WeeklySA_AdminWITH SY MAKARINGE
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM IN MKP
US President Joe Biden’s lackadaisical performance in the Presidential Debate hosted at CNN Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, two Thursdays ago should by now have triggered an honest, uncomfortable, but robust, succession debate among other political parties – possibly within the Umkhonto we Sizwe party, as it has done among many concerned Democrats in the US and the diaspora. At best, the ashen-faced Biden looked like a senile somnambulist or a slow-talking zombie as he mumbled and stumbled through the 90-minute live TV debate against his Republican nemesis and former president Donald Trump, who seemed to relish his opponent’s unfortunate situation.
With the all-important US November presidential elections less than five months’ away, Democratic Party supporters are in panic stations and have called on the 81-year-old Biden – he turns 82 in November – to be replaced as his continued run for the presidency would hand the future of America to Trump, whom he narrowly beat in the 2020 elections.
They doubt whether he would have the capacity and faculties to preside over the world’s largest economy for another four years.
South African-based and former US career diplomat and international affairs commentator J Brooks Spector put it diplomatically, excuse the pun, when summing up Joe Biden’s performance: “It’s absolutely clear that it was not Joe Biden’s best day. It was perhaps his worst day.”
David Urban, a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign adviser, was more brutal in his analysis.
“It was an unmitigated disaster for President Biden from the second he walked out to the closing statement,” he said, during a post-debate CNN panel discussion.
The octogenarian himself seemed to agree that his age his had slowed him down to some extent when he told a rally in North Carolina the following day: “I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t talk as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as I used to. But I do know what I know. I know how to tell the truth.”
Yet, in Nkandla, 13 941km away from Atlanta, there has been no indication that the six-month-old MK party has started asking itself difficult questions about its unelected, self-appointed president Jacob Zuma, who – at 82 – is almost the same age as Biden and not as agile and energetic as he was two years.
Whereas it would be too late for the Democrats to change their presidential candidate for the November elections, MKP members still have an opportunity to elect a new face ahead of the 2026 local government elections (when the incumbent will be 84) and the 2029 general elections (when he will be 87).
As the old saying goes, forewarned is forearmed.
SPAZA OPERATION NEEDS REVAMP
While still at it, the party should also start having a serious discussion about the need to upgrade itself from a spaza shop operation to being a fully-fledged South African official political opposition party with more than 14,5% of the electorate behind it.
Currently, former president Jacob Zuma’s MK party, voted in by more than two million people, operates from an unspecified location as its letterhead bears neither a physical address nor a landline telephone number. The only contact details on the letterhead are a general email address and a website address.
MKP, whence art thou? In MaKhumalo’s Nkandla spaza shop, perhaps?
RESIGNED OR
‘RELINQUISHED’?
The goings-on within the MK party are baffling, if not intriguing.
On July 2 Secretary General Arthur Zwane (not to be confused with a former Kaizer Chiefs coach) wrote to the party’s leader, former president Jacob Zuma, tendering his resignation with immediate effect, citing excessive workload as his reason.
Literally hours later, an “appreciation letter” dated June 28 (four days earlier) penned by Zuma suddenly surfaced on social media, informing Zwane, who had been in the hotseat for only three weeks, that “[o]wing to the need of using our limited and available human capital efficiently, I have decided to relinquish you from the Secretary General functions with immediate effect”.
But, on June 30, two days after he had been supposedly fired “with immediate effect”, Zwane was at a lodge in Limpopo where he, Zuma and other MK party leaders had gathered to draft its constitution. The SABC even quoted Zwane as saying a number of resolutions were taken at the jamboree.
So, which came first, the removal or the resignation? Such a debacle is, however, not unique to the MKP. It actually has its precedence in the ANC, Zuma’s “other” party (he insists the ANC is not his former party because he is allegedly still a member).
At the height of intense factional battles within the party of liberation a few years ago, its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, suspended then secretary general Ace Magashule following a misdemeanour, only for the latter to produce a pre-dated letter suspending the former.
