Yet perhaps what Zuma will be remembered for most is the Marikana massacre. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, thirty-four miners in the northwest city. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that ANC politicians (including Ramaphosa) had pressured the police to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not a tragic accident, but a premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board, Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” His conclusion: “there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” [...]
It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old-style warlords. Violence became inseparable from politics, especially in Zuma’s home province of Kwazulu-Natal. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least thirty-five people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted eighty of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, eighty-nine people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in acts of political violence. Almost no arrests have been made. [...]
Zuma’s regime was rife with instability. He regularly hired and fired ministers (he averaged one finance minister per year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair. He governed in a highly personalized manner, simultaneously speaking about his reign as if he was an outside observer and using his power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests or those of his vast family, or of the Guptas. Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency — such as Blade Nzimande, former general secretary of the Communist Party, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand — would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies. [...]
What Ramaphosa represents at one level is a return to the classic ANC model of social compact, putting forward a collective vision that favors developmental capitalism, collective aspiration, social harmony — but by and for elites, at the expense of workers. Indeed, while COSATU and the SACP supported Ramaphosa’s campaign, Zuma broke the back of these once proud organizations and Ramaphosa will most likely be able to pass pro-business policy without facing any real opposition from the Left.
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