Ebrahim Fakir | Of Friends, enemies and frenemies: What can we read in the Nkandla tea leaves?

Whatever the legacy of the “Nkandla Tea Party” it reveals immediately the nature and character of the society in which this kind of optics and politics is allowed to thrive, writes Ebrahim Fakir.

Will the "Nkandla Tea Party" of February 2021 usher in a revolution the way the "Boston Tea Party of 1773" did?  

The Boston Tea Party was at the interstice of a continuum of political events resisting British taxation and policy meddling with American colonists who originally fled religious persecution and the monarchy in Britain, culminating in the 1783 American Revolution. Premised on resisting the imposition of Crown taxes by the British on the American colonies, the upending of crates of tea into the Boston Harbour was organised by the "Sons of Liberty", following a series of resistance efforts dating from 1765 Stamp Tax.

After being initially quelled by the British, The Boston Tea Party spurred a further set of internecine but co-ordinated attacks on British Crown property precipitating a decade later, an actual revolution. The American Revolution of Independence in 1783.    

Though also prosecuted by what some historians consider smugglers and racketeers, the Boston Tea Party was guided by a set of political ideas in which American colonists resisted the domination of the British Crown over their lives and livelihoods.

The British, in turn felt justified doing so, working and resourcing the American colonists to protect and promote their interests by funding their incursions into the American hinterland and deploying troops to assist and defend conquest and plunder, and resist the reprisal incursions of Native Americans into the colonies.

Taxes

This necessitated, the Crown believed, justified taxes being levied on the colonists, which the American colonists considered to be unjustifiable and onerous. Unjustifiable because they were denied representation in the British Parliament which they sought in exchange for their taxes. And onerous because it had inflationary pressure on products and goods, rendering them increasingly unaffordable. It also ate away at the profits and rents of colonial commercial merchants and traders.

To resource the British defenses of the American colonists in the new world, the Crown imposed a "stamp tax" in 1765 which taxed all paper and print material – legal documents, public notices and newspapers, even frivolities such as playing cards - which was later extended to taxing building materials, lead, glass, wood, paint and ammunition, and later even, tea.

Resistance to the 1765 the stamp tax started almost immediately, and by the time the taxes were extended to other commodities, a brisk illegal trade in them had developed through smuggling and illegal procurement, in order to both - undercut Crown traded goods and deprive the Crown of tax revenues.

By 1773, many of the other excises and taxes had been done away with, but the tax on tea remained, which fuelled the illegal procurement and trade of smuggled tea, primarily from the Dutch.

The Boston Tea Party organised, by the "Sons of Liberty", a group sharing both commercial and political interests, arranged a protest in which they dressed as Native Americans to meet a shipment of tea from the British East India Company (BEIC), in which they would board the ships carrying tea and throw it overboard in to the Boston Harbour to protest the remaining taxes levied by the British.

By this time, the smuggled tea had become more expensive than the tea imported by the British East India Company, begging the question - why was the BEIC tea resisted, given that even with the added taxes it was cheaper?  

The tea smugglers obviously wanted to protect the underground tea monopoly that had developed along with the tea smuggling rackets, whilst simultaneously pursuing their political aims - such as wanting representation in the British parliament (here is from whence the slogan "No Taxation without Representation" comes), securing independence from Britain while retaining its protections and enjoying the "rights and liberties of Englishmen", the desire for self-government and strong strand of republicanism.

Of course, not all Colonists among the American founding fathers agreed with the direct action approach of the "Sons of Liberty", even if they shared broadly similar political aims - and both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin decried the actions of the Sons of Liberty in the destruction of private property, which they held as sacrosanct virtue.

These ideas and the political events surrounding them, along with the culture of bravado and theft, culminated in the American Revolution of 1783 in which independence from the British Crown was gained and the constitutional liberal democracy of the United States of America, established.

It is unlikely that the Nkandla tea party will have this significance in shaping history or determining the political destiny of the South African polity, devoid as it is, of ideology, or political and policy nous.

Or will it? 

EFF leader Julius Malema and parts of his party and former president Jacob Zuma, and the RET faction and other fractions of the ANC, share several ideological and political aims, to be sure.

They also have other interests in common – such as ensuring that public institutions are sufficiently hollowed out, at least until their legal troubles disappear or they immunise themselves from prosecution.

Conception of democracy

They also share a specific conception of democracy – as executive decree borne out of a crude majoritarian impulse.

Perhaps this is why the idea that Malema went to Nkandla to try and convince Zuma to appear before the Courts or the Zondo Commission, is anachronistic. Sure, it allows Malema to claim credit for being statesmanlike, which would repudiate the justifiably well-developed reputation he has earned for vengeful and petty infantile attention seeking, or the disdain for the necessary restraints on the (ab)use of authority and curbs on power – a taste for which, he shares with Zuma.

In any event, Malema appears to lack the temperament for being statesmanlike and Zuma is unlikely to want to appear anywhere near anything demanding answerability and accountability – least of all the courts.

The EFF is itself in no haste to appear before the Zondo Commission, and its passive aggressive silence in relation to appearing before the Commission is perhaps of equal magnitude to Zuma’s active recalcitrance.       

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Alternatively, the tea party was held to seek accommodation, irrespective of who – whether Malema or Zuma – precipitated it. After all, they need each other. Both Zuma and Malema and their carpet baggers potentially face big prosecutorial troubles and a mutual "protection society" would be handy.

