The following is an extract from my book, Rule Breakers: How the 2024 election campaign changed South Africa forever, published by Protea, in which I examine the forces and decisions that defined the 2024 election campaign and determine the outcome.
The frenzy around Zuma escalated even further in something that would not have been out of place in a political thriller. At around 19:40 on the evening of 28 March, on the R66 between Gingindlovu and Eshowe in KwaZulu-Natal, a car collided with Zuma’s convoy, hitting the vehicle in which the former president was travelling.
The news spread within MK through a WhatsApp message at around 20:00: “Cdes, JZ involved in a car accident near Eshowe just now. A certain car drove straight into his car in his convoy. Fortunately, he survived and was taken into another car, and they left. Remember someone said JZ will be lying in hospital by the time elections come.” At 09:04 the next morning, the message was leaked, and the news of the accident became public.
Following from the unsubstantiated implication of foul play in the leaked message, MK at 10:00 on 29 March went public with its allegations of sinister intent behind the accident. Speaking to the SABC, Musa Mkhize, in charge of the party’s campaign in Zuma’s home province, said that MK had “been waiting for it to happen and it has happened because the president was warned that he will be lying in hospital, we don’t know what more is still coming.”
Mkhize singled out Bheki Cele and his police ministry for involvement in the accident, claiming that Zuma’s safety “has been highly compromised due to political interference” that led to the reduction of security around the former president. And this, allegedly, led to the “so-called accident”.
Old tricks
News24 reported an insider as saying that the accident was caused by people – supposedly opponents of Zuma – getting up to “their old tricks”. Another source told the newspaper that the accident was the result of a drunk driver losing control of his car on the snaking bends outside of Eshowe.
The drunk driver, who was arrested following the crash, was according to this source “shocked to see the presidential convoy and drove directly into the convoy. He was so drunk that he could not stand up straight. I do not think that it was deliberate. Ubaba was taken by another vehicle, and some remained behind.”
Photos of the vehicle that had been carrying Zuma show damage to the driver’s side doors and wheels – predominantly scratches that run most of the length of the car. These scratches indicate a glancing and redirected collision rather than a targeted impact. The damage to the car was significant, but arguably not of a kind that could have caused the impacted vehicle to lose control and leave the road or cause direct impact damage extensive enough to harm those in it.
The drunk driver being charged with nothing more than driving under the influence and reckless and negligent driving further shows that, even in the immediate aftermath of the admittedly shocking event of a top political leader being involved in a car accident, the facts simply were not supportive of MK’s paranoid, cloak-and-assegai allegations.
And it is at this point where the narrative that allowed MK to dominate March 2024 comes into full view. In speaking to SABC News, Musa Mkhize called “on all South Africans to do whatever they can to protect President Zuma and make sure that he is safe because he is the only person who has been strong, who has suffered a lot for this country. And he is the only person, the only president who’ll make sure that people after the [election] will be free and people will get whatever they want.”
This, of course, is in itself a bizarre statement, yet it contains the neatly distilled victimhood message that Zuma has perfected over a decade and was using in the campaign: He had been muscled out of office and was still being targeted by “sellouts and apartheid collaborators” opposed to his noble and lonely mission to emancipate the downtrodden black victims of white monopoly capital.
Politically motivated
Reacting to the partial freezing of Zuma’s account on 19 March, Nhlamulo Ndhlela accused FNB of being politically motivated in its actions: “They’re trying to punish President Zuma as they always do but the resounding response that we are getting from the people will not silence us, nor the people. The bank account that is receiving these funds is the one that is rather closed, the one where he was receiving his salary and pension. You can see that it is deliberate. There were many other accounts – why that one in particular?”
Whether politically motivated or not, the freezing of Zuma’s accounts allowed his party to trot out its key message: From Mbeki’s ineffective attack on his successor, to the ANC’s litigatory efforts to prevent MK’s participation in the 2024 elections, to the freezing of his assets, to the IEC barring him from standing, to the car accident on the twisting roads outside Eshowe, Zuma was being targeted and persecuted for his audacity to pursue economic liberation and freedom for black South Africans. He was simultaneously the powerful warrior and the vulnerable victim.
It was strongman populism distilled to its platonic form that would make machismo-fueled politicians, from Maduro to Trump, blush. And it was driving a rule-breaking party to an astonishing election result.
March 2024 revealed in vivid detail a long-lurking fundamental characteristic of MK that made it distinct from almost any political party or movement in the post-1994 democratic era. It’s not a party of political ideology, but of personal mythology. In the face of a mythological narrative of Jacob Zuma as the common people’s hounded and wounded warrior from Nkandla, initially put about by the ANC itself while it was seeking to protect his presidency a decade prior, Ramaphosa’s party simply seemed incapable of mustering an effective answer.
People were responding positively to MK’s insurgency. Zuma’s victim status, being the target of accusations from “sellouts” like President Ramaphosa, was accomplishing the opposite of the ANC’s intentions: Zuma wasn’t being weakened by these attacks, but strengthened.
Having started in March with 9%, MK ended with 16%. The ANC, on the other hand, saw its support trickle down from 42% at the month’s start to 39%.
Squeezed
The EFF, squeezed by its two familial parties, was struggling to even reach double digits, ending the month on 8%. The ANC-MK-EFF collective support of 65–68% was staying stubbornly in place, but the competition for the 10% swing vote within that bloc was starting to irreversibly move away from Ramaphosa and Malema. Zuma, the passionate chess player, was picking off his enemies’ pawns.
If Zuma’s new party could achieve this level of support on 29 May, it would be the most successful outing by a new party in the history of our young democracy. In the final three months of the 2024 campaign, MK managed to find another gear, upping the pressure even further as its opponents flailed.
The ANC’s scramble in the closing days of this astounding month to deploy veterans from its own struggle-era uMkhonto weSizwe to KwaZulu-Natal was a panicked move in the face of an opponent that had used every mistake by Ramaphosa’s ANC to his advantage. Zuma had played the role of revolutionary and martyr to perfection, empowered clumsily and accidentally almost every step of the way by an ANC simply floored by its inability to effectively counter MK’s insurgency.
Ramaphosa’s formerly formidable electoral assets, his popularity, his affability and his statesman-like demeanour, the trust he could gain from a country that had throughout his entire presidency given him the benefit of the doubt for simply not being Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma – all of this was proving simply unequal to the task of stopping MK’s advance.
“Gedleyihlekisa” is an abbreviated form of “ngeke ngithule umuntu engigedla engihlekisa”. Translated from isiZulu into English, it means: “I won’t keep quiet when someone with a deceptive smile is causing harm to me.” Had more of his adversaries heeded this name – from Thabo Mbeki to Cyril Ramaphosa – the history of South Africa would have been vastly different. In March 2024, with South Africa’s most competitive elections since 1994 only three months away, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma was not keeping quiet.
In fact, he was turning up the volume to start off a cascade of chaotic events and shrewd political decisions that would ultimately see his party head into 29 May with unmatched momentum.
* Rule Breakers: How the 2024 election campaign changed South Africa forever will be available in bookshops and online from today.
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