Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former president Jacob Zuma and member of the MK party, at the IEC Results Operation Centre in Midrand. 30 May 2024. (Photo: Alet Pretorius) In the video, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla is asked by a journalist what kind of governance the MK party would bring to South Africa.
She replies: “The same kind of government that we had under President Zuma. Those 9 amazing years: very similar”.
In a different interview at the results centre, Zuma-Sambudla says that the MK party would endorse “doing what President Zuma did under his economy, which was great”.
Zuma-Sambudla obviously has a particular political axe to grind, but is there any truth to what she’s saying?
On the economy front, it is true that Jacob Zuma’s administration, which began in 2009, had to deal with the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Even so, however, in 2007, South Africa’s annual economic growth was at 5.4%. During the Zuma years, from 2009 to 2017, that growth collapsed to around 1.5% annually. It is impossible to blame the global economic crisis for nine years of depressed economic activity.
During the same period, unemployment rose from 22.5% to 27.5%. Electricity prices rose by 350% and total public debt doubled.
When Zuma took power in 2009, the number of service delivery protests as measured by Municipal IQ stood at 106 per year. By 2018, this had more than doubled to 237 per year.
Land reform is another issue that MK party representatives claim Zuma paid more attention to than any other leader.
But by the last year of the Zuma presidency, the budget for land reform was at an all-time low, with less than 0.1% of the national budget set aside for land redistribution. A presidential advisory panel appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa when he took office after Zuma found that the major beneficiaries of the land reform programme to that point had been politically connected urban businessmen.
Lastly, on poverty, former president Kgalema Motlanthe led a high-level panel in 2017 looking into various issues. This found that the percentage of South Africans living below the food poverty line increased from 21.4% in 2011 to 25.2% by 2015.
It is unclear, in other words, exactly what metrics Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla is relying on when she claims that the Zuma administration amounted to nine “amazing” years for South Africans. DM