The Democratic Moment: South Africa’s Prospects Under Jacob Zuma

Author: Xolela Mangcu

Publisher:  Jacana

One of the days either Thabo Mbeki or Xolela Mangcu needs to come clean and tell South Africa what wrong they did to each other for Mbeki to deserve so much venom from Mangcu. Did Mbeki perhaps prevent Mangcu from getting any particular post he eyed at one of the universities or perhaps the former President failed to offer him an advisory position in his government as is the fashion with many of our current crop of political analysts and commentators these days?. The jury is out on this one.

This book, which is punctuated with the typical Mangcu-speak of ‘I, myself and me’ (and I add... and Ginsberg and Steve Biko and Business Day and the American scholar), as could be expected is another of Mangcu’s many assaults on Mbeki. He may have tried to justify it to his children in the prologue as to why this book is not a sequel to his first one ‘To The Brink’, which specialised on vilifying Thabo, in fact it is except that he is using Zuma as a premise to get back at his favourite topic, Mbeki. It’s a continuation of his anti-Mbeki crusade but told from the Zuma angle. (We heard you Xolela many times in the Business Day and The Weekender and elsewhere before, will you get another topic now?)

This book is neither a bad idea nor is it irrelevant, don’t get me wrong. Save for Xolela obsession with Mbeki it is a good read. I read it because it is written by Mangcu, who is my mkhaya (homeboy to you). He is a product of the BC and stays in Ginsberg, Steve Biko's township and I from Mdantsane and of the ANC mould.

I must say I enjoyed his research but he bored me with his habitual overdosed referencing to US scholars. In The Democratic Moment, Mangcu provocatively tackles such important issues as the Zuma phenomenon – the people’s leader and gets deeper into the dichotomy of populism vs elitism and the struggle between the educated and the uneducated (amaqaba namagqobhoka) in the ANC and correctly mentions the names of the populists and non-populists. His dichotomisation of the situation is spot-on and he gives a historical perspective.

He exposes the dilemmas of the media since and prior to Polokwane. Again here he is correct because since Polokwane and in the run-up to it the media was compromised in reporting the ANC or alliance politics. Newsrooms were divided down the middle between those journalists who supported Jacob Zuma and those who supported Thabo Mbeki. In the process the journalistic principles of balance, fairness and truth were postponed as reporters and columnists took sides. Sadly that still continues to date. No doubt this book will stimulate ideas, provoke discussion and create controversy but mainly for those who are unfamiliar with Mangcu’s pen and his rantings in newspapers.

I expected the author to patronise Jacob Zuma and he has not disappointed me on that score. He has followed his pal Sipho Seepe in “brains-trusting” the post-Polokwane crowd. Let me put it this way, where you see the name Mbeki in the book, you can feel the hatred oozing from Mangcu and his singing of praises around the name of  Zuma are overdone. That’s the trend throughout the book.

Here Mangcu says Mbeki was booed and jeered at Polokwane. Those like me who attended and covered the ANC national conference in December 2007 will tell that Mbeki was accorded the most respect by the delegates who listened silently and attentively during his 20 minutes presidential address. It was so quiet that you could hear a small pin or a pen falling right from the end of that giant white marquee. The silence during the speech was a complete contrast to the rowdiness a few minutes earlier and that characterised the gathering as youth bayed for Mosioua Lekota’s blood, so to speak.

Yes as the media we were shocked by that moment of respect Mbeki got as his speech was extremely critical of power and position-mongering in the ANC, corruption in government and the processes leading up to Polokwane (read 'Political Developments' under President's Political Report. Yes we were disappointed because we were ready with headlines screaming: “Mbeki shouted down”. Strangely, after Mbeki finished, the noise then continued with the youth spinning index fingers in the air - a sign to call for a leadership change. That was the Polokwane indaba we attended not the one that the author talks about here. Did Mangcu mistake Mbeki for Lekota, perhaps? May be it’s because the author was busy celebrating Mbeki’s electoral defeat in Germany at the time, as he says in the book.

This book appears to have been a race against time as the author wanted to be listed alongside Jeremy Gordin as another biographer of Jacob Zuma. You will notice somewhere in the book that there is no smooth transition between the main issue under discussion and the side-issue of Mangcu talking at length about himself and his drinking with friends at a shebeen in Ginsberg and playing golf at the nearby King William’s Town gold course and one of his friends winning it. I stay about 60 minutes from the gold course in Mdantsanne and there is nothing attractive about that place and it's the one that Letlapa Mphahlele's APLA cadres bombed in the early 90s because it was a den of and frequented by the white rightwingers.

 If you read Mangcu’s columns in the Business Day and The Weekender over the years, then, on the main, you’ve read this book.

Reviewed by Eric Naki, Deputy Editor: Growth Magazine, Johannesburg.