Unemployed graduates, struggling entrepreneurs and army veterans marched through the eastern South African city of Pietermaritzburg this week, chanting the name 'Jacob Zuma'.
The 500 or so demonstrators brought parts of the city, in KwaZulu-Natal province, to a standstill – the traditional stronghold of Mr Zuma, a former president of both South Africa and the African National Congress, the party that ruled the country for three decades. ruled. .
The protest against everyday local problems demanded water and electricity and was also a show of force for the new political party Mr Zuma now leads – uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK – in the hope of eroding the dominant position of his former allies.
“We will have to fight to change things,” said Khumbuzile Phungula, 49, who joined the march after her neighborhood went without water for weeks. “MK is all about change.”
As vendors sold Jacob Zuma T-shirts and an MK-brand energy drink, and men in the military garb of long-disbanded anti-apartheid movements gathered the crowds, the demonstrators embodied Zuma's new party: a group of aggrieved voters who, like him , have had a falling out with a ruling party they consider ineffective and corrupt. Zuma's supporters now form a large enough bloc to do that turn him into a potential kingmaker in South Africa's general elections on May 29.
Not present at the march in Pietermaritzburg was Mr Zuma himself. Instead, he prepared Friday for a hearing at South Africa's Constitutional Court on whether the 82-year-old Zuma is even eligible to stand. He resigned from the top office in 2018 amid widespread protests, and three years later he was convicted of failure to appear at a corruption investigationalthough he eventually served only two months of a prison sentence of 15 months.
Mr Zuma is also already facing factional strife within his nascent party: a senior MK leader has accused the party of forging the signatures needed to contest the election, and police say they are investigating the claims, which the Mr Zuma has dismissed it as a baseless smear.
Yet none of these potential obstacles have deterred MK party members or diminished Zuma's status as a political threat. A lower court has already ruled that he can stand as a candidate, and MK plans to make his next court appearance a campaign event in which Mr Zuma is expected to address his followers.
Both Mr Zuma and his party have rapidly gained momentum, taking advantage of the ANC's internal leadership feuds and inability to provide basic services to South Africans. Since its founding just five months ago, MK has turned the country's political landscape upside down, becoming one of the most visible opposition parties in a crowded arena.
Although he led the party they now blame for the country's problems, Zuma's supporters look back with nostalgia on his ten years as president, including many of those who attended the demonstration in KwaZulu-Natal, the second most populous province in the country.
Lucky Sibambo, a forestry engineer who described himself as a political spectator before the launch of MK and who helped mobilize the march, said he believed Zuma's support for expropriating land without compensation and redistributing it would undermine black businesses like his would help.
Sphumelele Mthembu, 28, said she had been unable to find paid employment despite having a postgraduate degree in clinical psychology. “We are done with the ANC,” she said, watching the march from the balcony of a youth training center. “We are tired of the lies and the disappearance of money.”
And Mnqobi Msezane, 34, who has rallied support for Zuma on university campuses, cited his promises of free university education. Mr Msezane dismissed the corruption allegations that dogged the former president's term as a political ploy to thwart Mr Zuma's efforts to challenge the black political elite and end the economic dominance of white South Africans.
“Poverty has a color, and it is black,” Mr Msezane said.
Mr Zuma has turned his battles into fodder for campaign speeches claiming political persecution, and his supporters have turned the controversies over his presidency into success stories. But even as his popularity has helped the MK party grow, the scandal-prone former president also has obligations as party leader, Mashupye Herbert Maserumule, a professor of public affairs at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, said in an interview.
It is clear every time Mr Zuma addresses a crowd that his personal grievances shape the party's policies, Mr Maserumule said. Mr Zuma, for example, has called for legal change, echoing his repeated claims that he is a target of the courts.
And he added: “If he is no longer the face of MK, that will also mark the end of MK”
But so far, the Knesset's growth has eaten into support for older opposition parties, such as the Democratic Alliance — the country's official opposition — and the Economic Freedom Fighters. A former Democratic Alliance councilor, Pastor Shawn Adkins, even said that he decided to defect to parliament during the march in Pietermaritzburg because he was fed up with the slow rollout of housing in his neighborhood. “I'm convinced,” Mr. Adkins said.
There has been support for the ANC has been declining for years, and faced with a clear threat from the Knesset party, the ruling party is meeting its new rival head-on.
The ANC recently deployed its senior leaders and alliance partners for what the party called “a week of intense campaigning in KwaZulu-Natal” in a bid to curry favor with voters there. Alongside hundreds of volunteers, prominent ANC figures spread out across the province, forsaking large gatherings for more personal home visits.
“We are actually doing everything we can to talk to people, to tell them that the ANC still exists, that the ANC is still strong, that it is still worth supporting,” said Dr Zweli Mkhize, a former provincial chairman of the ANC and presidential candidate. campaigning in the Eastwood community in Pietermaritzburg.
Their efforts were rewarded by some local residents.
One voter, Queenie Potgieter, 65, said she would have supported MK if the ANC had not 'warmed up' her house, but that a visit from Dr. Mkhize had changed her mind.
And while Dr. Mkhize handed out T-shirts and sarongs in the party's colors, Tusiwe Mkhabela, a 21-year-old first-time voter, burst into tears at the sight of a man she considers a celebrity. The ANC has provided her family with welfare and food parcels, she said, and she believes they will also secure a job for her.
Yet 28-year-old Annaline Merime, who has never voted, dismissed the ANC with a sideways glance. “Only when it's time to vote do they do this,” she said. “Where are they the rest of the year?”
Dr. Mkhize said the ANC, aware of its own failures, would not underestimate Zuma's support in the province, nor voters' frustration. It was under Mr Zuma that the ANC itself grew in KwaZulu-Natal, and it was Mr Zuma who groomed the province's current leadership, Dr Mkhize said.
Dr. Mkhize noted that the ANC has dealt with breakaway parties before and said he remained cautiously confident.
“The only complication for us is that President Zuma has never campaigned on the other side,” he said.