Financial Times Editorial Comment: Zuma’s victory

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Zuma’s victory
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: April 23 2009 19:38 | Last updated: April 23 2009 19:38
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7e97f436-3031-11de-88e3-00144feabdc0.html


Jacob Zuma’s journey to the South African presidency has been bruising and divisive. At times, as he fought to overcome corruption charges, he has appeared ready to undermine the country’s institutions. His struggle for political ascendancy with Thabo Mbeki, the former president, split the ruling African National Congress. Yet Wednesday’s election has given him a huge popular mandate. South Africa’s next president has the opportunity to govern with magnanimity and repair the damage.

Not everyone will be comfortable with the outcome, but it would be hard to fault the process. Apart from isolated incidents, South Africans voted peacefully and in numbers comparable to the first post-apartheid elections in 1994, demonstrating their abiding faith in the power of the ballot box.

They were able to do so partly because polling was so smoothly organised. At a time when many recent elections in Africa have been marred by rigging, the conduct of the polls provides a welcome reminder that South Africa, at its best, can lead the continent by example.

Mr Zuma faces great pressure to meet the aspirations vested in him. Even before the global economic crisis, the country was facing enormous challenges associated with some of the world’s highest rates of HIV infection and soaring crime, exacerbated by income disparities as pronounced as anywhere in the developing world. The economy is almost certainly now in recession. At 5 per cent of gross domestic product, the current account deficit will be difficult to finance when capital is scarce.

In this environment the new government’s ability to provide jobs and distribute income more evenly will be severely hampered. But the constraints imposed by the global downturn make it doubly important that Mr Zuma delivers on another promise: ensuring government policies are more fairly and efficiently implemented.

To achieve this he must break the old politics of patronage, which saw credentials earned in the liberation struggle trumping competence in the pursuit of jobs. He must temper the demands of his supporters in the unions and on the left with the interests of a business community rattled by looming recession. Keeping the widely respected Trevor Manuel as finance minister would be a good start. Above all, he must resist the temptation that has been the undoing of so many other liberation movements, to use the ANC’s latest overwhelming victory to ignore criticism and operate an effective one-party state.