Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
There were no huge surprises about the Electoral Court’s decision this week to overturn the Electoral Commission’s decision to bar uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) leader and former president of the country Jacob Zuma from standing for elections.
Many at Luthuli House and other political party headquarters will mourn the result because they fear that if elected, Zuma might emerge with a significant influence on the way the anticipated coalition governments govern us at a national level and in some provinces.
Yet it will be celebrated by people in the streets and intellectuals in academic institutions, as another landmark in protecting fundamental rights, including placing voters as ultimate arbiters of the integrity quality that individuals occupying public office after the elections should possess.
The court’s decision to keep Zuma’s face on the ballot offers assurance of human rights protection and some disturbing lessons for manipulative politicians who use back-door tricks to eliminate competitors.
It reshapes the polity, leaning ever closer to the exclusion and cancelling culture, towards affirmation of values such as dignity and equality in our participatory and representative democracy. The values guide citizens to accept that political rights operate on a presumption in favour of inclusiveness.
The importance of the values was emphasised by the Constitutional Court back in 1999, in the Arnold August case on whether prisoners should be allowed to vote: “The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts.”
Above all, Zuma affirming the right to be a candidate shows that the state’s duty to protect rights, even those of individuals we might regard as outcasts in our society, is not weakened but emboldened by such judicial intervention. The rest of the citizens should take note, especially in the run-up to the historic elections predicted to introduce remarkable political changes.
But the final word is that Zuma’s candidacy counts. Whether his candidature in the eyes of the voters will enhance or impoverish our democracy remains to be seen. While some might find voting encouraging, others might be discouraged. If it ultimately improved voter turnout, our democracy would win.
On one level, some voices weighing in on the legal debate will continue to argue that because of the seriousness of the crime and the sentence in question, Zuma should never have been allowed to be a candidate this early because while a voter has an interest in having a wide field of candidates from which to choose, the right to vote cannot be considered as laying down a general guarantee that every voter should be able to find on the ballot paper the candidate or the party of their choice.
On another level, some voices weighing in on the political debate will keep arguing that Zuma thrives on conflict. He has persistently used the many attacks on him – not least from his close political opponents – to justify what critics correctly see as a comprehensive attempt to test the resilience of the overstretched checks and balances on the exercise of power in our democracy and remake the entire country in the image of one individual, himself.
But at a more fundamental level, Zuma’s opponents face the acute dilemma of the high prospects of what appears to be the unassailable comeback of what they perceive as Zuma’s questionable style of governance when judged by the state capture recommendations, which comeback is likely to ride on the back of election promises not anchored by any discernible policies.
Confronted with a political contender seen as posing risks of making South Africa become a democracy in name only, it will be interesting to see how much each political party’s deliberate enticement of the up-to-now ignored and disillusioned voters will energise the election campaigns to convince them that each vote counts this time and that we will all pay a substantial price for not voting.
Here is another moment when campaigns will probably get personal as there is a grudging acknowledgement that Zuma seeks to enlarge the electorate to include those he claims are alienated from the ANC and many other parties deserted by voters over the years. He conveniently seeks to confirm the MKP’s core claim to legitimacy as a voice of the poor and marginalised, which was once an unchallenged preserve of the ANC and other former liberation movements.
The energised voters are likely to overwhelmingly opt for the MKP, which they believe will bestow the vote that counts on them, thus proving that they are indeed part of the proper nation painted by Zuma in his election campaign. They might also be decisive in ensuring the party gets its majority in several voting stations nationwide.
His top spot on the MKP candidate list further contradicts a narrative that he was, in fact, fairly unpopular for much of the past five years, as someone opponents labelled as having presided over nine wasted years in the Union Buildings. His persistence in fighting his battles might continue to enhance his political fortunes and secure his re-election to Parliament, knowing that the ANC leadership is too weak to confront him directly.
There is nothing wrong with this approach, of course, other than the question of who exactly will end up paying for it – and a clear sign of the desperate state of the South African political parties in general that they are too late to think of any alternative policy offerings or election campaign strategies to address people’s sense that Zuma is a victim of a political witch-hunt and politicians, who have always been vocal in opposing him, are making huge profits off them.
While Zuma has sometimes successfully defended himself against serious allegations that have often called into question his suitability to be elected and be allowed to hold public office, the political chaos caused by poor leadership in the country has sustained and further elevated him in the eyes of his supporters, as the sole guarantor of order, that without him, everything would be even worse, the interests of bankrollers of elite politicians might take over. The elections will show whether the dynamic will be the other way around or defy predictions to confirm a new reality South Africans have not yet imagined.
* Nyembezi is a policy analyst, writer and human rights activist
Cape Times