaning forces of the pre-Polokwane era made us believe that then president Thabo Mbeki was the sole source of all that was wrong with the ANC, and removing him and what was euphemistically referred to as the remnants of the “1996 class project” would deliver the working class and the poor to the proverbial promised land.

Zuma was often touted as the friend of the left who would not embrace the self-imposed, neo-liberal and Washington consensus prescriptions-inspired Gear of Mbeki. The ushering-in of Zuma has plunged the country into a crisis of unprecedented proportions, reminding one of Niccolo Machiavelli’s sentiment in his book, The Prince, “for men change their prince willingly, hoping to better themselves and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules, wherein they are deceived because they afterwards find by experience, they have gone from bad to worse”.

Substituting somebody else for Zuma (the prince) won’t work. What will work for the poor is a political formation willing, able and ready to change the constitution to allow a move to an electoral system that would ensure leaders are accountable to the people who voted them into power rather than their national executive bodies.

This will thus close the space for patronage dispensation.

What will work for the black majority is for their government to implement policies aimed at realising their economic emancipation through the government’s participation in exploration, extraction, processing, beneficiation and trading of the country’s mineral wealth and other key industries. The ANC had ample opportunity to effect these and other progressive changes, but did not.

There was a time when it enjoyed a two-thirds majority in parliament but instead of amending the constitution in a way that would ensure the equitable redistribution of land, it passed the floor-crossing legislation and thereby stifled democracy. It is true that the challenges that the working class and the poor are confronted with are a legacy of colonialism and its apartheid derivative.

However the ANC has dismally failed to alter the foundations of white monopoly capital, and Zuma, Cyril Ramaphosa, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or any of the other individual leaders of the ANC have ceased to be the hope of the poor.