12 April 2010

Business Day
Anthony Butler

Johannesburg — THE Soccer World Cup is now only weeks away. This unprecedented opportunity to remake SA's international image is finally moving to the forefront of our political leaders' minds.



In recent weeks the African National Congress (ANC) has made one misstep after another and needlessly given ammunition to the country's foreign detractors. The UK Daily Star's claim that fans "could be caught up in a machete race war" was both predictable and eminently preventable. Air ticket prices are down on the same period last year, indicating unexpectedly slack demand. World Cup organisers are unloading cheap match tickets onto locals because anticipated interest from international fans is failing to materialise.

The eyes of the world are not yet on SA and the tournament can still be salvaged. The ANC can silence youth league president Julius Malema. Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille can desist, for a few weeks at least, from portraying SA as a gangster-run banana republic. Ordinary South Africans can prepare a welcome in their hearts for visiting fans and reporters.

President Jacob Zuma 's supporters are troubled by a second and related preoccupation. A successful World Cup is now a necessary condition for the president's political survival.

Any hint of national humiliation and he will be dead in the water long before the ANC's national general council in September.

Whether Zuma's second term can still be rescued will remain uncertain even if the tournament is a success. Malema's relentless indiscipline has made him appear toothless. The administration has made no headway with urgently needed reforms. Zuma has looked on passively as ministers and officials have brazenly schemed to loot public assets.

The president's fight-back campaign will have three main elements. First, Malema's days are clearly numbered. Zuma is leaving the difficult work to others - to party disciplinary committees, the revenue service, and youth league members themselves - but he is trying to collect whatever credit is available. On Saturday he described the youth league's conduct as "totally alien to the culture of the ANC". The same day, Malema's enemies openly taunted him at the league's provincial conference on his home ground in Limpopo.

Second, Zuma's camp will return to low-level ethnic mobilisation. The KwaZulu-Natal ANC continues to benefit from the disarray in other provinces, and KwaZulu-Natal Premier Zweli Mkhize controls a wide-ranging network of support for Zuma's two terms. The highly capable Mkhize, sometimes cruelly characterised as the president's "surrogate brain", will ensure the national general council's Durban location counts strongly in Zuma's favour.

Third, there are few credible alternatives to Zuma. The eternally youthful housing minister, Tokyo Sexwale, remains widely unpopular. The left has a conceivable candidate - Cyril Ramaphosa - but it cannot yet imagine him in that role. Mathews Phosa's reputation has been tarnished by the grubby work of an ANC treasurer-general. This generation of leaders, born in 1950s Johannesburg, lacks credibility in the country's populous provinces where ANC conference votes must be harvested.

To remove Zuma, the rational centre of the liberation movement will have to pull together before the ANC's 2012 Mangaung conference. Sexwale, Phosa and Ramaphosa will have to put their ambitions on hold once again. Only Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe has sufficient credibility in the branches to replace Zuma as ANC leader, and he would have to be persuaded to return to the state presidency he so recently vacated. To avoid any perception that a successor was being designated for 2017, the ANC deputy presidency would have to go to a woman (and so non contender) such as Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu.

Another term as state president for the obscurantist and anti democratic Motlanthe, the mad monk of Mahlamba Ndlopfu, might appear to be a dispiriting outcome. Given the shambles of the Zuma presidency, however, it may strike many ANC members as a return to a golden age.