Old habits die hard.
FURIOUSLY REVOLVING DOOR
In the same “letter of appreciation”, Zwane is listed as deputy secretary general, whereas Sihle Ngubane, who has since become one of the party’s 58 MPs, is still named as the secretary-general.
The letter also cites Danisa Zulu as the party’s treasurer even though she and Zwane were booted out at the same time, only to be swiftly replaced by Menzi Magubane and Dr Sifiso Maseko respectively.
It just goes to show how furious the revolving door at MK is turning since the exit of “founder” Jabulani Khumalo and five others were axed a few weeks ago.
Zuma swings the axe faster than the speed of light, hardly enough time for support staff to keep up to update documents, including the party’s letterhead.
ONE FOOT IN, ONE FOOT OUT
Al-Jamah leader Ganief Hendricks does not know whether he is coming or going.
When his party joined the Government of National Unity (GNU) as the10th and second-last partner in the coalition ahead of the composition of the cabinet, he knew fully well that the ANC and DA were the dominant players in the multiparty arrangement.
He notoriously joined the GNU after sneaking out of the so-called left-leaning “progressive caucus” made up of the EFF, MK Party, PAC, ATM and his party.
In an interview with Newzroom Africa’s Nhlanhla Sehume on Sunday afternoon, the self-proclaimed leftist expressed discomfort at working closely with the DA, a party he described as representing white minority interests.
“It’s a setback. It’s a tremendous setback. It’s a setback to 30 years of hard work. We’ll now have to start from scratch again.
That’s very sad that land won’t be redistributed and also transformation in the labour field, employment field and so many other fields.
“We’re back to 1994.
We now have to accommodate the wishes of a white minority and also people yearning to go back to the years of apartheid,” said Hendricks.
Yeah, right, Mr Hendricks.
If you already had reservations about the DA, why on earth did your two-seat stokvel agree to work with the same party in this GNU in the first place?
BOTH FEET IN THE MOUTH
Well, it took less than 10 hours for the spineless man from Cape Town to change his tune.
Just after 10pm that Sunday, on learning he had been appointed to the position of Deputy Minister of Social Development in the GNU, Hendricks was beaming from ear to ear.
This despite knowing he was going to work closely with a party that “represents white minority interests”.He described his appointment by President Cyril Ramaphosa as “a great honour”. This from a man who had nine hours earlier said he did not see the GNU lasting more than 100 days, predicting the coalition would soon be replaced by leftist parties to exclude the DA and Freedom Front Plus.
Asked by his Newzroom Afrika interviewer if his party was still affiliated to the “progressive caucus (PC)”, formed after EFF’s Julius Malema spurned overtures by Ramaphosa to join the GNU, the two-faced, fork-tongued Hendricks called on his former PC colleagues to rethink their position.
“They will be a strong opposition, but there will also be a strong government,” said Hendricks, in an apparent flip-flop to follow where the wind was blowing.
IZWELETHU, iAFRIKA
In what has been described as a masterstroke, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed PAC leader Mzwanele Nyhontso as Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development in the GNU.
Though Nyhontso is not well-known outside his organization, the Land Reform and Rural Development portfolio could not have been handed to a better party than his Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, the real and true custodians of the crusade against land dispossession and landlessness in South Africa.
Although currently commanding only one seat in the National Assembly, the party has not wavered from its principled stand since its formation by Robert Sobukwe and others in 1959.
Ramaphosa’s appointment of Nyhontso was probably inspired by the PAC’s land policy, Izwelethu, or by his genuine desire to see the 65-year-old party playing a creative role in unlocking the contentious land debacle for the benefit of Africans.
Given the monumental failure by successive ANC land affairs ministers over the past 30 years to push for the return the seized land to its original owners, Nyhontso will find this appointment as a great opportunity to reposition the PAC to reclaim its rightful place in the South African political discourse. Or it might very well prove to be a poisoned chalice.
* Sy Makaringe is a Limpopo-based editorial content development specialist. His tongue-in-cheek column appears fortnightly.
