The ranks of political casualties are awash with names of those who have underestimated Jacob Zuma’s tactical acumen. This list includes some notable heavyweights, not least former president Thabo Mbeki, trade unionist Zwelinzima Vavi, and youth firebrand Julius Malema, among other eminent political figures.
He has demonstrated the idea that to be underestimated by your political opponents is among the grossly unheralded secrets of political success. This position of apparent weakness has been a devastating weapon in his demonstrably febrile tactical arsenal.
He is a man of limited formal education in an era that worships education, a status that lends itself to confusion as implying an inferior intellect. This status has had the added advantage of endearing him to the multitudes of South Africans who share a similarly disparaged social status.
His disarmingly guffaw, simplicity and genuinely amiable manner have led many among his opponents to confuse him with a contemptible lightweight.
His constant portrayal by the media as a feckless buffoon has done much to feed this misperception, to his absolute glee. Something he has effectively used to portray himself as a target of unjustified victimisation.
Most of his political enemies have come to discover just how mistaken they were about his supposed ineptitude.
Since the great coup of Polokwane that he masterminded, he has sauntered nonchalantly from one political victory to the next. A slew of seemingly endless scandals that would have buried those of lesser tactical acumen have been defused with masterly skill. He seems the embodiment of the idea of the Teflon President, the epithet ascribed to the irrepressible former US president, Ronald Reagan.
The problem with tactical genius is that it lends itself to the kind of sustained success that invites a more formidable opponent – hubris. This, referring to that all-consuming state of delusion that imagines its objects as uniquely impervious to defeat. One that is usually fanned by a ubiquitous phalanx of ingratiating sycophants.
Perhaps no one epitomises the dangers of hubris better than Hitler. He possessed it in droves as did Napoleon before him, among countless other historical figures.
Not without reason. His effortless conquests of firstly, the German public imagination, followed by Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Denmark, France among other nation states that succumbed like dominoes before the overwhelming might of the advancing Third Reich, seemed ample justification. It conferred upon him that delusionary sense of invincibility that inexorably lends itself to overreach and with it fatal miscalculation.
This same hubris has come to be disturbingly recognisable among the contemporary South African political elite. The growing audacity of their actions betray that historically familiar delusion that they are uniquely exempt from the principles that all of us must account to.
The predictable release of Shabir Shaik, immediately following the ascension to the presidency of Jacob Zuma, sadly presaged the shape of more sinister things to come. He came to be unceremoniously replaced by the notorious Guptas, who have come to enjoy such privilege that even our military base once came to serve their personal needs, all with vexing impunity.
As though this was not jarring enough, we came to learn of a personal mansion, built upon the toil and sweat of the overburdened South African taxpayer. The President was nevertheless summarily rewarded by the ANC and South African voter with a second term. A statement that would have reinforced the sense of imagined immunity from personal accountability.
This sense of untouchability usually leads to greater daring. For Zuma this to took the form of the subsequent Russian nuclear deal that we must now contend with. The deal has a look of a fait accompli despite the charade that will masquerade as due constitutional process.
This brings me to the fatal shortcomings of tactical when weighed against strategic acumen. The primary distinction being the reach of the temporal horizon.
The tactician is concerned about outmanoeuvring the enemy in order to win the immediate battle, lending itself to a short-term outlook. The strategist on the other is preoccupied with finding the most propitious paths towered ultimate victory.
Indeed, the superior tactician might win battle after battle while the strategist remains the only one with the assurance of ultimate victory, despite defeat upon ignominious defeat.
South African history bears ample evidence of this principle.
n the darkest moments of seeming Apartheid invincibility, when victory for the oppressed majority seemed but a remote refuge of quixotic dreamers, this knowledge is precisely what energised them.
They knew that theirs was a just struggle. That is all they needed to know, and thus its eventual success was guaranteed. This is despite the fact that much of the developed world, not least the US, were counted among its opponents until much later in the game, when the momentum of history had shifted irrevocably.
This audacious hope leaned on no other pillar than the universal principle that is abundantly adorned by history – that despite the length of their battle and the number of their tactical defeats, those on the side of what is true, right and just are never denied ultimate victory.
To this end we can surmise that the reason for the Soviet Union’s loss of the Cold War was ultimately due to no want of tactical nous but that it positioned itself on the wrong side of this question. Precisely as it was a murderous regime that robbed its citizens of freedom, incarcerating and executing millions of them.
Martin Luther King captured this idea with characteristic eloquence when he thus paraphrased Theodore Parker:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
This is exactly where the master tactician is exposed. He is so consumed in the details of winning the immediate battle to the point of failing to ask whether the war is in fact a winnable one. Indeed, the sheer weight of success lulls him into the false belief that the status quo can only indefinitely endure.
Thus, despite the abundant tactical acuity, the bankruptcy of strategic acumen makes defeat merely a question of time even though at the height of his powers, this may appear a remote possibility.
Decades or centuries of success had convinced the proponents of the apartheid-colonialism nexus that victory was their birthright. The strategic momentum reached an inflection point in a twinkle of an eye, at an innocuous historical moment in 1976 when certain students dared to question this conventional wisdom.
Perhaps it was not clear at that moment that those students were setting into motion forces that would ultimately bring the mighty apartheid machine to its knees. Our historical vantage point gives us a better perspective of the fruit of their heroic actions.
On that occasion, as is so often the case, driven by typically boundless idealism, energy and a certainly reckless audacity, the youth became catalysts in shifting the balance of political forces towards the direction that the true strategist would have foreseen decades before as inevitable, despite the towering odds.
This is because strategists align themselves not with expedient victories, that inevitably prove ephemeral, but with the grand historical themes of nobility, justice and truth, that may suffer momentary setbacks but for which victory can never be denied.
Recently we have witnessed similar audacity from the very same constituency, whose actions have issued President Zuma with perhaps his very first genuine political defeat.
Their vigorous protest action seems a strange throwback to a bygone era.
Might they be midwives of shifting tectonic forces towards ushering a new political era in South Africa, that sweeps the current political elite into the dustbin of history? Only time will tell.
They occur, nevertheless, amid a smouldering consensus, corroborated by damning evidence that is embodied in the jarring juxtaposition of the impudent opulence of Nkandla against a sea of penury, that President Zuma has chosen to align himself in opposition to these grand universal principles.
And thus the sheer weight of historical evidence compels us to wonder not whether he will join the annals of historical ignominy in one way or the other, but when.
