By John Carlin

"Not in this country! Not in this country!" An African National Congress man came up to me and uttered this cry as I was having a quiet glass of wine a couple of hours after Jacob Zuma's election victory.

A Zuma supporter, he was middle-aged, highly educated, well connected with the ANC's upper echelons, and sober.

What he was saying was that the message he and the majority of ANC delegates in Polokwane had conveyed by voting for Zuma, and against Thabo Mbeki, was that, as he put it, " South Africa is not Zimbabwe and we are not going to go the Zimbabwe way."

"Not in this country!" It was a cry of national pride and political defiance. Mbeki's attempt to extend his grip on power beyond 2009 via the presidency of the ruling party contained, as this man saw it, echoes of Robert Mugabe.

And that in South Africa, in a country where so many had fought for so long for democracy, was intolerable.

The defeat, the humiliation of Mbeki was the defeat, the humiliation of an idea that he and the ANC were simply not going to allow to take root. Not now, not ever.

For anyone out there who might imagine that this uplifting little cameo represented the minority view of a uniquely principled ANC elder, try this.

A journalist friend of mine who contrived to insinuate himself into the heart of the singing, dancing Zuma contingent as the election results were announced on Tuesday night reported seeing one young KwaZulu Natal man - the type whose demeanor inspires terror among right-thinking white folk here and abroad - who was brandishing a banner with the following message scrawled on it: "No Zimbabwe here!"

There are plenty of reasons to be cheerful, it seems to me, as we enter the final day (Thursday) of the ANC's national conference in Polokwane.

First, that the most serious political crisis the country has been facing in recent months has concerned the democratic - that is, full-blooded - leadership contest between Zuma and Mbeki.

Do you South Africans realize how lucky you are? Had political logic applied here in the grim way it ought to have done, given human nature and given the revolution of 1994, this country would have grown wearily accustomed by now to an Irish Republican Army-style bombing campaign from an angry, bitter separatist white Right. And you know what that would have meant for the fragile young democracy and the fragile youngish economy?

Instead, and to the enormous credit of the ANC, what you have is the most politically radical collection of individuals in the country standing up at the start of the organization’s 52nd national conference to sing Die Stem with (almost) as much fervor as Nkosi Sikelel'.

Second, you have a fabulously vibrant press. Okay, so the state broadcaster has been neutered (hopefully things will change once the Mbeki control freaks have left). But the running-dog capitalist press, to which journalists in this newspaper proudly belong, is as irreverent and - at times - as uncompromisingly savage in its criticism of the powers-that-be as anywhere on Earth. That the press should remain so rampagingly free 13 years after liberation, in a country where for all practical purposes you have one-party rule, is a priceless achievement.

Which does not mean that people in authority won't fantasize about putting limits on freedom of expression. At a press conference on Wednesday, Blade Nzimande presumed to prescribe what we should and should not write about when he lamented our exasperating insistence on writing about "individuals", instead of "policies".

Well, Mr Nzimande, we'll do that on the day you achieve your communist utopia and you can guarantee a living wage for us all.

Meanwhile, newspapers have to survive, which means people have to want to read them. In order for that to happen, we have to write about people, not dialectical abstraction. Or has the general secretary of the Communist Party not noticed that what the proletariats of this country are reading in the greatest numbers is not the English version of Cuba's Granma, but The Sun.

The editors of this admirably successful newspaper would be fired on the spot - and quite possibly packed off for psychiatric help - at the merest suggestion that their winning diet of "individual"-centered sex and crime stories should be sacrificed in favor of policy documents.

Third, in how many countries is the rule of law applied with as much impartiality as South Africa? Zuma's rape trial and pending bribery charges do not present a very edifying picture - unless you reflect on the broader significance of the fact that in each case the law has been allowed to take its course, at which point the picture becomes very edifying.

And talking of edifying pictures, the spectacle of Mbeki embracing Zuma seconds after he had suffered the most crushing setback of his public life revealed a grace and a political maturity that you would struggle to find in the most ancient Western democracies.

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, bitter rivals in the British Labor Party for years, have nothing to teach Mbeki and Zuma in this regard.

And then there was the reverent manner in which Mbeki's beaten supporters, or a good number of them, stood up to applaud Zuma on his election as ANC president. A class act, if ever there was one.

Returning, finally to the matter of the possible Zuma jail sentence, some student organization suggested on Wednesday that charges against the new ANC president should be dropped. I was with a cabinet minister on Wednesday morning chatting when someone came up to him and asked him what he thought about the idea.

"What?" the minister cried, almost choking on his cup of tea, before adding, perfectly seriously: "No, that will not happen here. This isn't the United States. This is South Africa! "

Damn right it is.

John Carlin is a former South Africa correspondent for the London Independent. He now lives in Barcelona, where he writes for the Spanish daily El Pais. He has joined Independent Newspapers South Africa in Polokwane for the duration of the ANC conference.

Published on the Web by IOL on 2007-12-20 12:46:08

Source: Independent Online