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by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 Staff Writer

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Mputhumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - At the end of last June, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa fired his Deputy President, Jacob Zuma, for bringing the government into disrepute, because of an alleged corrupt relationship with a businessman named Shabi Shaik. The SACP (South African Communist Party), COSATU (Congress Of South African Trade Unions) together with ANCYL (African National Congress Youth League) immediately shouted foul.

This noisy chaos of political power and the feebleness of popular political thought, dubbed the Zuma Saga, is revealing underside of tensions behind the hulking facade of the Tripartite Alliance (ANC, SACP & COSATU).

The real feud inside the Alliance is the fight for the final shape of the country's economic policies. The tension is negating the solidarity ethos of the Alliance.

The SACP, COSATU, and the seersuckered fraternity boys of the ANCYL believe that there's a conspiracy made up of those who are pushing for the neo-capitalist agenda inside the Alliance to discredit the then-Deputy President Jacob Zuma because he happens to be too close to the left. They've vowed to offer unqualified support for Zuma in the coming trial in October. They're also demanding that all charges against Zuma be dropped.

The gesalt in the worker class of the Alliance is that the fruits of the struggle are being reaped only by the few emerging black middle-class on the backs of poor workers. They believe that the fiscal trend toward globalsiation th e government is following is cruel to the majority of country's people who are semi- and unskilled. The working class representatives of the Alliance also believe that the government programs designed to alleviate poverty do not deliver because those programs often are caught up in the horns of retarding bureaucratic constipation and corruption.

Quite another perception exists among the middle-class members of the Alliance. The members believe that sectarian and cabalistic tyranny is the order of the party alliance. They believe that populism is often rewarded with high political positions without real merit. The majority in the middle-class are angry at the reported appalling corruption of political leaders and welcome the President's bold step in cleaning the government.

All of these tensions within the Alliance are a clear indication that the era where alliances were formed regardless of geopolitics is passing in South Africa. The intrigues of power and clashes of interest are slowly chipping the Alliance away, with it solidarity. The Alliance is becoming little more than Apicius' exercise in vanity -- who, when bankrupt, sold his house and kept only the balcony to see and be seen on it. The megalithic structure of the Alliance is buckling under its own weight despite what its leaders say to maintain face.

What the politics of the Alliance need most now is a clear break with the past. The SACP must make clear its capitulation to the Capitalist agenda, or, if their bite is as good as their bark, vigorously pursue a Communist agenda by leaving the ANC led government which purports not to be Communist.

The COSATU needs to step back from politics and become a proper trade union or form its own political party that'll exclusively picket under the banner of worker's rights.

As for the glamour boys of the ANCYL, the rapture would see some squirreling back to the mother body, under stringent discipline perhaps. Some will go with SACP or COSATU, while others would probably occupy window-dressed managerial positions in companies that need to meet their BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) requirements and be relegated to the filthy rich anonymity of empty vacuum.

Either way, they would be heaving sighs from all directions. Otherwise, their droll upheavals, empty bravadoes, blank silences, with all their queasy visceral suspense of invisible rapture are delaying the political development of the country.

There's, without any doubt, a corrosive element of populism -- that impulse of the ill-informed and paranoid -- inside the Alliance. It's the comeuppance for the rabble-rousing politics -- a species of nationalism -- that the ANC used to grow support by under the apartheid regime. Resentment has always driven the politics of ordinary people allowing clever politicians to manipulate them.

Populism is a style of political appeal that glorifies the masses and casts the opposition as a hostile, undemocratic elite. In contemporary politics in South Africa, it spawns the "tyranny of the majority" Tocqueville warned against. A loathsome marriage of conspiracy theories, mass ignorance, corrupted public virtue, "a steady increase in carnality, vulgarity, brutality," if unchecked will not only destroy our social order but nip our young democracy in the bud.

President Mbeki's call for a commission to investigate the "allegation that members of the ANC and the broad democratic movement, including the President of the ANC, have been and are involved in a conspiracy targeted at marginalizing or destroying Deputy President Zuma" is admirable, and keeping with his drive for transparent government. But I'm afraid no moral reckoning, no laying of spectres, no clearing of skeletons from cupboards, will solve the woes facing the Alliance.

The Alliance cannot go on a negotiated settlement, backed by solidarity of the past, forever. Especially now when the status quo is affording henchmen to share in the prestige of 'comradeship' at the expense of the country's reputation. The only platform people like the Deputy President of the ANC to salvage his reputation is in the court of law, anything else will smack of a cover up.