Minabere Ibelema
After growing dissatisfaction with President Jacob Zuma’s corruption-and-scandal-plagued administration, the African National Congress at last came to accept what the opposition has long said: that Zuma is not fit to govern. On Tuesday, the ANC issued an ultimatum to Zuma to resign or be forced out by a vote of no confidence or by impeachment. By Wednesday, the former ANC guerilla spymaster reportedly agreed to resign.
It is the second time within three months that a southern African president has been forced out of office. It was just last November that the Zimbabwe African National Union forced out President Robert Mugabe after about 37 years in office. Unlike the ANC, ZANU needed the muscles of the military. It’s an indication of the wide gap between South Africa’s democracy and Zimbabwe’s.
What the two forced resignations have in common still is that they are both forward-looking. For long, ANC legislators had blocked attempts to remove Zuma, despite recurrent exposures of gross corruption, maladministration, and squander-mania. What eventually cost the populist Zuma the presidency isn’t so much the scandals per se. It is the formerly unimaginable prospect of losing the presidency to the rival Democratic Alliance.
Since South Africa’s transition to majority rule in 1994, the party that was almost synonymous with Nelson Mandela has had a grip on government, never bothering to look back at its nearest competitor. But recent elections have shown that the hitherto unflinching voter support has been eroding during the Zuma presidency. The 2017 municipal elections, during which the ANC lost control of major municipalities, including Johannesburg, served as the party’s clarion call.
The ANC is looking at the presidential election of 2019 with greater foreboding than ever before. If Zuma remains in office until then — when his term expires — the party might lose the presidency and even the legislature. That would mean becoming an opposition party again, the role it played with different methods during the apartheid era. And so, Zuma had to go.
Even then, there was a certain awkwardness in the process of removing Zuma. It was led by Cyril Ramaphosa, who, as the president of the ANC,will replace Zuma as South Africa’s president. So, at least in principle, it is hard to distinguish between Ramaphosa’s pursuit of the party’s interest and his own ambition. The two just happen to converge. Still, even by the standards of politics, it has to be awkward.
Ramaphosa, in essence, has been South Africa’s president in waiting. He was expected to succeed Mandela but was bypassed for Thabo Mbeki. Then Zuma squeaked past him in the contest to replace Mbeki. With Ramaphosa now president, South Africans will know what they have been missing, if anything.
How about the APC?
By some coincidence, 2019 also happens to be a year of political reckoning in Nigeria. And just as Zuma is embroiled in multiple scandals in South Africa, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari is knee-deep in controversies. There’s his undeniably ethnocentric pattern of political appointments, his failure to reign in marauding herdsmen (“I’m trying,” he told a meeting with Christian clergy), failure to alleviate Nigerians’ economic distress, and especially the demonstrated cases of corruption in a government that promised that combating it is task Number One.
It has all meant that former staunch supporters are abandoning ship. Buhari isn’t even sure of the support of Northern chieftains. They convened recently to decide on a consensus candidate,a meeting that might not have been necessary had they seen Buhari as a certainty.
And Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate and indefatigable political gadfly, recently described Buhari as being in a trance. In 2015, he gave Buhari’s candidacy considerable cachet when he declared that Buhari was a changed man — changed, that is, from his record of ethnocentricity.
So, with an eye on 2019, might the APC do to Buhari what the ANC just did to Zuma? It is a question that is best left to blow in the wind for quite sometime. Nigeria’s political calculus is much more complicated than South Africa’s.
Nigeria’s “Cool Running”
It was exactly 30 years ago that Jamaica fielded an improbable bobsled team at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, the team that inspired the Disney movie “Cool Runnings.” Yet, when I read that a trio of American-born Nigerian young women are representing Nigeria at the current Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, it was the Jamaican feat that came to mind.
The Caribbean country, which has about as many names for marijuana as Eskimos have for snow, has had an oversized impact on global culture—think reggae, Bob Marley, dreadlocks, and curry goat. Still, as a tropical country, nobody had expected it to partake in a sport that requires frigid temperatures. So, when it defied that expectation and fielded a bobsled team in 1988, it got considerable press attention. Though the team didn’t come anywhere close to earning a medal—in fact, it had potentially deadly mishaps— its against-the-odds feat inspired a high-grossing movie in 1993.
That may have been the inspiration for U.S.-born Nigerians Seun Adigun, Akuoma Omeoga, and Ngozi Owumereto constitute the Nigerian version of “Cool Runnings” in 2018. When I first read about it, I was a little sceptical. The novelty of a tropical country fielding a winter-sport team is long gone. So, why bother, I wondered. But then, I read the young women’s explanation of their mission, and I was sold.
To begin with, it is all about representing the motherland. “Although we’re Americans, we’re also Nigerians. We’re actually Nigerians first,” Adigun told the Associated Press. “That’s the one culture that we know, that we were raised to respect and understand. To show people that it’s okay to be both and it’s okay to represent where you’re from is a powerful message that, hopefully, we’ve been able to translate.”
That Nigerians don’t readily relate to a snow-based sport the way they do to soccer, tennis, and sprinting, for examples, isn’t lost on Adigun.”Just because you don’t know what it means to see snow or to understand temperatures that are equivalent to ice, that doesn’t mean you have to shy away from it,” said Adigun, the organiser of the Nigerian team. “That’s what Africa is representing — that we can take those risks and still be able to compete with the best in the world.” One can’t argue with that.
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