Jacob Zuma announced his new government on Sunday. There were a few surprises and some restructuring in the ministries The full list of the new ministers can be found below together with a video of President Jacob Zuma announcing his new appointments. Let us know what you think of this new team.
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Yesterday marked a ‘new dawn’ in South Africa when Jacob Zuma was inaugurated as the president of the country. As I woke up yesterday, the weather was terrible, it was grey and overcast and I wondered what was going to happen at the inauguration if it rained. I switched on my TV to tune into the live coverage of the inauguration and you could see the rain coming down and those already gathered at the Union Buildings had their umbrellas and raincoats. At that time I started to receives text messages and emails saying that this rain and gloom is a bad sign! “How can our next president be sworn in on a day that is so dull and gloomy?” I too was getting very worried. But I was sure that the organisers of this event had made provisions for rain. In African culture, rain is a sign of blessing so even if it rained it would be a blessing for that day, whilst some would say the rain is a sign of the infamous Jacob Zuma ’shower’!
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Baleka Mbete will not be the deputy president of South Africa and instead will take up a role at Luthuli House as chairperson of the ANC. No one knows exactly what is happening behind the scenes at the ANC with regards to Mbete but this is the most likely explanation:
Mbete wanted to remain as the deputy president of South Africa when Jacob Zuma was appointed president of the country. But it looks like Zuma has decided to go with caretaker president Kgalema Motlanthe as the deputy president of the country. A move that Mbete was clearly not happy with.
On Wednesday in parliment, Mbete ‘refused’ to be sworn in as an MP. I use the word refused in inverted commas because some circles say Mbete refused to be sworn in on her own terms whilst some people say that Mbete and the ANC were not yet clear on what role Mbete would take up by the time Wednesday came thus she was not sworn in.
But now it looks clear that Mbete refused to be sworn in after being snubbed of the deputy president position. But as a former deputy president, Mbete is entitled to her R1.8 million pension for life and other perks such as bodyguards, an official car and staff at taxpayers’ expense. Not bad money at all!!
Reports in todays Sunday Times suggest that Mbete “behaved like a school girl” when she snubbed being sworn in as an MP, a move they say embarrassed the ANC. One would be tempted to say there is already infighting in the new ANC administration ‘before a ball has even been kicked’. This is politics after all and nothing will ever be clear and smooth sailing from here on out.
The puppet that caused a lot of controversy has been auctioned off for R100 000. The puppet which featured in the recent Nandos TV advert and became a “celebrity overnight” was sold to Ryan Lotter from Johannesburg. It is understood that the proceeds of the auction will be donated to a charity group. The question now remains; what will Lotter do with the puppet? There are some suggestions that he is going to give it to DA leader Hellen Zille who Julius Malema recently called a ‘racist little girl’.
South Africa’s fourth democratic elections since 1994 exposed some key fissures in the country’s body politic yet also confirmed some long-standing trends. Domestic party politics has always been largely the domain of the African National Congress – fighting to either increase its monolithic dominance of public support within a single-dominant political party structure or fending off smaller and less significant opposition entities usually from minority communities. This election was no different – yet the unique circumstances following last year’s un-ceremonial early dismissal of outgoing President Thabo Mbeki together with the ascent to the power by Mbeki’s successor, the controversial Jacob Zuma., dominated the campaign.
In fact, the entire poll was dominated almost entirely by the persona of Jacob Zuma. Acquitted on rape charges three years ago and implicated in an ongoing graft and corruption scandal involving a very controversial and questionable arms scandal, Zuma was bound to illicit howls of derision from intellectuals. The ‘chattering classes’ were quick to laugh him off as eminently unsuitable for public office and to denigrate him for his lack of formal education. Coupled with his now infamous views on unprotected sex and the transmission of HIV/AIDS, Zuma’s every word and deed became the focus of the campaign – to the detriment of most other policy debates.
All South Africa’s political parties produced glossy and detailed election manifestos that dealt in varying degrees of detail with the perennial issues of ‘service delivery’ – particularly in education, health care and poverty alleviation. But, it was still Jacob Zuma and his suitability as future President that continued to occupy the minds of the media and analysts alike. Few voters would’ve been able to articulate policy nuances of the differing parties – but most had a view on Zuma.
It may be a public holiday today and many of you may not be surfing the Internet today but I have just come across a piece of interesting news! Julius Malema was today addressing thousands of tripartite alliance supporters at Workers Day celebrations at the Thomas Shabalala stadium at Lindelani, north of Durban. And as always, Malema had something to say! “She [Zille], the racist little girl, must remember that Zuma is her boss,” Malema said. He went on to also say, “Helen Zille must give report to Zuma about the Western Cape…the racist girl has not won…all of them must call President Zuma, President.”
