Mr Zuma is no ordinary litigant. He is the former President of the Republic, who remains a public figure and continues to wield significant political influence, while acting as an example to his supporters… He has a great deal of power to incite others to similarly defy court orders because his actions and any consequences, or lack thereof, are being closely observed by the public. If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the rule of law. As this Court noted in Mamabolo, “[n]o one familiar with our history can be unaware of the very special need to preserve the integrity of the rule of law”. Mr Zuma is subject to the laws of the Republic. No person enjoys exclusion or exemption from the sovereignty of our laws… It would be antithetical to the value of accountability if those who once held high office are not bound by the law.
Firstly, the “we” whose anti-colonial struggle is “ours” is nothing less than people itself. Secondly, this “we”, the people, is authentic only when it is either in or sanctioned by the nationalist movement. What has happened here is that the political space has come to be conflated with the space of the movement. Hence the ambivalent relationship of the nationalist movement to the democratic process.To the extent that the movement wins a democratic election, the results then merely confirm what the movement already assumes: that it is the authentic voice of the people. In the same way, democracy is valued to the extent that it is possible to pursue “the people’s” agenda through its mechanisms and institutions.When uncertainty enters the political scene, things look different. What does one make of a political opposition if “the people”, “our people”, are always by definition unified in and around the nationalist organisation? Whom does it represent – if not “reactionary” forces (former colonisers, foreign interests, ultra-leftists). Moreover, if the nationalist movement is by definition the people’s own, then electoral loss can mean only one thing: sabotage by the enemies of the people.
In which case one pursues “the people’s” agenda by other means (“states of emergency” and so on). Is this not the brutal logic at play in Zimbabwe today? If so, then it is time to ask: Is not the condition of democracy today the weakening of nationalist organisations in the body politic?
This strikes me as a very interesting point and serves as a counterweight for the argument put forward by Ronald Suresh Roberts that those who get nervous about the ANC´s commitment to democracy are really just channeling the worst kind of racism and anti-nativism.