Zuma: Liability Or Leader?

After scraping by in yet another unsuccessful motion of no confidence, President Jacob Zuma now has some thinking to do.

- Thulani Gqirana

EIGHT motions to get rid of him in nine years and still he lives on – little wonder they call President Jacob Zuma the Teflon man.

Yet this time things are looking considerably shakier for No 1 – no mat

ter how immune to scrutiny our all-giggling, all-dancing president may appear.

He may have survived the motion but more than 30 of his own MPs wanted him out – and that’s a lot.

So what does this mean for Zuma? Is he in serious trouble – or will he live to laugh all the way to the 2019 general elections?

We ask experts to unpack it all.

Was the motion result really a victory?

Zuma was quick to treat it as such, partying long into the night with his MPs. But it was a weak win for the president, political analyst Daniel Silke says.

The numbers – 198 MPs voted against removing him from office, 177 voted for his removal and nine abstained – indicate the tide is turning against Zuma.

“The ANC held solid but what’s changed [since the last no-confidence vote] is that a substantial number of MPs voted against their own party. This indicates there’s a revolt against Zuma from members who aren’t willing to back down,” he explains.

The motion was a win-win for the opposition, according to Professor Richard Calland of the University of Cape Town’s department of public law.

“They may have lost this battle but they feel confident they’ll win the war. After all, it’s clear Zuma is now their greatest electoral asset, with several polls showing that across race and class, trust in him has collapsed since he returned to power for a second term in 2014,” he says.

The motion itself might have been a victory for Zuma, he says, but in the long term it’s likely to be seen as a major defeat for the ANC.

What does this mean for the ANC?