Senior leaders of the ANC and of the business community forced Zuma to get rid of Van Rooyen after just three days and replace him with Pravin Gordhan, a respected former finance minister.
Gordhan continued Nene’s vigilance over the Treasury.
His thrift was in no small measure motivated by a plausible conviction that Zuma and his business cronies, the Gupta family, had already “captured” part of the state and were still trying to get their hands on other state-owned enterprises – and even the Treasury itself.
Gordhan launched a campaign to persuade jittery foreign investors that prudent economic policies had not been abandoned, and convinced international credit rating agencies to hold off from a widely expected rating downgrade for South Africa to junk status.
But Zuma did not take his 9 December humiliation lying down. Even after the “state capture” saga and many other corruption scandals had cost the ANC three metropolises in the August local elections last year, Zuma continued to plot against Gordhan.
Evidently reading from a ZANU-PF-like script (though supposedly written by a British public relations firm), he recast his major tussle with Gordhan from a grubby and corrupt scrap over state resources to a heroic ideological battle by black South Africans.
Led by the ANC, this was a battle for the sovereign control of their economic destiny – against regressive white monopoly capitalists trying to retain their historic grip.
The latter were, of course, backed by self-serving international investors and abetted by credit rating agencies.
Those, like Gordhan, who blocked the efforts of Zuma and his Gupta friends to capture the state, were presented as traitors to this noble cause.
Not everyone, even in the ANC, was fooled by this shift in narrative.
Many in the ruling party, including much of its parliamentary caucus, sided with Gordhan.
Veterans and stalwarts of the liberation struggle launched a campaign to remove Zuma from office – or at least from being able to manipulate the succession at this December’s ANC elective conference – while Zuma’s supporters, in the ANC women’s and youth leagues and in several provinces, called for Gordhan to be fired.
It was difficult to discern who had the upper hand.
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