Was Zuma’s Cabinet reshuffle a case of perfect timing?

Right now, there is a hive of activity as people both within and outside the ANC “mobilise” against President Jacob Zuma in the bloody wake of his major power play cabinet reshuffle on Thursday.

Were this matter to go to a no-confidence vote tomorrow in parliament, it’s more than likely that Zuma would find himself without a job, since there are probably enough disgruntled MPs in the ANC to ensure that the required parliamentary majority is reached to support the major opposition parties in having Zuma removed as the head of state.

However, parliament is in recess and will only resume on May 9. Then there will possibly still be the usual to-ing and fro-ing before another vote is tallied in the House. And the same old problem will once again confront us – namely that MPs cannot cast their votes in secret.

The usual questions of self-interest and fear will once again grip the ANC’s MPs.

“What if I’m the only one who votes against Zuma? What if we fail? Msholozi will come after me with his machine gun,” each ANC MP will be thinking. “I can’t take that risk,” they might be telling themselves even now.

By then, Zuma’s majority in the ANC national executive council will also have sniffed out all those MPs likely to be part of the revolt to either intimidate or promise them huge incentives to continue to stick to the status quo.

In this way, we may find that an ANC leader who is even more divisive than Thabo Mbeki was continues to crack the whip, perhaps even until 2019. That seems unthinkable, especially since even the ANC’s treasurer-general, Zweli Mkhize, has expressed his disapproval of how the cabinet reshuffle was managed, as Zuma made it clear that the ANC has been moved to the sidelines of power and the president is now simply doing whatever he likes.

Parliamentary Speaker Baleka Mbete was only scheduled to be back from her overseas trip on Thursday, but she has rushed home this morning and is facing a court application from the EFF’s Julius Malema to compel her to convene an urgent sitting of parliament – but there’s no guarantee this will happen. She may very well still be in Zuma’s corner, and that will be a huge boon for the president.

The fact that she’s cut her trip short, though, may be a hopeful sign.

There’s no doubt that Zuma, wily fox that he is, knew that the parliamentary break represented his best window of opportunity to finally slip through this cabinet reshuffle that he’s been itching for since 2015 – and then to hope that time would be on his side to manage the fallout.

No wonder he showed no compunction in ordering Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas back from their international investor roadshow when he did. It had to happen, and it had to happen now.

It may yet backfire spectacularly, even though South Africa has become used to being abused by Zuma. It’s almost become our “new normal”. That’s why it may be hard to maintain the outrage, since we’ve become to used to outrageous comments, actions and decisions by the president.

We live in a world of 24-hour cycles in the news, and smartphone-addled brains that think in 140 characters on Twitter have a short attention span. We’ve seen this anger at Zuma before, and we’ve seen it going nowhere.

But hopefully not. Surely there are some things it’s worth staying angry about for as long as it takes for that anger to actually make a change.

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