Has Zuma lost his grip on South Africa?

The president retains a grip on the ANC but scandals and court cases show his power is not as absolute as it seemed.

President Jacob Zuma addressed the National Assembly in Cape Town, delivering a speech on the xenophobic violence unfolding in KwaZulu-Natal

In the Pretoria High Court 2D, Advocate Kemp J Kemp hunched his shoulders and pushed his head out like a heron about to snaffle its prey.

The 2009 decision to drop more than 700 fraud, corruption, racketeering and money-laundering charges against his client, President Jacob Zuma, was a "message", Kemp argued, that the National Prosecuting Authority's "enormous powers" would never again be used to "decide who will be the president of the country" or "to engineer political results".  

ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe, right, and newly appointed spokesperson Zizi Kodwa hold a media briefing in parliament

"How is that not something that should be upheld, and that should not be lauded?" he asked a full sitting of the High Court bench in the South African capital. Kemp was in court fighting against the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), who had filed an application to have the dropping of charges declared "irrational". 

The 2009 decision to discontinue Zuma's prosecution was made by Mokotedi Mpshe - then acting national director of public prosecution. If the application succeeds, "charges against Zuma may be reinstated", the DA's James Selfe told Al Jazeera.


Mpshe had ostensibly dropped the charges after listening to conversations between Leonard McCarthy, then head of the Scorpions special investigative unit, and former prosecutions leader Bulelani Ngcuka, emanating from phone taps by still-unestablished sources.

Ngcuka and McCarthy had apparently discussed whether the timing of the charges against Zuma could be manipulated to favour former President Thabo Mbeki, who was contesting the African National Congress' (ANC) presidency against Zuma at the ANC's 2007 Polokwane conference. Zuma ultimately won.

Working in the shadows
The irony of Kemp's argument was inescapable: The president, who recently weathered a vote of no confidence in the national legislature through the ANC's substantial majority, has long stood accused of eroding the independence of institutions such as the prosecuting authority and using the state's intelligence and security apparatus for his own political ends.

'South Africans were as depressed as their currency' 
After being elected ANC president, Zuma had once danced unchallenged through South Africa's political landscape - singing his trademark struggle song, Mshini Wami ("Bring me my machine gun") to populist frenzy, while promising a more everyman administration than that of his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki.

He had revolutionised how power could be attained and consolidated within the ANC in the build-up to his 2007 election, and had kept a firm grip on the party ever since.

Yet, his control no longer appears absolute. To understand why, analysts suggest, one must rewind to December of last year.