South Africa’s president is tottering

THE death of a struggle hero brought the great and good of South Africa together in mourning. Ahmed Kathrada, who was sentenced to life on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, died on March 28th. His funeral at a Johannesburg cemetery drew former presidents, sitting cabinet ministers, the chief justice of the highest court and the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC). There was one conspicuous absence: Jacob Zuma. Instead, the man who had preceded him as South African president read from a letter in which Mr Kathrada, in a final act of resistance, called on Mr Zuma to resign. The crowd of mourners erupted in cheers.

Such is the tenor of opposition to Mr Zuma, who has an approval rating of just 20% among urban South Africans (though higher among rural ones). Even those who backed him through countless scandals are now calling for him to quit. Their pleas have fallen on deaf ears, with the president growing ever more defiant. A day after the funeral, Mr Zuma reshuffled his cabinet, firing the respected finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, and his deputy, and replacing them with cronies. In doing so, Mr Zuma defied warnings from his own party and the markets. Mr Gordhan had kept a tight rein on spending and stood firm against corruption, while working doggedly to keep South Africa’s debt from being downgraded. As if to mock these concerns, Mr Zuma had ordered Mr Gordhan to return from Britain, where he was drumming up investment, to face the axe. The rand duly fell, and within days of the reshuffle S&P, a credit-rating agency, had cut South African debt to junk. Ministers with disastrous records, meanwhile, kept their jobs.

Mr Zuma has crossed a line. For the first time, he is facing an open rebellion from within the ranks of the ANC as well as its official partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The SACP and COSATU have joined calls for him to step down. Some of the ANC’s most senior leaders are now speaking out against Mr Zuma, albeit cautiously. Among them is Cyril Ramaphosa, the deputy president, who wants to succeed Mr Zuma as president. Mr Ramaphosa, who had remained silent until now, condemned Mr Zuma’s flimflam excuse for the firing: an “intelligence report” alleging that Mr Gordhan’s unremarkable investor road trip was part of a “plot” to overthrow the president.

Mr Zuma has also angered other ANC leaders over his failure to consult with them on the reshuffle, as party pratice dictates. Gwede Mantashe, the party’s secretary-general, worried that the list of new ministers had been compiled “somewhere else”. His concerns are reasonable: South Africa’s anti-corruption ombudsman last year called for a judicial inquiry into allegations that the Gupta brothers, tycoons and close friends of Mr Zuma, had exerted undue influence on cabinet appointments and government contracts.

If the ANC fails to remove Mr Zuma, he may continue to control the party’s future. In December the ANC will choose its new leaders at a five-yearly elective conference. The winner is likely to become South Africa’s next president in 2019 (after a parliamentary election; MPs then choose the president). With a pliant new cabinet in place, Mr Zuma hopes to be in a stronger position than ever to ensure that his preferred successor, his ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, takes over from him.

Getting rid of Mr Zuma any earlier than that does not look easy. A shrewd operator, he has installed loyalists in key positions within South Africa’s police, prosecuting authority and state security apparatus. Mr Zuma was in charge of intelligence-gathering for the ANC while it was in exile, and has a long memory. His most vocal supporters have been the ANC women’s league, and its youth league, which he neutered by ousting its rabble-rousing former head, Julius Malema. In a show of support, the youth league held a stadium rally to celebrate the reshuffle. Susan Booysen, a politics professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and the author of several books about the ANC, expects Mr Zuma to dig his heels in hard. “He will be pulled down kicking and screaming,” she said. “This is a battle now for the soul of the party.”

Civil-society groups have planned marches in protest through the streets of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Opposition parties are vowing to work together to remove Mr Zuma from office. Their best shot is through a no-confidence motion in parliament. For this to succeed, at least 50 ANC MPs would need to cross the floor. Many doubt that ANC members would support an opposition motion, even though the ruling party’s chief whip, Jackson Mthembu, is a critic of Mr Zuma. The president has easily survived several such votes, including one a year ago after South Africa’s highest court found that he had violated the constitution.

Other observers, though, think the tipping point may be near. Parliament is on a break until the second week of May, and the delay may allow outrage over Mr Zuma’s shenanigans to subside. But opposition parties have written to the speaker, a Zuma loyalist, asking that she hold an urgent sitting; this is now set for April 18th.

The other road to a Zuma exit seems even rockier. Under the ANC’s constitution, he could be made to step down by his party’s 104-member national executive committee. Such an internal “recall” felled a previous president, Thabo Mbeki, in 2008. But the ANC’s current national executive is said to be evenly divided between those allied to Mr Zuma and those opposed. The party is trying to keep the fight behind closed doors. With decisions taken by consensus, a move against Mr Zuma seems unlikely for now.

Whether he stays or is forced out, Mr Zuma could split the party. This divide would be less factional than opportunistic, pitting those who are beholden to the president against those seeking to preserve the ANC’s old reputation for idealism. During the struggle days, people joined the party because of principles (such as non-racial democracy), regardless of personal cost, laments Sipho Pityana, an ANC stalwart who is now the chairman of AngloGold Ashanti, a mining firm. Mr Pityana has launched an anti-Zuma campaign called “Save South Africa”. He despairs that the ANC has become “open to opportunists” and that too many people use its power to gain “access to riches in society”. That is indeed why the ANC is losing popularity. It is unlikely to recover under Mr Zuma.