Cape Town — The rifts run deep. After South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) forced President Thabo Mbeki to resign last weekend, nearly half his cabinet chose to follow him, leaving South Africa in a state of uncertainty.
When parliament sits to elect the country's new president on Thursday, the resignations of 10 cabinet ministers and three deputy ministers will hang over proceedings like a dark cloud.
Jacob Zuma, Mbeki's successor as party leader and the ANC's candidate for president after elections next year, and the ANC's deputy leader, Kgalema Motlanthe, who is expected to fill Mbeki's shoes in the interim, will have to demonstrate strong leadership in the next few days to bring calm to the nation. This is a crisis that can be managed but it could also exacerbate the tensions within the ANC which its national executive committee sought to reduce by bringing Mbeki's term of office to an early end.
While some of the cabinet resignations were expected, the resignation of Finance Minister Trevor Manuel came as a bolt from the blue.
Over the past week, there have been consistent indications that he would remain in his post. He has clearly taken a stand on a matter of principle, risking the reactions of the markets to show his personal dissatisfaction with the way Mbeki was removed.
At the same time, he put the new leadership on the back foot. They have had to approach him to stay on, cognisant of the fact that they will not easily be able to change the country's economic direction. While Zuma's allies may not like Manuel, they will not be able to ignore the fact that market indices reacted to the announcement of his resignation by dropping steeply, stabilising only when his office said he was still available for reappointment. No amount of shouting or protesting from them will alter this reality.
Some ministers are resigning because they feel they need to give the new president the freedom to create his own cabinet. Others are profoundly disturbed by the way in which Thabo Mbeki was treated and have had enough of the internal wranglings within the ANC. Essop Pahad, Minister in the Office of the President, has resigned not only from cabinet but also as a member of parliament.
When Mbeki fired Jacob Zuma as deputy president of South Africa three years ago, he could not have imagined that he was setting in motion a chain of events that would bring about his own demise and that of many in his cabinet.
At the time, his stand sent a strong signal that the South African government would act against corruption without fear or favour. This was well received on the continent and abroad. He was prompted to act after a judge, Hilary Squires, convicted Zuma's financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, on fraud and corruption charges in June 2005, and sentenced Shaik to 15 years in prison.
There was no cheering or jeering when Mbeki announced at a special joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament that he was firing Zuma. The silence suggested there was discord brewing deep down within the organisation. In Murder in the Cathedral, T S Eliot wrote that "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason." Through the silence came a faint hint that the president was doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
In retrospect, Mbeki's action marked the beginning of a revolt within the ANC that culminated in his ousting at the party's conference in Polokwane, in Limpopo province, last December. Mbeki was roundly defeated, losing the party leadership to Zuma.
Despite this, fresh corruption charges were brought against Zuma soon after the conference, propelling the ANC into a circus of conflicting forces for most of this year.
Zuma supporters not only waged a relentless campaign against the judiciary but some also said they were prepared to "kill for Zuma". This has threatened to drag the country back into the kind of conflict which liberation in 1994 brought to an end.
Earlier, Zuma's conduct as revealed during a rape trial had set back the gains of the country's women's movements. He was found not guilty but succeeded in doing enormous damage by elevating chauvinistic male prowess to new heights. He also set back the country's education campaign around safe sex when he admitted to having unprotected sex and taking a shower afterwards as a precaution.
Then came another court judgement, one which has changed the political scene completely. Two weeks ago another judge, Chris Nicholson, adjudged as invalid the charges brought against Zuma after the Polokwane conference, on the grounds that prosecutors had not given him a chance to make representations as to why he should not be charged.
Nicholson emphasised that his finding did not address Zuma's guilt or innocence and that prosecutors could press charges again. But his ruling drove a nail in Mbeki's coffin when he inferred that Zuma's claims during the case that the charges were part of a political conspiracy against him were perhaps not as far-fetched as some believed.
Suddenly Zuma's supporters hailed the judiciary as fair and independent. Nicholson was described as "progressive" and not "anti-revolutionary," as Constitutional Court judges had been labelled some weeks earlier. Zuma and his supporters felt vindicated.
Then Mbeki and his cabinet decided to appeal against a section of the judgement and all hell broke loose in the party. By the time the national executive met last Friday, Zuma's view that Mbeki should stay, but that elections should be called early, was swept aside. By Saturday afternoon, the executive had decided it would "recall" Mbeki. On Sunday night he announced his resignation on a live television broadcast.
The ANC's handling of the weekend's developments has shown a level of sophistication comparable to its conduct during the negotiations leading to liberation and the period immediately thereafter. There was none of the shrillness of recent weeks; in his televised address to the nation, Mbeki conducted himself with great dignity, quietly retiring into history.
So it seemed until Tuesday when the cabinet resignations were announced. At the same time, Mbeki has approached the Constitutional Court to challenge aspects of the Nicholson judgement.
Ironically, Mbeki may be the winner in this round. By exiting with grace and not digging in his heels as he did as defeat loomed at Polokwane, he has earned considerable respect at home and abroad. This has released him from the strain of being the punching bag for every difficulty experienced by his cabinet. The focus is now no longer on him: it is firmly on the new leadership and more specifically on Zuma and Motlanthe.
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Their day has come and all that follows will fall squarely on their shoulders. They need to move quickly to firm up Trevor Manuel's appointment as Finance Minister and accelerate whatever plans they may have for a new cabinet. Ideally they would have wanted to attend to this detail after the elections in six months time. The resignations, however, remove this luxury. They will have their work cut out over the next few days.
Many South Africans are sceptical of the ANC's claim that the firing of Mbeki was carried out to unite the party. Instead there is a strong feeling that the action spoke more of revenge than of healing; moreover, that it was directed more towards effectively ending all prosecutions against Jacob Zuma than anything else. If it were about unity and healing, as the party secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, has said, the executive would have had to act against both men. Instead those who wanted the charges to go away won the day.
South Africa may yet count the costs of one man doing the right thing for the wrong reason and another allowing others to do the same.
Zubeida Jaffer is an award-winning South African journalist and author who has chronicled South Africa's struggle for democracy for more than 25 years. She is also an honorary research associate at the Centre for African Studies of the University of Cape Town.
