Will MK party suffer the same fate as Cope?

When former president Thabo Mbeki was recalled – a euphemism for forced to resign – in September 2008, ANC stalwart and former defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota announced that a national convention to discuss South Africa’s future would be held.

That convention resulted in the formation of the Congress of the People (Cope) party on 16 December 2008 which took 30 seats in the National assembly in the 2009 general election.

When former president Jacob Zuma was recalled in 2018, he waited a few years before announcing on 16 December, 2023 that he had formed his own political party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK).

Like Cope before it, it took the South African political landscape by storm, garnering 58 National Assembly seats.

The similarities between the formation of Cope and the MK didn’t end only in that they were breakaways of the then ruling ANC, but also in that they could both be referred to as “parties of the disgruntled”.

This past week saw some deep and public disagreements within the ranks of MK that any pundit would be forgiven for asking: is the party headed the same way that saw the destruction of Cope as a formidable political force in South Africa?

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Is the disgruntlement that served as the glue that unified Zuma supporters to form the MK not enough any more to keep them together as a party as happened to Cope?

Cope purists would take exception to being referred to in the same terms as the MK.

Like the MK, they politically appropriated a piece of ANC history in naming themselves, but they would argue that is the end of any similarity between the two.

The biggest disagreement to rock MK was how the daughter of party leader, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, tore into the party’s secretary-general, Floyd Shivambu, on social media platform X declaring: “I’m not scared of you Floyd” and using very colourful language to ask him to say “your minions to back off.”

The insults were deep, but even deeper and perhaps more destructive for Zuma’s retirement project was the first detailed apology that Zuma-Sambudla put out. She apologised to everyone, but the subject of her insults.

When the second apology came, the damage had been done. In four short posts she had undone the hard work that had been put in to demonstrate that MK was not an ethnocentric party belonging to one group of people.

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Even worse, without spelling it out, she came off sounding like “how dare you come from where you come from and want to control my dad’s project?”

When it emerged that former judge John Hlophe had been given an obituary-sounding like speech that paid homage to what a great president Zuma was as a response to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address, it became clear that the MK is far from being a solid institution that can survive the harsh waters of SA politics into the future.

That the party’s most senior leader in parliament can be duped by another senior party member into embarrassing himself publicly just shows how disjointed the whole setup is.

Will MK die an agonisingly slow death like Cope and dwindle down to a measly two seats in the National Assembly?

Not in the short term, there is still a lot of political opportunism mileage that can be milked from associating with Zuma, so they’ll still get a good result in KZN in the upcoming local government elections. But the downward spiral has begun, at some point all co-opted leaders will be dealt with like Floyd: as an unwelcome outsider.

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