Who will be anointed king at Mangaung? The public discourse suggests that there is a contest for the crown between Jacob Zuma and Kgalema Motlanthe.
But there can only be a succession race if there is an alternative contender, and Motlanthe has not yet thrown his hat into the ring.
There is no doubt that he would like to contest for the ANC crown. And there are many in the ANC who would like to see the back of Zuma. But unlike Zuma, who had nothing to lose and everything to gain in the run-up to Polokwane, Motlanthe has everything to lose should he be unsuccessful in a bid for the ANC crown in Mangaung.
Motlanthe will throw his hat in the ring only if he knows that it is a contest he will win. In this scenario, it is better to swallow your pride, defer the battle and position yourself for the presidency in 2017.
But how do we account for the divisions within the ANC? Moreover, why do so many of its factions want to see an end to the Zuma presidency? The common explanation is that this is a struggle between patronage networks over the resources of the state.
However, while there is an element of truth in this, what these explanations ignore is that this battle over patronage overlays a deeper ideological struggle about the meaning of development that goes back to the dawn of the democratic SA.
Two visions of development have vied for supremacy within the ANC in post-apartheid SA. The first simply imagines a deracialised capitalism, albeit with a poverty-alleviation focus.
It advances a conservative macro-economic policy agenda that emphasises deregulation, privatisation, low fiscal deficits, a BEE programme intent on creating a black bourgeoisie, and a circumscribed role for the state.
The second envisages a deeper social transformation and the establishment of a social democracy. It focuses on transforming the economy through aggressive state intervention, an active industrial policy, the strategic use of parastatals, a broad-based black economic programme and an agenda to address poverty and inequality. The first of these visions prevailed between 1994 and 2007. It counts as its indicators of success a long period of moderate growth, low fiscal deficits and the stabilisation of the country’s macroeconomic finances. Its Achilles heel was its failure to address unemployment and contain inequality.
This was used to delegitimise the Mbeki presidency, culminatingd in his defeat at the Polokwane conference in 2007.
The second vision has come to dominate in the Zuma era. The Zuma presidency was thus explicitly built on the mandate of a deeper social transformation agenda and a broad-based black economic programme.
Its legislative hallmarks were the New Growth Path and the Industrial Policy Action Plan 2, both of which emphasised targeting particular labour-absorbing industrial sectors for growth, driving small business development, expanding BEE beyond politically connected entrepreneurs, driving employment and containing inflation.
The success of the programme, however, has been limited as a result of the global economic recession since 2008 and an internal political challenge from within the ANC.
The contemporary factional problem within the ruling party originally lay in the alliance of forces that brought Zuma to power in Polokwane. As so many have said before, this was a coalition of the wounded.
The left, institutionally represented by Cosatu and the SACP, was an important part of the coalition, but it also comprised African nationalists unhappy “with the climate of fear” under Mbeki, Zulu traditionalists who supported Zuma because he was one of their own, and a range of shady businessmen looking for their time at the feeding trough. It was a recipe for the factionalist politics that ensued. The opening gambit in the divide within the Zuma administration was the tussle over economic policy, reflected initially in the mandate of and commissioners appointed to the National Development Commission, and the battle over executive appointments in parastatals.
It is now reflected in the tensions (not contradictions) between the economic policy prescriptions of the New Growth Path and the National Development Plan.
This primary divide, however, is overlaid by other divisions. A significant layer of the original left, centred on ZwelinzimaVavi, are unhappy at the enrichment and corruption that has not only continued but seems to have taken on an added impetus under Zuma.
Modernist African nationalists have been turned off Zuma either by the indignity he has brought to the presidential office through his personal foibles or the instability in markets that his lack of leadership inspires.
Other factions are led by ethically questionable politicians such as BhekiCele and Julius Malema, who simply want revenge against Zuma because he was forced to take action against them for their failures. Still others are led by shady businessmen who are driven by the potential access to the state’s largesse. Zuma is, of course, not the best presidential candidate that the ANC can put up for a number of reasons. First, there is a tussle over economic policy reflected in some of the contrasting policy prescriptions reflected in the New Growth Path and the National Development Plan. These need not be mutually exclusive programmes and the tensions between them can be bridged. - Habib is Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Johannesburg.