By Tapiwa Gomo The ruling African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa faces one of its trying times since independence in 1994 and it threatens to impact the stability of the country. The issue arises from a tiff between former President Jacob Zuma and the Zondo Commission of Inquiry. Zuma is alleged to have defied the Constitutional Court by refusing to testify for the second time at the commission saying he would rather go to jail. He has alleged that the courts are biased and that the commission is treating him the same way the apartheid regime treated black people. With those daggers drawn, a constitutional crisis is now looming. Before getting into the details of the potential implosion, let’s start with a background. It was in January 2018 that Zuma as the President of South Africa launched the Judicial Commission of Inquiry, also known as the Zondo Commission of Inquiry to investigate allegations of State capture, corruption, fraud and other allegations in the public sector including organs of State in South Africa. The commission is led by Judge Raymond Zondo, the Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa. In doing this, Zuma was implementing recommendations by the former public protector, Advocate Thuli Madonsela based on formal complaint from a Catholic priest that the Gupta brothers had captured the State. By December 2020, the commission had interviewed 278 witnesses, collected 159 109 pages and massive data as evidence. The inquiry arose from alleged fears that the Gupta brothers, allegedly working with Zuma at the time, had led to massive corruption and maladministration. For those reasons, Zuma, became the central figure to the inquiry. In his response, Zuma has alleged conspiracies back dating from the apartheid era when he was chief of intelligence for the ANC; to current sour grapes by the white capital led by the Oppenheimer family and associates, who feared their control of the economy was shifting to the Indian brothers. Going by his arguments, some of which are well documented, the current political crisis in the ANC is simply a battle between the Gupta brothers and white capital otherwise known as the markets. When one looks at the historical narratives, there is nothing that the Guptas have done that has not been done by the white capital which controls, not only the economy, but everything that is political in South Africa. White capital is alleged to have bought properties and dished shares to ANC leadership ostensibly as “start-off” soon after independence. And this and others earned white capital ANC “protection” and weakened the ANC against white capital — a scenario similar to State capture in which private interests significantly influence the State’s decision-making processes to their own advantage. This situation remains. Hiding behind markets, this same group controls and funds almost all civil society organisations including labour movements. Their media group boasts more than 20 of the country’s most prominent print and digital news platform scattered across the country. They also h
