Former president Jacob Zuma has suffered a medical event with serious consequences, according to multiple sources cited by The Common Sense, and the news lands at a moment when the political asset he built, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), ranks among the most valuable properties in South African electoral politics. For investors in the country’s political stability, the central question is not Zuma’s health but whether the party’s market position survives without its founder, and what that means for capital, governance and risk ahead of the November election and the 2029 national vote.
The scale of that asset is measurable. Polling conducted by The Common Sense in conjunction with the Social Research Foundation at the end of the second quarter of this year put MKP support at 16% of all voters and 24% of black voters, the latter figure equalling exactly two-thirds of the African National Congress’s support among black voters. Frans Cronje’s assessment is that “that 24% is a sufficiently strong foundation from which MKP, with shrewd strategy, could grow to rival the ANC in size…one plausible outcome by 2029 is a three-way split of South African politics in which the Democratic Alliance (DA), ANC, and MKP each command between a quarter and a third of the national vote.”
That national footprint converts directly into bargaining power at municipal level. In two of the most important November battlegrounds, Johannesburg and eThekwini, MKP holds the potential to force a balance of power by allying either with the DA or with the ANC and its splinter elements. Cronje points to “very interesting green-shoot indications that the party is beginning to break out of its narrow KwaZulu-Natal constituency,” adding that the party should be able to maintain its Zulu nationalist roots while extending its appeal into broader constituencies, so that its longer-term growth prospects are not necessarily constrained by the boundaries of its original support base.
The brand equity attached to Zuma himself was also substantial. Data shows his national favourability rivalled that of President Cyril Ramaphosa, which, as Cronye notes, “defeats the assumption, common among South Africa’s elites, that Zuma and, by extension, the MKP are widely reviled.” Among the roughly 35% of voters who remain in the ANC his figure is low, but among those who have left it is considerably greater. Cronje argues that South Africa’s high unemployment rate creates a constituency for aspects of the MKP’s populism and a foundation for further growth, making the party’s electoral appeal considerably broader than the political establishment’s perceptions suggest.
Meanwhile, the party commands a campaign asset neither the ANC nor the DA can replicate: the targeting of foreigners. Separate data previously published by The Common Sense shows a 61% majority of South Africans believe it would be right for communities to take the law into their own hands and expel migrants, a sentiment with direct economic consequences for labour markets and community stability.
Operationally, the newspaper judges MKP to be an expertly run organisation. The repeated churn of its leadership is deliberate, designed to prevent an organised internal opposition from acquiring the influence to challenge or sabotage the party’s leadership, and should not be read as organisational weakness. The party also enjoys broad and expert support from third-party sources interested in securing a seat at the table of any future government. The appointment of Duduzane Zuma as the party’s first deputy president has, in the newspaper’s judgement, gone a considerable way towards completing a viable succession strategy, providing continuity. Under the younger Zuma, the three central elements of the campaign strategy are expected to remain unchanged: appealing to liberation-era nostalgia, acknowledging that mistakes of that period require correction, and arguing that the ANC has grown distant from and even contemptuous of its voters. Third-party civil society actors, including organisations such as March and March, remain well positioned to advance campaigns that strengthen MKP’s electoral appeal.
What follows from this: Zuma’s demise will not undermine the party’s medium-term trajectory, and the opposite may be more likely. As Cronje puts it, “South Africa is a conservative society in which serious illness and death is treated with great reverence. Zuma’s situation could therefore produce an increase in sympathy for him and, by extension, support for MKP ahead of November’s elections.” Sustaining his political legacy should be relatively straightforward, especially if the ANC continues to repel sections of its traditional support base.
The immediate commercial risk is political violence and disorder in KwaZulu-Natal, which carries costs for investors and insurers. Cronje places this in historical perspective, noting South Africa has been a volatile society for four centuries, punctuated by episodes from the Boer War and the 1914 rebellion through the Bulhoek Massacre, the 1922 Rand Revolt, Sharpeville, Soweto in 1976, the low-intensity civil war in Natal in the 1980s, Boipatong in 1992, the 2008 xenophobic riots, the Lonmin Massacre at Marikana in 2012 and the “insurrection” of July 2021. “The chart is not to displace the seriousness of these things but rather to act as a reminder that South Africa has faced many terrible things and come through them…this is a tough place,” he said. Potential triggers include state mishandling of developments around Zuma, contestation of November’s results in KwaZulu-Natal, a killing during a confrontation involving migrants, or police firing on a crowd. The state’s response to date, specifically the deployment of the military over the weekend, mitigates the risk, as does the experience intelligence services and private security actors gained in 2021. Over the weekend the odds of an eruption were put at 40/60 against, possibly rising to 30/70 within the week, with the expectation that order should be maintained into November.
By contrast, the broader conclusion is that Zuma’s personal circumstances and the MKP’s electoral prospects are not the same question. His demise may produce short-term uncertainty and heightened security risk, but the constituencies, incentives, structures and campaign arguments underpinning the party’s growth do not depend on him. The full analysis, and the context behind these judgments, is available at https://www.thecommonsense.co.za/Politics/what-has-happened-jacob-zuma-these-are-implications. The party may yet emerge with its electoral prospects intact, and potentially strengthened, ahead of November and into 2029, a result that would flow as much from the parlous state of the economy and very high unemployment as from any other factor. The Common Sense sends its best wishes to those dear to him, and maintains that had his coming to power been handled differently after 2008, including by the business community and elite society, South Africa might have avoided much of the nastiness and risk of recent years.