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On Valentine’s Day, Jacob Zuma announced that he would resign as South Africa’s president. Earlier that day Zuma gave a surreal, rambling speech disguised as an interview, where he maintained that he had done nothing wrong in his nine years as leader. If Zuma’s aim was to project an air of defiance, he came across as pitiful, alone, and sad. This was a far cry from his reputation as a Machiavellian strategic operator who had repeatedly defied both public opinion and his party. Zuma survived eight motions of no-confidence in parliament, including one last year, where some members of his own party, the African National Congress (ANC), broke with tradition and voted with opposition parties in a secret ballot. In the end, though, he resigned so as not to subject himself to humiliation the next day in parliament, where ANC members of parliament were planning to join the opposition in voting to throw him out. Some, wary of the many premature obituaries written throughout Zuma’s political career, were worried he might pull one last stunt. In his Valentine’s Day interview, he had made vague threats of violence and days earlier shadowy groups like “Hands of Zuma” and Black First Land First — the latter implicated in professional trolling on Zuma’s behalf — held marches declaring him a kind of radical figure who was only being persecuted because he was leading a vaguely defined struggle for something called “Radical Economic Transformation” against “White Monopoly Capital” and neoliberalism. But by Thursday morning South Africa had a new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who that night delivered his first State of the Nation address. The positive reception that Ramaphosa received — even from the usually combative Economic Freedom Front, which regularly disrupted Zuma’s visits to parliament — was evidence that very few South Africans would mourn Zuma departure. During his nearly two terms, Zuma managed to accomplish a rather remarkable feat: uniting South Africans in shared disapproval. One poll taken a few months ago measured his approval rating at 18 percent.

Zuma Zuma’s nearly decade-long rule will go down as the worst presidency of the post-apartheid order. Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratic president, cemented a reputation as the great unifier — a father of the nation. As a result, even Mandela’s harshest critics downplay the negative effects of his economic policies or the failure of his regime to tackle the legacies of South Africa’s racist past. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, was loved by business elites and birthed South Africa’s now-thriving black middle class (including the students who fronted #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall in 2015 and 2016). Mbeki’s government, however, set records for the number of street protests against it over privatization, housing evictions, and, crucially, his unforgivable denialist response to South Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis. Zuma was a flawed figure from the start; ANC, trade union, and communist leaders such as Ronnie Kasrils (who served as a government minister under Mandela, Mbeki, and Zuma), had long questioned his leadership qualities, and Zuma had been implicated in widespread corruption and survived a rape trial (he was accused of raping the daughter of his former Robben Island prison cellmate). In 2005, Mbeki fired Zuma, the then-deputy president, over corruption charges. The anti-Mbeki forces, including most of the Left, coalesced around Zuma, claiming that he was the victim of a political conspiracy. It helped that Zuma came across as humble with the common touch, something the aloof Mbeki lacked. While hired mobs burned effigies of the woman he was accused of raping and chanted “burn the bitch,” the Left — including COSATU’s then-general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi — declared that Zuma would reverse neoliberalism in South Africa. Three years later, Mbeki was forced to retire as the country’s president and in 2009, on the strength of an improved ANC showing at the polls, Zuma was elected South Africa’s president. If the poor expected respite from the global recession or the negative effects of neoliberal policies from Zuma, what they got instead was increased repression and state violence, politicization of key state institutions (to settle political disputes within the ANC), widespread incompetence (for example, temporary chaos in making welfare payments), and extensive political-influence peddling. South Africans again spoke of “state capture” — a relationship between the state and outside interests (usually capitalists), in which private interests take control of key elements of the state and are able to directly influence, guide, and shape policy. State capture dates back to the colonial and apartheid eras — when white regimes and white business colluded to facilitate the super-exploitation of the black majority — but in its postapartheid version, the Guptas, an Indian business clan close to Zuma, were able to hire and fire ministers, guide state appropriation policy, and even change official affirmative action policy to include them as naturalized black South Africans. Yet perhaps what Zuma will be remembered for most is the Marikana massacre. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, thirty-four miners in the northwest city. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that ANC politicians (including Ramaphosa) had pressured the police to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not a tragic accident, but a premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board, Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” His conclusion: “there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” Zuma later established a public commission of inquiry into Marikana, but it turned out to be a paper tiger. No one was charged, and none of his ministers — not even the police commissioner — resigned. No one paid any political price for the massacre. This was to be expected: the postapartheid epoch has largely has largely meant violence, exclusion, and degradation for South Africa’s black poor. As the ANC took over the South African state, in a country where economic opportunities up to then had been closed off to black South Africans, the ANC became not just a political party, but a way to earn a decent salary. Competition for political office in the ANC, especially at the local level, increasingly became the be-all and end-all, because it meant access to lucrative state contracts and accumulating wealth. Higher up in the party, access to the state through the ANC became the way to get rich quick. It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old-style warlords. Violence became inseparable from politics, especially in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least thirty-five people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted eighty of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, eighty-nine people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in acts of political violence. Almost no arrests have been made. Zuma’s departure signals the end of outright looting in the South Africa state. It is no coincidence that the same day Zuma resigned, police raided the Guptas’ house in a rich suburb of Johannesburg. Ramaphosa’s election hopefully means an end to the parasitic corruption that has turned many state-owned companies into heavily indebted, barely functional enterprises. Zuma’s regime was rife with instability. He regularly hired and fired ministers (he averaged one finance minister per year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair. He governed in a highly personalized manner, simultaneously speaking about his reign as if he was an outside observer and using his power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests or those of his vast family, or of the Guptas. Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency — such as Blade Nzimande, former general secretary of the Communist Party, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand — would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies. By the end of his presidency, few South Africans cared that Zuma was a liberation hero, that he’d served a decade at Robben Island prison, or that he was key to ending violence between the ANC and a Zulu nationalist grouping that acted as apartheid’s proxy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Zuma will be remembered as someone who brought down a 105-year-old liberation movement and broke the South African left. Zuma was able to hijack the Left’s critique of South Africa’s racial and class inequalities to advance his own parasitic political project, rising to power through the Left. For the majority of Zuma’s presidency, the Left defended his every outrage. At various points they declared that Zuma would initiate a “Lula moment” in his second term or that all criticism of Zuma was the product of imperialist conspiracies against BRICS. Zuma was meant to be the left leader the country needed. Instead, he showed the pitfalls of a politics that desperately seeks a messianic leader to free the country from its malaise.