Paul Trewhela
There was a whiff of political thuggery in Jacob Zuma’s opening speech at the elective confer­ence of the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Vet­erans’ Association in Boksburg last weekend.The extremism of his language provides confirmation of the warning last month by Siphiwe Nyanda, an under­ground hero of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) in the fight against the apartheid regime (and later chief of the SA National Defence Force and then a government minis­ter), that Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans’ Associa­tion (MKMVA) has been unconstitutionally trans­formed into Zuma’s “private army.”
Irrespective of any issues of business ethics that might or might not attach to General Nyanda, this is a warning from the very top of South Africa’s political elite that may not be ignored. The language of Zuma’s speech comes out of the his­tory of human rights abuses in the ANC in exile, as doc­umented in three internal ANC commis­sions of inquiry (the reports of the Stuart Commission (1984), Skweyiya Commission (1992) and Motsuenyane Commission (1993) as well as inquiries by Amnesty International (report, 1992) and the Truth and Reconcil­iation Commission (Final Report, 1998. Volume 2, Chap­ter 4, Sections 98-180).
In his speech to the MKMVA conference, Zuma did not refer to his critics in the ANC of being political oppo­nents of his candidacy in seeking a second term, or of his record and his programme, or of being political rivals, or any other term in the language of a parliamen­tary democracy — but as the “enemy within.”
That “enemy within” is the language and mindset of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century — in Russia, Germany, Italy, China, Cambodia and elsewhere.
It was also the language of the ANC security department in exile, Mbokodo (“the grindstone”, in isiXhosa), of which Zuma was one of its top commanders in the period immediately before and after his return from exile and in which Quatro, the ANC’s main prison camp in Angola, fell under his authority.
This is the language learned by Zuma during his military training in the former Soviet Union.
The state broadcaster, the South African Broadcast­ing Corpora­tion, reported his speech on the same evening as his Boksburg speech, as follows: “The ANC had to beware of the enemy within its organisation, President Jacob Zuma said today. ‘The enemy is always present in different guises, sizes and shapes,’” Zuma said in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg.
“OR Tambo warned us all the time,” he said, referring to former African National Congress president Oliver Tambo, who was quoted as saying: ‘Beware of the enemy within; remain vigilant”’.
The SABC reported further verbal attacks in Zuma’s speech on “alien tendencies” within the ANC, on those who wanted the ANC “to be destroyed in front of our own eyes”, “people who don’t like this revolution and are trying to destroy it.”
Also in his speech was the most deadly phrase used constantly in the killing, torture and incarceration of brave and honest individuals who stood up for democ­racy and accountability and against corruption in the ANC in exile: the lethal words, “enemy agents.”
Here South Africa’s president stepped into the boots of the former Mbokodo chief. As the TRC concluded, Mbokodo (as led by Zuma and others) had been “responsible for . . . gross violations of human rights . . .  against suspected ‘enemy agents’ and muti­neers.” (TRC Final Report, Volume 2, Chapter 4, Section 180).
Here, the term “mutineers” covers the strangest so-called “mutiny” in history — a pro-democracy move­ment within the ANC in Angola in 1984, in which so-called “mutineers” wanted to be sent to the front, back to South Africa to fight, rather than continue to be squan­dered (as they saw it) in a pointless civil war far away. As the TRC concluded, the term “enemy agents” was the cover within the ANC in exile for a systemic regime of “gross violations of human rights.”
True to its totalitarian heritage, the Young Commu­nist League in Gauteng — mobilised as another detach­ment of Zuma’s “private army”, to use General Nyanda’s phrase — called sycophantically the next day for a purge of “renegades”, “ill-disciplined elements” and “elitist group­ings” opposing Zuma.
Now add the following to these menacing sentiments. In a survey published the same day as Zuma’s Boks­burg peroration, the Mail & Guardian in its current issue car­ried an article by Niren Tolsi and Matuma Let­saolo under the front-page heading “Branches ‘rigged’ to boost Jacob Zuma,” claiming Zuma’s cronies have rigged ANC membership figures across the country to secure his re-election at the party’s conference at Man­gaung in December.
This follows massive coverage in the print media over previous weeks of exorbitant state expenditure to bene­fit Zuma’s private fiefdom at Nkandla in rural KwaZulu Natal. In his column, Justice Malala argues that as a result of political engineering of this kind, Zuma is more or less “through” in his campaign to secure a sec­ond term, while his “hapless opposition is stuttering to a halt.”
In the wake of the downgrading of South Africa’s credit terms last month, Malala predicts: “The wanton looting of taxpayers’ money, such as that to build Zuma a palace in Nkandla, will not abate. Expect more of the same as security legislation is used to stop scrutiny of such looting. The likes of Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi — who has started an investigation into who the whistle-blower on the R238 million Nkandla expendi­ture was, while failing to lift a finger to stop the rot itself — will be amply rewarded with promotions.”