It was a foregone conclusion; it was not going to succeed, and it sure as hell failed.

The move by a section of the South African parliament to impeach President Jacob Zuma over the so-called Nkandla scandal was always going to flop, because of the lop-sidedness of the House, which still has a huge majority of African National Congress members.

The political organisation that spearheaded the national liberation struggle holds a near-monopoly of the politics of that country, and it may be some time before its stranglehold on the nation’s affairs is finally broken.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I had many occasions to interact with cadres of the ANC living abroad and receiving training for the struggle back home and mobilising support for various campaigns, such as the Free-Mandela campaign.

Many of these young women and men had been born in the ANC; their parents were, or had been, ANC cadres, with memories of the many resistance actions against the apartheid regime; the “young lions,” as they were called, had been brought up on a diet of stories of the heroism of people like Walter Sisulu, the first African Nobel laureate, who was killed in a planned railway accident.

The stories included giants like Nelson Mandela and his comrades incarcerated on Robben Island, and those who were murdered like Stephen Biko, and Solomon Mahlangu, who was hanged, another form of judicial murder.

The youngsters had been inducted into “Congress” literally at birth. Their fathers and mother had been “Congress,” their grandparents had been “Congress” and their sons and daughters would be “Congress” after them. There was nothing beside “Congress,” and they could not imagine life without it.

It looked to me like “Congress” was a South African tribe, or, better still, a South African nation. Which shouldn’t be so surprising when contemplating a movement that had existed for half a century and had, up to that time, worked so hard to remove a system that seemed so un-removable.

Most South Africans I met then seemed and sounded like they belonged to the “Congress” nation. Not much has changed since, and the ANC’s sway over the country’s politics is still undiminished.

Or is it? The foregoing notwithstanding, I tend to see signs that that unabridged hegemony may be unravelling and that other, novel political formations are beginning to make inroads into territory that was hitherto the preserve of the “Congress.” What have been the factors causing the political sands shift?

One would be the obvious improbability of meeting the aspirations and demands of a long-suffering people who saw the end of apartheid as the beginning of the promised nirvana promised by the liberation struggle leaders since the Freedom Charter was proclaimed at Klipton in 1955. The promises were so rosy, the aspirations so unrealistic that many hopes were bound to be dashed.

Two is the waywardness of the political leadership since 1994. From Madiba, to Thabo Mbeki on to Zuma, none of the leaders really wanted to tackle the real issues that lay in the way of true liberation and restitution, such as land. Mandela played the role of angelic superstar going around with a halo encircling his head; Thabo became a professor of philosophy teaching a class of stonemasons; Zuma went on the rampage to collect wealth, pleasure and infamy.

Three, coming from the two points above, has to be the rapid descent of the ANC and the country into unbridled corruption, greed and sleaze.

It was as if, after a long, dry and hungry crossing of the desert, Moses had stumbled onto an oasis, and, rather than apportioning the water and dates judiciously among his followers, he had decided that only he and Joshua, Aaron, Jethro and a few others would drink and eat while the multitudes might as well go back to Egypt, and captivity, if they so pleased.

This reality will not let the ANC rest in peace, and soon, I suspect, the people will tire of it thoroughly. Zuma can take solace for the time being that the Polokwane he did on his high-minded boss, Mbeki, did not come back to haunt him. Not this time, anyway. But the damage he has done to his party may be too great to ignore.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]