After the Party

"Yes, it’s a poignant story, Andrew Feinstein’s book, it’s very, very powerful. It’s the story of a young, idealistic Jewish South African who is a member of the anti-apartheid movement soon after the end of white rule and an MP for the ANC. He’s imbued with the idealistic visions of how the ANC is going to build a progressive society and how its ministers won’t drive around in Mercedes, but just have ordinary Toyotas, and that the great dream of a government truly committed to serving the people and untarnished by corruption will be realized in South Africa. Then, bit by bit, after a few years, he starts realizing that actually there’s a harsher side to his beloved party. The story he relates is the story of his own disillusionment, but also more specifically it’s the story of an appalling corruption that lies at the heart of many of South Africa’s problems, which relates to a multi-billion dollar arms deal that the ANC in government approved in the late nineties. The particular significance of this billion dollar arms deal is that it came at a time when the country was clearly in need of investing vast sums of money in education, healthcare, housing and so on, and it decided to spend vast sums of money on ships and jets and submarines at a time when no-one could really see where South Africa faced a military threat from. Later it emerged, as Feinstein describes very clearly, that many of the deals were signed with all sorts of bribes and corruption. So his story is the seedy underbelly, I suppose, of the ANC, and it’s a pretty poignant story as a result, alongside this personal story of trying to be this idealistic person. He was appointed as head of one of the parliamentary commissions of enquiry into wrong-doing, and there he was thinking, ‘Well, I’m doing this job, so I should be exposing ANC corruption as well as the opposition parties’ corruption, because that’s my job as part of this enquiry,’ but he was told very clearly by senior people in Mbeki’s circle that this is not the sort of thing you should be investigating. So it’s a very important book. Well he is an extraordinarily winning character [laughs], that’s certainly true. I met him on a few occasions, both before the ANC took power in 1994, and a few years after it, and in those years one of his main roles was to try and reconcile warring factions in the province now called Kwa-Zulu Natal which was deeply troubled; an awful semi-civil war was raging between supporters of the ANC and supporters of the Zulu nationalist movement, the Inkatha Freedom Party. Thousands of people were killed. He was the one with the winning smile, the mellow charm and instinctive feel for ordinary people. He was sent down to reconcile the different factions, and he did it pretty well, he played an important role, and one of the things is that he comes from a very ordinary background. Poor, black South Africans make up the majority of the population; he’s one of them, the son of a police constable and a domestic worker, his father died when he was very young, he grew up in a remote village, he was badly educated. He spent his youth herding livestock and having stick-fights with his contemporaries and so on, so there’s nothing elitist about him, unlike Thabo Mbeki, who’s a very much the product of a middle-class, university educated clique. So he’s got these winning ways, but nonetheless it’s pretty remarkable, some would say shocking, that the man with so much controversy and scandal in his recent past should become first the leader of the ANC, which he did in December 2007, and then leader of the country, in April 2009, and that tells you all sorts of things. One of them is that the ANC is a very loyal organisation; another is how unpopular Thabo Mbeki had become. A third is that there are many people in Zuma’s inner circle who really don’t care about the impression given to the outside world, or indeed about some of the niceties of democracy. They just wanted their man in place who will deliver for them, so it’s a fairly mixed picture I think."