But it may well be more prosaic and impolitic:

Malema needs to attract the disgruntled RET forces, who are seeking - both an organisational outlet (since the proxy, ATM is proving too small, maverick and uninfluential) and protection by numbers – since several members of the RET faction are at risk of prosecution. In any event, the promulgation of the Party Funding Act shuts off revenue streams to individual leaders and their parties, or factions in parties.

An accommodation between them, allows for an ANC RET remnant compacting with the EFF, to destabilise and fragment the mainstream ANC further than it already is, and undermines President Ramaphosa.

But this compact is also rational by numbers, for both the RET faction of the ANC and the EFF, for purposes of future elections.

It may even allow for a conditional re-entry into the ANC on more favourable terms for Julius Malema and EFF leaders and supporters who will follow him. But if none of this were possible, it ensures an alternative entry point for the political longevity of the RET project, through the EFF, for when they may no longer be accommodated in the ANC.

Destabilising Rampahosa 

Or it could simply be a short-term strategy to simply undermine and destabilise Ramaphosa and his administration and make it difficult for him to govern - precisely the same tactic was used against Zuma.    

But destabilising Ramaphosa would be easy.

Many of Zuma’s lieutenants and fieldworkers are not only already in Ramaphosa's ANC NEC, but worse, in his Cabinet.

Ramaphosa is thus neither in full political control of the ANC, nor the Government - the State. Thus, in order to preserve some semblance of authority he will be forced, for his own survival, to make concessions.

This is bad news for Ramaphosa, and worse news for South Africa and the public.

To save himself and the ANC, Ramaphosa will be pushed to be more populist in policy and more concessionary, and accommodating of the RET faction. It is likely he will accede - given that his Presidency – both, of the ANC and the country – was invested from the very beginning by this kind of accommodationist complicity.

There is little evidence that Ramaphosa was unaware of, or resisted the influence and encroachment of the RET faction and its thinking, or its factions.  

After all, one of Rampahosa’s former Thuma Minions, Dakota Legoete, in breath-taking disingenuity, argued on these very pages that that the charges against Ace Magashule are the product of political motivation and the consequence of abused state institutions that manipulated process and procedure. In a needlessly lengthy screed, Legoete exposes four basic instincts that continue to animate the ANC:

Whatever Legoete’s argument, there is a basic absurdity that he and the ANC continue to propound. That is that the charges against Magashule are malicious and motivated by the manipulation of state institutions. This is ridiculous.

The Courts are there, precisely to adjudicate on the charges made against Magashule, not the court of public opinion, nor the court of opinion within the ANC.

If innocent, he will be exonerated. But how can anything done by the Government and the State in which the ANC is in charge, be "manipulated", when the ANC is in full control?

Quite who are the governmental and state institutions being manipulated and (ab)used by? If by another faction of the ANC – then Legoeta is in fact arguing for a split. If the manipulation is due to some other bogey then the ANC is not running Government or in charge of the State, which renders Government moot.    

President Ramaphosa continues to play a craven game with both the gullibly naive as well as the rabble-rousing agitators in the RET faction - in a delicate dance in favour of keeping the ANC united and getting some support for his Presidency from within the ANC, albeit fractured, short lived and schizophrenic. Ramaphosa certainly does not want to go down in history as the President who presided over a split in the ANC.  

Whatever the legacy of the "Nkandla tea party", it reveals immediately the nature and character of the society in which this kind of optics and politics is allowed to thrive. Whatever its party going protagonists intentions, it is obviously a type of politics that thrives on secrecy, speculation and subterfuge.

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Even if nothing else emerges out of the Nkandla tea party, Malema gets the attention and publicity he craves.

The EFF will scramble to find rationality amidst the contradictory irrationality - and justify this as will ANC NEC members.  It is to be expected. This kind of regressive, unprincipled & rootless politics thrives amidst speculation and uncertainty.

Projected as radical "black unity", the reality is very different. There are now, and there has been for the past decade, decidedly greater antagonisms amongst blacks and amongst Africans than there has ever been.

Unlike the "Sons of Liberty" who prosecuted the American revolution and shared both commercial interests and political aims, the ring leaders of the Nkandla Tea Party do not genuinely share common commercial interests, even though they might appear to share common political aims.     

Political stagnation

This is a kind of politics that lacks any fidelity to principle. The problem with such a political approach is that it could lead to political stagnation or a situation such as obtained in Lesotho and Kenya – where political alliances shift and it is impossible to tell from one election to the next who is with whom, resulting in constantly shifting situational alliances. Here politicians and parties are incentivised to use the most popular issues and populist measures (especially on race and identity) as an organising principle of politics. But the principles mask more immediate and narrow accumulative claims.   

Societal tensions, social cleavage and division – race, inequality, unemployment and poverty - become focal points not for resolution and amelioration, but are exploited for purposes of political mobilisation and political profit, justifying capricious policy and procedural, process, and institutional debasement in the name of empowerment. 

There is no way out of this morass, but through class solidarity and a values based progressive unity based - not on the false consciousness of "race" and the fake social antagonisms premised on narrow racial identities - but fidelity to principles. Otherwise avaricious predators perpetuate and entrench themselves in power and authority while societal problems remain unresolved.

- Ebrahim Fakir is Director of Programmes at the Auwal Socio Economic Research Institute (ASRI).

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