Leading a nation is hard work. It is unsurprising that former leaders devote post-presidential life to rest and reflection. Unlike their Western counterparts, who retire to lucrative book deals and endowments to establish centers and institutes, African presidents have little to look forward to after active politics. Those who depart office with intact reputations can serve as “statesmen” who routinely grace public events or embark on all-expense-paid trips across the continent to observe elections for “democracy promoters.” Even these modest perks have eluded Jacob Zuma. 

Zuma, South Africa’s president from May 2009 to February 2018, has had a difficult retirement. He has been forced to account for corruption during his presidency. When he failed to appear before an inquiry investigating widespread graft and “state capture” that occurred during his rule, he was found in contempt of court. For that offense, he was jailed for 15 months, serving two months until he was released on “medical parole.” Aside from these, he faces legal woes for alleged bribes, money laundering and racketeering in a 1999 arms deal with a French firm.

Scandals and corruption have dogged the 82-year-old Zuma’s political career. From being an exiled operative of the African National Congress (ANC), he rose to become the deputy president of Thabo Mbeki but was fired over corruption allegations. When he later displaced his former boss to become the ANC’s and South Africa’s president, corruption seeped into every aspect of the state. This alarmed ANC’s leaders to boot him from office. His missteps in office aside, Zuma was accused of raping an HIV-positive woman. The very public and divisive trial that controversially acquitted him was, in itself, a scandal that would have capsized many political careers. He survived, earning the nickname “Teflon president” for his ability to stage political bounce-backs. 

When it appeared he was leaving for good in 2018 after his resignation, the BBC mocked him as “the survivor whose nine lives ran out.” With the benefit of hindsight, the jokes are on the BBC. Six years after the British broadcaster announced his political demise, Zuma is on a strong comeback act. He has led and galvanized a six-month-old party, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), to secure an impressive 14.6 percent in South Africa’s May 2024 elections.

Meaning “Spear of the Nation” in isiZulu, MK takes its name from the ANC’s paramilitary wing founded in 1961 to bolster resistance to white minority rule. In its present avatar as a fully fledged political party, it is Zuma’s vehicle for the “total liberation” of South Africa. Founded in December 2023, Zuma’s affiliation has been the central fuel of MK’s surprising shake-up of South Africa’s political landscape. Although the ANC was poised to lose its majority for the first time since 1994, it is undeniable that the arrival of the Zuma-backed party has deepened the ANC’s electoral troubles. Moreover, the MK party has eaten into the vote shares of other smaller opposition parties. The influence of the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by the acerbic Julius Malema, has been dented, with some of the EFF’s leaders migrating to join Zuma’s organization. Aubrey Matshiqi, a South African commentator, has described the MK party as the “newsmaker of the year.” 

Zuma’s unabating relevance and the MK party’s immediate impact on South African politics has forced analysts to speculate about its implications for the country, with some describing its existence and exploits as a “frontal assault on the survival prospects of South African democracy.” What the party and its leader will do in the future can only be subjected to such conjectures. Here, I am concerned with why Jacob Zuma, pronounced politically dead by critics and trailed by corruption and scandal, retains the vast influence he has used to power his new party to transform politics in South Africa.

I suggest that two key factors underlie Zuma’s appeal. His appearance as a “relatable” politician gives him a nationwide appeal in South Africa. In his native province, KwaZulu-Natal, where the MK party derives much of its support, the story is much thicker. He is seen as an embodiment of traditional values of a fruitful life that have been blighted by democratic modernity. I consider the two factors in turn.

When Zuma became president in 2009, he won 66 percent of the national vote. The scale of his victory was called “a Zunami.” Postmortem of the polls found that he won the heads and hearts of people. His triumph emerged from a belief that as a minimally educated person who hails from a poor rural background, Zuma would sympathize with the plight of the poor masses and do something to better their conditions. These elements of Zuma’s life gave him the personal and political credentials to speak to and, perhaps, tackle the political and economic upheavals people were experiencing when promises of political liberation were less forthcoming. As a traditionalist and polygamist who supports several wives, girlfriends, and many children, Zuma was perceived by some as a solution to the “crises of social reproduction,” which manifested in declining marriage rates and an increasing number of men shirking fatherhood responsibilities. This strategic use of identity allowed him to transcend ethnicity, gender, and generational divides. While he provided hope for the young with promises of job provision, he embodied a renewed sense of respect for traditional and generational dignity for the old.

Moreover, his affable persona, what Roger Southall calls “charismatic buffoonery,” casts him as a down-to-earth person. His willingness to sing for and dance with his supporters sharply contrasts with Mbeki’s perceived distant and out-of-touch appearance. The strategies that secured him the heads and the hearts of many South Africans are on full display again as he steers the MK party to reshape the Rainbow Nation’s politics. Interestingly, despite having presided over the country’s political, economic, and social decline, he has framed his agenda as a “total liberation,” positioning himself as a representative of the aspirations and “real” concerns of black people striving against a new apartheid. In doing this, he cast the ANC, the party he once promised to serve all his life, as a failure. 

