South Africa’s ruling ANC announced on Monday January 29 that it was suspending the country’s ex-President Jacob Zuma, who indicated last month that he would campaign for another movement ahead of the next elections.
“Zuma and others whose conduct is in conflict with our values and principles will find themselves outside the African National Congress” (ANC), said Fikile Mbalula, Secretary General of the ANC, which has been governing the country since the end of apartheid in April 1994.
The decision, widely expected, is a further sign of the divisions within the movement ahead of this year’s general elections – the final date has not yet been announced, but they are due to be held between May and August 2024. Spattered by corruption scandals in a gloomy socio-economic context, the ANC, long in a position of strength, could lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in its history, according to opinion polls.
Jacob Zuma was the fourth president of democratic South Africa, from 2009 to 2018, but was forced from power by corruption scandals and fell out with the party he once led. In December 2023, Mr. Zuma, 81, said he would campaign for a new small radical party, Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK, or “Spearhead of the Nation”), named after the ANC’s military wing during the apartheid period.
Fikile Mbalula added that the ANC would lodge a complaint with the Electoral Court to have the new party deregistered, and launch proceedings to recover its name. “The creation of the MK party is no accident,” said Mr. Mbalula after a meeting of the ANC’s Executive Committee, attended by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. “It is a deliberate attempt to use the proud history of armed struggle against the apartheid regime to give credibility to what is a blatantly counter-revolutionary agenda,” he denounced.