Jacob Zuma in exile: three unexplored issues

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Paul Trewhela gives a partial review of Gordin's new Zuma biography. This is an important piece of writing on the forces that shaped Jacob Zuma:

1. The Securocrat
Zuma has never, to my knowledge, accounted publicly in any way for his role - whatever that might have been - in the arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, release and subsequent murder by poisoning while in close confinement of Thami Zulu ....

Serious attention was needed from a biographer into the conduct of Mr Zuma's role as head of counter-intelligence in the ANC in exile in the late 1980s, and for about three years after his return to South Africa in 1990.
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For a former spy-chief to become president of a country is no small matter. In the apartheid period in South Africa, an equivalent would have been the ascent of a Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh to Presidency of the state. In Russia, it would recall the transition of the KGB director, Yuri Andropov, to general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982. In post-Soviet Russia, it would suggest the ascendancy of President Vladimir Putin.

2. "Soviet graduate"
In his study ANC: A View from Moscow (Mayibuye Books, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, 1999), the former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and former senior Soviet state and party liaison officer with the ANC and the SACP, Dr Vladimir Shubin, writes of Jacob Zuma and Joe Nhlanhla that "both comrades were Soviet graduates and understood Russian perfectly." Both of them, writes Shubin, were "heavily involved in sensitive ANC matters." (p.367)
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What exactly does this statement mean, coming from the top Soviet official then responsible for South African affairs? Firstly, it must mean that both Zuma and Nhlanhla could only have spent a considerable amount of time in the Soviet Union, in order to have learned to understand Russian "perfectly". Secondly, it proposes the question: in exactly what form of study had these two Securocrats "graduated" in the Soviet Union, if it was not study in their special craft, for which they had been placed at the very pinnacle by the ANC and the SACP? Generally, East Germany - the former German Democratic Republic - was the principal training area in the Soviet bloc for members of iMbokodo, where their tutors were the Stasi secret police force.

3. Politburo member of the SACP

Gordin reports accurately that Zuma "quit the Communist Party with Mbeki and others in 1990." (p.56) He makes no further inquiry, however, into the nature or duration of Zuma's membership of the SACP, surely a significant matter concerning a probable future President of the Republic, but a subject once again left blank by Gordin (as blank as the inquiry into the likely perpetrator or perpetrators of Thami Zulu's murder by the ANC-appointed Sachs Commission).
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This places Zuma, already at the head of iMbokodo, at the top rank in the SACP. Mark Gevisser has given an account of how Mbeki, Zuma, Josiah Jele, Joel Net****enzhe, Aziz Pahad and several other high-ranking members of the SACP "did not attend the SACP's first open congress in 40 years, in December 1990 in Johannesburg." He considers this to have been a "serious miscalculation" on Mbeki's part, since "through the 1990s and into Mbeki's presidency, the Party - now run by a younger generation - would become the standard bearer for left opposition to Mbeki's economic policies, and many of its leaders, specifically the general secretary Blade Nzimande - would become fervent supporters of Jacob Zuma after Mbeki fired him in 2005."

Though Zuma and Mbeki each abandoned his membership of the SACP - in which both had served at Politburo level - in 1990, they interpreted this differently. As Gevisser continues in a reliable explanation, as Zuma "became estranged from Mbeki, he would make a point of courting the left in the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance - and particularly the leadership of the Party, which felt marginalised by Mbeki and his new power elite." In this new conjuncture, Zuma "went out of his way to distance himself from Mbeki's departure from the Party in 1990. Attending a Party policy conference in 2000 at a time when the ANC and the SACP were barely on speaking terms, he referred to the 1990 split - the primal wound in the relationship between the two fraternal organisations - and made it clear that if some had left the Party for ideological reasons, he was not one of them. The imputation was clear: while he, Zuma, might have left the Party for strategic reasons, Mbeki did so because he had lost the faith." (p.472)

For the SACP, this declaration of continued faith in its ideological goals was a key component of a now dominant political praxis which is certain to reverse the economic policy of Mbeki, after the election in April. In the eyes of the SACP, Mbeki's own reversal of ANC economic policy in 1996, through his high-handed replacement of the ANC's previous statist economic Reconstruction and Development Policy (RDP) with the free-market policy of Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), was an act of treason, by which he earned the undying hatred of the Party.