But on Monday this week, Zuma appeared to make his long-expected move against Gordhan, seemingly emboldened by majority support from the ANC’s national executive committee – its highest decision-making body between its five-yearly conferences – which had just met.
Zuma abruptly recalled Gordhan midway through a roadshow in the UK to drum up investor support.
The sudden move has been widely interpreted as a prelude to firing Gordhan – a move, some said, which was postponed briefly only by the death on Tuesday of Rivonia triallist Ahmed Kathrada, rather ironically one of the veterans and stalwarts who had called loudest on Zuma to resign.
Zuma had probably been watching the rand rising against the dollar and decided he had enough cushion in the exchange rate to risk removing Gordhan.
He was, quite ironically, inadvertently helped by US President Donald Trump, whose travails are depressing the US currency.
Emerging market economist Peter Montalto of Nomura International, among others, has speculated that recalling Gordhan from his investor roadshow was probably Zuma’s way of testing the market reaction to an imminent removal of Gordhan from the Treasury.
And that reaction may have been small enough – a drop of some 3% in the exchange rate of the rand against the dollar – to persuade him to go ahead.
The symbolism of yanking Gordhan off an international investor roadshow could not have been coincidental.
This was clearly Zuma sending a message to Gordhan, the ANC and indeed the foreign capitalists themselves, that wooing them was not a priority; the priority was state-led “radical socio-economic transformation” back home.
These attempts by Zuma to “Zanufy” the South African polity, as the PAC put it, are not very plausible and may provoke a backlash fatal to his cause.
Land expert Aninka Claassens, director of the Land and Accountability Research Centre at the University of Cape Town, believes that Zuma is now espousing radical views on land redistribution in part to shore up his waning support in the ANC – but even more so, as a smokescreen to mask the absolute failure of government land reform on his watch.
She says under Zuma, land reform has benefited wealthy elites close to the ANC far more than it has helped the poor.
Most of the state money budgeted for land redistribution has been channelled to big business projects such as Agri-parks, rather than, say, giving security of tenure to the myriad shack dwellers living on the perimeters of cities or small-scale farmers in rural districts.
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