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South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma has been suspended from the African National Congress, highlighting the deepening divisions in the governing party ahead of national elections this year.
Zuma, 81, served as president from 2009 to 2018, when the ANC forced him to step down to make way for Cyril Ramaphosa, the current leader. Zuma’s presidency was dogged by a series of corruption allegations and poor growth in Africa’s most industrialised economy.
Last month he launched his own political movement named uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) after the ANC’s former military wing, arguing there had been a “failure of leadership” in the governing party. “I cannot, and will not, campaign for the ANC of Ramaphosa,” he said.
Fikile Mbalula, ANC secretary-general, said Zuma was “actively impugning the integrity of the ANC” by campaigning to unseat the party. Mbalula said the decision to suspend Zuma, a former head of intelligence during the ANC’s struggle against apartheid, was unanimous.
“The formation of the MK party is not an accident,” Mbalula said. “It is a deliberate attempt to use the proud history of armed struggle against the apartheid regime to lend credibility to what is a blatantly counter-revolutionary agenda.”
In a three-page letter sent to Zuma on Monday, Mbalula said he had been suspended immediately, though on a temporary basis, for a number of infractions of the party’s constitution. This included acting in a way that could “provoke division” in the party, bringing the ANC into disrepute and campaigning for a party that it had not endorsed.
Richard Calland, a political analyst, said Zuma launched the new party as an attempt to weaken Ramaphosa’s efforts to reform the ANC.
“The intention was never to destroy the ANC entirely, but rather to knock 1 or 2 per cent off its total votes in the upcoming election, to precipitate the end of Ramaphosa,” he said. “This would create room for Zuma, and his allies, to regain a foothold in the ANC. It’s a very narrow, and self-interested project.”
Zuma has cast himself as a victim to gain political capital before. In 2006, he used the threat of a corruption investigation as a springboard towards the leadership of the ANC the following year, and ultimately to the presidency a year later.
The party is facing a battle to retain the majority it has held since South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
Susan Booysen, a political analyst and emeritus professor at Wits University, said Zuma’s MK party had the potential to hurt the ANC at the polls.
“It’ll chisel away at the ANC’s support, and this could be crucial given that it may drop to below 50 per cent in the election. This has the potential to reconfigure South African politics,” she said.
Booysen pointed to a large bloc of voters disenchanted with the ANC’s efforts to lift the economy who may gravitate towards Zuma.
“A couple of recent Zuma rallies have attracted the sort of crowds that the ANC itself is struggling to get these days. He knows how unsettled the ANC is, so he’s shrewdly targeted the party at a particularly weak point,” she said.
MK has yet to respond to the ANC’s letter, but spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela said in a video on X that Zuma “has the right to campaign for whatever party he wants to campaign for”.
Zuma was handed a 15-month prison sentence in 2021 for defying an investigation into systematic corruption of state institutions. He was released on “medical parole” after serving only two months, and was later pardoned by Ramaphosa.
