WeeklySA_AdminINTRIGUE The machinery may be impressive, but Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma risks discovering that institutional competence can conceal an ideological price too costly to pay…
By Themba Khumalo
There is a moment when political pragmatism devolves into absolute self-sabotage, and Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma crossed it the second she took her seat across from Kallie Kriel in Centurion.
She did not walk into that room to play grandmaster; she walked in as raw meat for a machine built to grind ideological opponents to pulp.
To understand how she arrived at that table, one has to understand what Jacinta believes she is building. Her movement, March and March, is an anti-illegal-migrant civic movement whose activities have increasingly leaned towards a form of Zulu chauvinistic nationalism, a tendency that becomes particularly revealing when placed alongside its engagement with AfriForum.
Less than a fortnight after launching the South Africa First Forum to drive private prosecutions and strategic litigation, and boldly declaring her ambition to build an “AfriForum for black South Africans”, Jacinta went looking for the institutional muscle she believed her civic movement needed.
She looked at AfriForum, with its private prosecution machinery, legal capacity, community-security structures and self-funded tertiary institutions, and saw a ready-made blueprint for civic self-reliance.
The attraction is obvious: when the state repeatedly demonstrates that it cannot protect citizens, enforce its own laws or provide functioning institutions, the temptation to partner with an organisation that has built its own machinery of self-reliance is considerable.
But what she failed to grasp is that you cannot borrow the mechanics of an organisation without inheriting its soul.
Everything Jacinta needed to learn about AfriForum’s institutional machinery could have been gleaned through basic research, requiring neither a public embrace of Kriel nor the spectacle of a formal working relationship. She could have examined its litigation strategy, studied its organisational discipline, scrutinised its fundraising model and learnt from the institutions it has built without placing herself in the orbit of its leadership.
By choosing a high-visibility bilateral pact instead, she handed her fiercest critics lethal discrediting fodder.
The optics evoke dark historical parallels, reminiscent of the disastrous pre-1994 political manoeuvring between the IFP and the National Party, where transactional alliances ultimately damaged the credibility of those who believed they were playing a clever game.
AfriForum is not a neutral service provider or some benevolent civic consultancy dispensing organisational wisdom to whoever happens to knock on its door. It is an organisation with a distinctly articulated ideological identity, a long history of defending Afrikaner interests and a political record that places it in direct conflict with much of the black-majority conception of transformation and redress.
Its opposition to affirmative action and BEE is not some obscure footnote that can be tucked away while everyone admires its organisational efficiency; it is part of the ideological terrain on which the organisation has built its influence.
This is the same organisation whose leadership embarked on an infamous White House junket to advance its claims about interracial violence and farm murders, with those claims subsequently echoed by Donald Trump and others. To sit across a boardroom table from Kriel and treat him as a benign civic administrator is an act of staggering political naivety that instantly invites damning accusations that March and March is being controlled, bankrolled or weaponised by white right-wing interests.
That is the political price of pretending that institutional competence can be separated so neatly from ideological baggage, particularly when the people watching have long memories and very good reasons to question what they are seeing.
Jacinta can insist that the relationship is about learning, that she does not agree with AfriForum on everything and that the two organisations have found common ground around issues such as the rule of law, crime, community safety and illegal immigration. None of that makes the ideological contradiction disappear.
You cannot walk into a room carrying one political history, sit beside somebody carrying another and then expect the public to admire the furniture while pretending not to notice the house.
Jacinta has wandered into AfriForum’s workshop and started admiring the machinery.
The danger is not that she will suddenly become Kriel. It is that institutional competence can be seductive enough to make the ideology behind it look like an acceptable price of admission, particularly when the machinery appears to work and the state she is reacting against appears increasingly incapable of doing anything properly. That is how institutional borrowing becomes ideological dependency.
The hypocrisy becomes even more uncomfortable when immigration enters the room.
March and March has made illegal immigration one of its defining grievances, demanding stricter controls, changes to asylum policy and action against employers who hire undocumented migrants. Yet here she is embracing an organisation whose wider constituency includes sections of the agricultural and business establishment in which the employment of undocumented migrants is hardly some exotic phenomenon.
Where is the outrage when the undocumented migrant is not simply crossing a border but being handed a payslip — or, more accurately, being denied one — by a South African employer? Where is the fury directed at the person who profits from illegal labour? Where is the same uncompromising scrutiny when the person breaking the law is not the foreigner looking for work but the South African employer looking for cheap and vulnerable labour?
If the foreigner is condemned while the employer receives a polite handshake, the principle begins to look suspiciously selective.
That is the sort of contradiction that can hollow out a civic organisation from the inside.
But the deepest poison in this arrangement lies elsewhere, in what Jacinta appears to be absorbing from the AfriForum model beyond its institutional machinery.
When she mused about building ethnic tertiary institutions — Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana enclaves modelled on institutions such as Sol-Tech and Academia — she wandered into territory that should make any South African with even a passing acquaintance with this country’s history deeply uncomfortable.
There is nothing wrong with strengthening African languages in education, and there is nothing wrong with building excellent institutions in which isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana and other African languages are treated as languages of knowledge rather than decorative cultural accessories. The problem begins when linguistic empowerment is transformed into ethnic institutional separation and presented as liberation.
South Africa has already experimented with that proposition.
We called it apartheid.
The Bantustan system was sold in the language of cultural identity, ethnic autonomy and self-determination, but underneath the respectable vocabulary was an architecture designed to divide black South Africans into separate ethnic compartments and deny them a common political and economic existence. Dressing the same instinct in contemporary language about mother-tongue autonomy does not make it progressive; it simply gives an old idea a newer wardrobe.
Black South Africans do not need Bantustans with better branding. They need institutions capable of producing lawyers, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, teachers and intellectuals who can compete with the best in the world without being told that their ambition must first pass through an ethnic gate.
If Jacinta wants to build a world-class Zulu university, build it. If she wants to create an institution that makes isiZulu a language of advanced scholarship, technology, science and commerce, there is nothing remotely objectionable about that ambition. The same should apply to isiXhosa, Setswana, Sesotho, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, siSwati, isiNdebele and every other African language that has been systematically denied the institutional status it deserves.
But building powerful African institutions is not the same thing as constructing separate ethnic enclaves, and confusing the two would be an extraordinary betrayal of the very black self-determination March and March claims to champion.
The demand for self-reliance is legitimate, as is the demand for civic organisations with the capacity to litigate, organise communities, defend citizens and build institutions. That is precisely why Jacinta should have been more careful about the company she chose to keep.
She has something potentially powerful in her hands: a civic organisation born from genuine frustration with state failure and an appetite among ordinary citizens for institutions that can do what government repeatedly fails to do. She could have developed that capacity from an intellectual foundation of her own, borrowing lessons from AfriForum without allowing its institutional model to become the template through which she begins to understand her own social objectives.
Instead, she has allowed the relationship with AfriForum to become part of the story before her own civic project has properly begun, giving her critics an opportunity to argue that the machinery she hopes to borrow may eventually dictate the shape of the institution she intends to build.
The problem is not that she is trying to learn from AfriForum. The problem is that she appears to have mistaken proximity for pragmatism and institutional competence for ideological neutrality.
Jacinta went to Pretoria looking for institutional muscle. She may have found it, but she also walked into an ideological trap in which the machinery she admires comes with a price she has not yet fully calculated.
If she is serious about building a powerful civic organisation for black South Africans, she should take the lessons, discard the baggage and build her own machine before somebody else’s machinery starts deciding what it is designed to produce.
