The odds against the Third Coming of Jacob Zuma are stacking up 

A series of public comments by uMkhonto Wesize (MK) party leader, former president Jacob Zuma, and the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Julius Malema, reveals how poisonous the relationship between them has become. 

Despite this acrimony, both appear to want to lead a “black unity” party as part of a campaign against the ANC’s current leadership under President Cyril Ramaphosa. 

These attempts are doomed to failure, largely because Zuma has failed to build sustainable structures in his new party. And although Malema built membership and leadership structures that led to the EFF’s steady growth into the third-largest party in 2019, its massive loss in support to the MK party in the 2024 elections followed by the exodus of prominent EFF members to the MK party after the departure of EFF co-founder and deputy Floyd Shivambu, exposed deep cracks in the party’s structures.

Over the last few days there has been much reporting about a podcast interview with Zuma published by the Sunday Times, in which he responded to his expulsion from the ANC.

He clearly still does not accept the authority of the ANC’s current leadership to remove him. And in fact, he does not appear to accept our democracy is a true democracy. 

This has led to some public derision, particularly as Zuma regularly described South Africa as a democracy when he was our elected head of state, as TimesLive columnist Tom Eaton pointed out.

Within all of this has been much discussion about how Zuma would like to lead a “black unity” party. In his interview, he refers to gatherings, saying that “when we were establishing the MK party – we met as black parties – and agreed we were going to take over … it’s something that happened”.

Dali Mpofu referred to this idea many times during his interviews after he moved from the EFF to MK, suggesting at one point that he could, in his heart, be a member of the ANC, of the EFF and of the MK party all at the same time.

But there must be something inherently wrong with the idea that people will, or must, vote for a particular party because of their race. 

While our racialised inequality means that race is often an important element of many people’s political choices, the very idea that all black people would agree to support one party simply because of their racial identity might remind many people of our apartheid past.

Even if Zuma did seriously believe this, then surely, he would have to concede that the ANC, as weak as it is at present, would still fit the definition of a “black unity” party better than any other formation in our political history.

This may reveal that in fact this entire issue is just dog-whistle politics. It is about trying to claim that opposing Cyril Ramaphosa is opposing whiteness (there is a long history to this; Robert Mugabe once referred to Ramaphosa as a “white man in a black man’s skin”, in an attempt to find the most pointed political insult possible for Ramaphosa’s failure to silence newspapers that had criticised the detention and torture of two Zimbabwean journalists, when he was chairperson of Johnnic Holdings).

Fractured politics