By Gabriel Manyati
History has an uncanny ability to forgive flawed leaders. Time softens rough edges, turns villains into complicated figures and occasionally elevates disgraced politicians into symbols of larger national struggles. Yet some leaders seem determined to deny themselves even that historical mercy. Former South African president Jacob Zuma increasingly appears to belong to that tragic category.
There was a time when Zuma occupied a singular place in South Africa’s political imagination. To millions of ordinary South Africans, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, he was the liberation fighter who had endured imprisonment and exile, the charismatic populist who spoke the language of the poor and the political survivor who repeatedly defied his critics.
Even after the scandals of Nkandla and State Capture, there remained a constituency willing to believe that history would eventually be kinder to him than contemporary politics had been. Some even regarded him as a genuine Pan Africanist whose politics had been shaped by the solidarity of African nations that sustained the anti-apartheid struggle.
That possibility is now being systematically destroyed by Zuma himself.
By aligning his uMkhonto weSizwe Party with anti-immigrant and openly Afrophobic movements such as Operation Dudula and March and March, Zuma is not merely making another controversial political calculation. He is desecrating the very traditions that once gave his political career meaning.
The timing of this political flirtation is impossible to ignore.
South Africa heads towards local government elections on 26 November, and the temptation of electoral opportunism is plainly visible. Across the world, politicians facing difficult electoral terrain often reach for the same instrument: the politics of resentment. When economic growth is weak, unemployment remains catastrophic and public frustration is boiling over, scapegoats become politically useful.
Migrants become the enemy. Foreign shopkeepers become the problem. African immigrants become convenient symbols upon which society’s frustrations can be projected.
The late French philosopher René Girard described this tendency as the “scapegoat mechanism”, arguing that societies often transfer their anxieties and tensions onto vulnerable outsiders in order to preserve social cohesion. It is one of the oldest political tricks in history.
The danger is that it works.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is electorally seductive because it offers simple answers to extraordinarily complex problems. It tells struggling communities that their hardships are not the product of corruption, economic stagnation, policy failures and weak governance. Instead, it points to a visible and vulnerable target.
The foreigner.
One cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that this is precisely the calculation now being made by sections of the MK Party ahead of November’s municipal elections. Having stunned the political establishment with its electoral performance in KwaZulu-Natal, the party now faces the challenge of converting protest sentiment into durable local government support.
Nothing mobilises anger quite like identity politics.
Nothing generates emotional energy quite like the promise of reclaiming jobs, neighbourhoods and opportunities from perceived outsiders.
The events surrounding the much vaunted 30 June deadline are instructive.
For weeks, South Africans were warned of sweeping protests and dramatic action against foreign nationals. Yet the deadline has come and gone. The promised upheaval failed to materialise. The anti-immigrant mobilisation did not produce the political earthquake that many of its proponents predicted.
Yet instead of ending, the campaign has been repackaged.
Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma has since declared that the protests will continue every Thursday. This shift from a singular deadline to recurring demonstrations raises serious questions. If the objective was genuinely tied to 30 June, why continue indefinitely? If the deadline has passed, what exactly is now being pursued?
These are legitimate questions because permanent mobilisation is often the hallmark of political rather than civic projects.
Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia has himself suggested that there appears to be a political agenda behind the protests. His remarks should not be lightly dismissed. Coming from the minister responsible for policing and public safety, they underscore growing concerns that anti-immigrant activism may be evolving into a vehicle for political organisation and electoral mobilisation.
Indeed, one cannot avoid the suspicion that the continuation of these demonstrations every Thursday serves to keep immigration at the centre of public discourse ahead of the November local government elections.
The strategy is politically obvious.
Keep communities angry.
Keep grievances alive.
Maintain the sense of an unfinished crisis.
Then offer political movements and parties as the instruments through which that anger can supposedly be resolved.
This is not a uniquely South African phenomenon. Populist movements across the world have discovered that sustained political energy often depends on keeping societies in a permanent state of agitation. A movement without a grievance soon loses momentum. A movement with a perpetually renewed grievance can become an electoral machine.
The irony in Jacob Zuma’s case is almost unbearable.
The African National Congress, the organisation to which he dedicated most of his political life, would not have survived without the solidarity of other African countries. Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Angola and Zimbabwe sheltered South African exiles, trained liberation fighters and provided sanctuary to thousands fleeing apartheid repression.
Without the generosity of fellow Africans, South Africa’s liberation struggle would have been immeasurably more difficult.
To now participate, directly or indirectly, in the demonisation of Africans from other countries is not merely hypocrisy. It is a profound historical betrayal.
South Africa has already seen where this road leads.
The xenophobic violence of 2008 left dozens dead and displaced thousands. Subsequent outbreaks of anti-immigrant violence have repeatedly stained the country’s democratic record and damaged its standing across the continent.
Every time a senior political figure legitimises anti-immigrant sentiment, the threshold for violence is lowered.
Every slogan portraying migrants as invaders grants moral permission to vigilantes.
Every suggestion that even legally resident foreigners should leave the country chips away at constitutionalism and the rule of law.
The tragedy of Zuma’s political journey is that he understands this better than most. He knows what exclusion feels like. He knows the value of solidarity. He knows that liberation movements survive because others open their doors and extend their hands.
Yet he increasingly appears willing to gamble with these principles in pursuit of political relevance.
This is not statesmanship.
It is opportunism.
Indeed, the suspicion cannot be avoided that Afrophobia has become, for sections of the MK Party and its fellow travellers, not a conviction but an electoral strategy.
If so, it is an extraordinarily dangerous one.
Because once politicians discover that anger wins votes, they rarely stop feeding it. They nurture it. They become prisoners of the resentments they helped unleash.
South Africa’s future cannot be built upon hostility towards fellow Africans. The country’s economic and diplomatic fortunes are inseparable from those of the continent. Afrophobia is therefore not merely immoral. It is profoundly self-defeating.
As for Jacob Zuma, he had alternatives.
He could have embraced the role of elder statesman. He could have devoted his remaining years to defending the values of liberation and preserving the memory of continental solidarity. He could have sought redemption in reconciliation and historical reflection.
Instead, he increasingly appears determined to be remembered as a former president who chose grievance over unity and resentment over principle.
History remembers leaders not only for the offices they held but for the passions they legitimised.
Nelson Mandela is remembered for reconciliation.
Julius Nyerere is remembered for Pan Africanism.
Kwame Nkrumah is remembered for African unity.
If Jacob Zuma continues down this path, history may remember him for something far darker: a liberation hero who, in the twilight of his political life, embraced the politics of division and helped normalise Afrophobia in pursuit of political relevance and electoral advantage.
For a man who once embodied so much of South Africa’s democratic promise, that would be a tragic and entirely self-inflicted epitaph.
