In a week of co-ordinated events, I thought I had struck a luck at the Durban City Hall on Friday. A presidential cavalcade pulled up outside Durban City Hall and the media scrum was nowhere in sight.

A crowd gathered excitedly and their mobile phones shot up to take photos as the hubbub grew. Security detail nearby said “we should close the road”. I expected President Cyril Ramaphosa to emerge.

Then shouts of “Msholozi” and former president Jacob Zuma got out of the BMW X5 and laughed and glad-handed with a crowd of ANC volunteers who had mobbed him. He was in Ramaphosa’s service handing out pamphlets featuring the ANC president’s beaming image and advertising Saturday’s launch of the party’s manifesto.

This week, Ramaphosa was criticised for sharing a platform with Zuma and promising to bring him into service. A few days later, Zuma was handing out pamphlets for his successor, showing the kind of political service ex-president’s get assigned to.

I followed his walkabout and while he was warmly received, the crowd didn’t grow beyond the throng of volunteers who had been set up to walk with him. While Zuma’s security detail wanted the road closed, presidential style, for his cavalcade, it remained open. Zuma is popular in KwaZulu-Natal but he no longer has state power and without that, he is a man of the past.

Outside the Durban City Hall, a set of ANC history books for learners sells at R100 a piece but for the book on Zuma by the author Chris can Wyk. Bookseller and film maker Zama Qampi rushes me R150 for that one and explains it by the fact that the book is bigger and more popular than the others, like the biography of ANC co-founder Sol Plaatje I had also picked up.

The city hall’s pavements have been turned into an ANC market of merchandise. They are there to sell to ANC delegates who come to get accreditation tags. If I weren’t a non-partisan journalist, I’d buy some stuff, it’s so swag.

ANC official merchandisers have long moved past the T-shirts and caps which used to be about all you could get back in the day. But now there are gorgeous dresses, shoes, jewellery, jump-suits and tracksuits!

And it’s expensive: everything I eye starts at R500 a piece and goes up. Ramaphosa’s call of “Thuma Mina” or “Send Me” is emblazoned across T-shirts, caps and kangas.

The merchandise tells a story about more than party swag. At its top, at its delegates level, the ANC is a party of incumbents, of power, of insiders with money. There is a coincidence between being an ANC delegate and being in government or being in enough with the government to get tenders or rents from the state.

Without the power of incumbency, Zuma has rapidly lost power to dish out patronage either in the state or state-owned enterprises; he has lost the ability to capture the state and swing contracts to his patronage network.

Without the megaphone of the Presidency and his easy access to the SABC and to the now-folded Gupta media mouthpieces of the New Age and ANN7, he is now a Twitter influencer.

As I watched him with the lingering accoutrements of presidential power – the cavalcade, the security, the volunteers, the media people – it was clear that all Zuma is now is a popular pamphleteer with a razor-sharp Twitter handle.

And very much an ex-President. DM

All photos by Ferial Haffajee.