In the wake of the ground shaking 2024 National Elections, the ANC faces its worst existential crisis ever.  Nothing that the various Apartheid governments threw at them came anywhere close after the ANC’s electoral support slumped by 17% to 40.2%.  The ANC which saw off the IFP and smugly lorded it over everyone for 30 years is now forced to form some unpalatable coalition structure.  The architect of this is laughing boy, Zuma, himself who weaponised the shiny new MK Party.

The ANC has successfully seen off renegades in the past.  They were nothing more than minor potholes in the road. Their parliamentarians had barely warmed their seats with their fat bottoms and were yet to discover the likes of fraudulent travel vouchers and the levers of corrupt power when they were forced to excommunicate ‘General’ Bantu Holomisa for accusing them of corruption.  How prescient of the little self-styled prick. In the next election, he took 3.4% of the vote giving him 14 seats.  Today he is virtually a one man, one vote party with 3 seats.  Next it was Mosiuoa Lekoto’s turn to go off in a huff.  He had to use a huff because they took away his parliamentary travel privileges.  In the 2009 elections his party, COPE, got 30 seats.  Today it has sunk without so much as a ripple on the surface as a no man, no vote party.

Actually, Zuma was not the architect.  The MK Party established itself a few months back as a disgruntled bunch of Zulu ANC cadres who were not eating enough at the trough.  They had a leader, but no manifesto, just a bunch of grudges that Trump would be proud of.  This was Zuma territory.  While protesting that he was still a true yellow, green and black ANC man, Zuma became a fellow traveller, then a figurehead and finally, through transubstantiation that would make Catholics envious, their leader in head-spinning short order.

The ANC has reached these crossroads after 30 years (particularly the last 20) of disastrous government where they institutionalised poverty and unemployment through cadre deployment which placed undeserving people in all sectors of the economy and who were behoven to their Luthuli House masters.  Underpinning this were racist labour policies of getting rid of whites without considering the loss of institutional memory and the general dumbing down of the bureaucracy of the country by replacing them with anyone as long as they were black.  Then there were the disastrous BEEE policies which only ever empowered the Chosen Few.  All this created fertile ground for the parasitic tenderpreneurs and corrupt cadres which saw its ultimate incarnation in state capture whose choir master was Jacob Zuma.

This has blocked the potholed road forward for the ANC.  It is left with two stark choices.  It can take a right turn and join hands with the DA which hopefully would provide a counterpoint to the insanity of the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Luthuli House.  However, the Tripartite Alliance partners, Cosatu and the SACP, and together with the likes of Lindiwe Sisulu within the ANC will have none of this sinful cavorting with counter-revolutionaries.

Alternatively, it could lurch to the left and eat putu pap with the EFF and gangster McKenzie’s PA.  Gayton doesn’t demand much.  He just wants the Ministry of Home Affairs so he can kick the makwerekwere out.  The EFF, however, as a minimum want to install Floyd Shivambu, he of VBS corruption fame, as Minister of Finance whereupon they will nationalise the Reserve Bank and private banks and immediately unleash the plague of Expropriation Without Compensation on the umlungu. Hmmm.

On the road to the left they will also find the MK Party who alone could also give them a misgoverning majority. The MK Party is essentially the ex-RET (Radical Economic Transformation) faction of the ANC and are like the EFF just without the naked racism and vituperative harangues of Malema.  The problem for the ANC is that Zuma hates Ramaphosa who he sees as responsible for his resurgent corruption trial problems.  The MK’s only demand is that Cyril steps down. 

So, the answer to the titular question is, no, Zuma will not bury the hatchet unless its in the head of Cyril.