In this sense, the style and substance of Zuma’s politics resemble that of contemporary populists, not least Donald Trump, who also displays charisma to play “the charlatan and the fool” to win hearts. The MK party’s fortunes in 2024 have come about through a rhetoric that successfully harnesses the discontents of economically marginalized people while presenting Zuma, who spent almost a decade in power, as a challenger to the establishment (again, not unlike Trump). At the MK party’s rallies, Zuma deploys a familiar charm by singing his signature song, “Umshini wami” (a war song meaning “bring me my machine gun”). This is more than an attempt to win hearts. Liz Gunner notes that this song collapses the past and the present and articulates “a deep need to return and create the just state.” When his young and old supporters swing their arms and roll their hips to match his movements, they accept the message he is peddling. Those who follow him see Zuma not as a calculating kleptocrat but as a champion of the downtrodden whose good intentions have been hamstrung by spiteful forces. Now, he is being unfairly persecuted. They accept him as the man to foil a great political betrayal. Anytime they do, a nail is driven deeper into the coffin of the ANC and the prospect of accountable democracy in South Africa.

The second explanation for Zuma’s popularity can be gleaned by looking at his personal and the MK party’s exploits in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), where the party secured 45.3  percent of votes. It is not surprising that Zuma’s home province is his party’s stronghold. Before he became leader of the ANC in 2009, KZN politics was dominated by the Zulu nationalist party Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). His ascendence to the ANC’s helm provoked a migration of Zulu nationalist impulses from the IFP to the ANC. In Zuma’s leadership, Zulus perceived that the ANC was evolving towards traditionalism. Until then, the Party of Liberation was advancing policies of cosmopolitan modernization, as seen in Mbeki’s “African Renaissance” vision. Believing firmly that Zuma is a conduit of “Zuluness,” Zulu migrants in cities and those in rural areas happily invested their emotions and support in the ANC. The clear message is that his believers will follow him wherever he goes.

Jason Hickel’s Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics explains this shift and sheds light on another dimension of Zuma’s staying power. He draws on extensive sources to argue that the Zulus believe “the state of nature is one of sameness, disorder, and sterility, and fruition can only be realized by properly ordering the social world” through strict social hierarchies regulated by cultural and moral codes (umthetho). Adherents of this cosmological theory of fortune and misfortune or affliction and healing believe that the idea of democracy, which aims to dismantle hierarchies and liberate individuals to realize their agency, disrupts the order that is conducive to fruitful social reproduction. Consequently, they perceive liberal policies promoted by the ANC—equal rights for women, children, and sexual minorities as well as abortion rights and support for single mothers—as the underlying cause of misfortunes such as unemployment, illness, inability to pay bridewealth or even death.

These beliefs, Hickel argues, undergirded the unyielding resistance to the ANC in Zulu heartlands. It motivated violent clashes between the IFP and the ANC over the mantle of fighting for black liberation. After apartheid, these sentiments determined party allegiance and voting behavior, underwriting the IFP’s decades-long dominance in KZN until 2009, when Zuma was elected ANC president. Hickel argues that Zulus “see him [Zuma] as embodying many of the values that they feel are otherwise under threat.” He respects the hierarchies of the rural homestead and upholds the ideals of traditional patriarchal masculinity. Through his deep understanding of cultural idioms and competent use of isiZulu, he slips easily into his supporters’ worlds, assuring them that he would “bring culture back.” Additionally, Zuma’s disapproval of same-sex marriage and his rejection of abortion rights signal to his supporters that he only partially supports liberal ideals. It is by embodying these values, Hickel argues, that his co-ethnics have come to regard him as an uBaba (father) who has an isizotha (dignity) of an inkosi (chief). 

Aubrey Matshiqi has made a similar point recently, that Zuma is the symbolic “leader of the Zulus,” and attacks on him are interpreted by his supporters as attacks on the Zulus. This explains why his affiliation with the MK party swiftly boosted the party’s popularity and displaced other parties like the EFF that were lining up to dethrone the ANC. 

If his time in office is anything to go by, Zuma would have very little political substance to offer his staunch supporters and South Africa. But his followers’ willingness to stick with him indicates performance matters less to them. Perhaps they believe in him not solely, if even, because he can offer the economic empowerment he is promising. In a country where the national story is no longer coherent, as Will Shoki argues, and in heady times when globalization is making us all “people of nowhere,” he represents a salve for his followers’ longing and loss. 

The components that form the foundations of Zuma’s movement—culture, ethnicity, traditional morality, and deployment of the past as a critique of the present—largely render standard democratic reasoning and counterpoints useless. Liberals in South Africa and around the world don’t have much in their arsenal to respond adequately to such cultural populists and ethno-nationalists. Every counterargument becomes proof of the accusation of elitist arrogance.

The rise, the fall, and the rise again of Zuma teach us that culture inflects the positive and not-so-positive trajectories of democratic change in ways that demand attention. It is my hope, at least, that his opponents have learned better than to pronounce Zuma and his ilk politically dead, for they will have heirs.