I guess we have gotten used to Malema and his comments and statements but this one today has caught me by surprise. I would have thought that now they (ANC) have won the elections, Malema will now keep quiet but he may just be warming up for bigger statements now that they are in charge.
Now that the elections are over in South Africa, this is what Zapiro thinks about the 2009 Elections.
“Visit www.zapiro.com for more cartoons.”
As we expected the ANC has claimed a resounding victory in the general elections. With a 66% majority in Parliament, the ANC is set to elect Zuma as president when the new legislature convenes on May 6. The final results were released today (Saturday) and they showed that the ANC was allocated 264 seats in parliament after winning 65.9 percent of the vote. The ANC won control of eight of the nine provinces. The DA won the Western Cape province. ANC president, Jacob Zuma has come out and said, “Working together we will make it a government for all South Africans.”
The final results were:
Total number of votes per party:
ANC: 11,650,748 (65.90 percent)
DA: 2,945,829 (16.66 percent)
COPE: 1,311,027 (7.42 percent)
IFP: 804,260 (4.55 percent)
ID: 162,915 (0.92 percent)
OTHER: 805,950 (4.56 percent)
I watched with interest Koos van der Merwe’s comments this morning on E-TV’s New Channel on the reasons behind the IFP haemorrhaging both nationally and in its stronghold of KZN. As an ex-IFP spokesman, the IFP’s further slide does not surprise me. I think the two key factors can be summarised as follows:
1. The ‘Zuma factor” removed one of the key reason d’ etre’s of the IFP’s existence. No more could it mobilise on the strength of its “Zuluness”; no more could it tap deep into overt or latent feelings of Zulu pride and nationalism. To use a traditional metaphor, Zuma thrust a Zulu short-stabbing spear into the IFP’s heartland. The IFP were caught off-guard by the ‘Zuma’ drawcard, and seemingly were unable to mount a viable and enduring challenge to his sheer magnetism. In effect, style (Zuma’s political charisma as the champion of the “everyman”) won over substance - not for nothing was Zuma voted SA’s most “sexy” politician. The body language and even some public statements by IFP leaders before the election spoke volumes of a party of despair – in contrast to the robust optimism of previous elections, that sometimes resembled the pre-fight hype of a prized fighter, an air of realism (some less charitable may say resignation and defeat) crept into some of its public utterances, as it contemplated an erosion of its traditional support base that in previous years would have been considered unthinkable. This support base has been ebbing away since the ’94 election, and despite Prince Buthelezi threatening to crack the whip on its activists, and threatening to purge its ‘dead wood’, it seems that, based on the election outcome, the KZN electorate has spurned the IFP as an “anachronism” that has failed to reinvent and re-define itself convincingly in the modern era.
2. Unforgiving minority communities continue to “punish” the IFP for its previous dogged insistence on making Ulundi the capital. Although the capital issue was not an election issue this time round, it was still fresh in the memory of voters from minority communities. Unfortunately, the IFP has not been able to shed this ‘liability’ in the minds of minority voters, as it has neither repudiated this stance - which clearly alienated significant sections of KZN – nor has it publicly conceded that this strategy was counter-productive. It therefore lost an opportunity to re-capture, and build on, the goodwill it previously enjoyed from some minority communities in KZN.
Personally, I’m disappointed that the IFP has squandered the opportunity it had since the last election to re-position itself as a “sexy” antidote to the ANC juggernaut and as a credible government-in-waiting. As our democracy matures, it’s inevitable that the number of competing voices whittles down, but the stronger the plurality our political voices are, the more vibrant our democracy.
Notwithstanding the above, I don’t believe the IFP will enter into a coalition at this stage. Like the Freedom Front Plus, diluting its identity is anathema to it. The most I see at this stage is strategic voting with the DA on issues of mutual interest.
In terms of the realignment and strengthening of opposition politics, it would make sense for the UDM and ID to absorb themselves into Cope, with Bantu Holomisa and Patricia de Lille perhaps put forward as Cope’s premier candidates for the next election. I hope that, with time, voters increasingly move away from ‘identity’ to ‘interest’ politics and that minority communities in particular embrace parties whose support bases are significantly rooted in the black majority.
Post submitted by
Ed Tillett
The Democratic Alliance (DA) can celebrate one thing: the got the most overseas votes and they won them by a land slide. It is a pity that they can not win by that margin when all the votes are put together. But then again, we asked this question before the elections with regards to how much these overseas votes would contribute to the bigger picture. The Democratic Alliance received 7 581 votes of the 9 857 cast from people who voted overseas. The African National Congress received 673 votes and the Congress of the People received 918.
What this result just goes to show is that the South Africans living overseas are not behind the ruling ANC party and that is probably the reason they left the country in the first place. And it is also interesting to note that COPE got more overseas votes than the ANC. Those in the diaspora really don’t like the ANC!
