Our friend Alec Hogg and his excellent BizNews channel did a very good thing in having the new deputy leader of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), Duduzane Zuma, address delegates at his recent popular investor getaway in the Drakensberg. The younger Zuma spoke very well and said things that South Africa’s elites need to think through – so that they don’t make the mistake with him that they made after 2008 with his father.

When this newspaper polled the MKP last month it found a most striking thing. Among black South Africans the party now attracts two thirds of the support attracted by the African National Congress (ANC).

Put in percentages, 36% of black voters said they would vote for the ANC, whereas 24% said they would back the MKP. If the MKP continues on the growth track it has been on – while the ANC continues to flounder – then parity between those two parties may not be far off. At least it is wise to make the assumption that this could now happen, and then to test the consequences and the strategies to respond.

Speaking to the guests of the man he called “Mr Hogg”, the younger Mr Zuma explained that his party was now a permanent part of South Africa’s political equation. He also explained how in a country with South Africa’s economy, and by extension unemployment, that had to be the case.

When his father came to power in the ANC he made very similar points: that the ANC had changed and that South Africa was a country in which many people lived under very difficult circumstances.

The elder Zuma was also a very capable person. He was highly regarded by the people who had trained him during the Cold War. South Africa’s intelligence people of the 1980s and 1990s (not the thugs but the thinking ones) rated him very highly too as a capable and professional operator. Zuma was, after all, a master chess player and had even established a charity to help children learn the game. Like Vladimir Putin, he did not drink – always an interesting marker of a unique kind of discipline in politicians.

Given his origins and experiences, the elder Mr Zuma had in fact lived the most extraordinary life. Tending livestock as a child in the most poverty-struck rural backwaters one can imagine (a most honourable and responsible thing for a youngster) he rose to the highest levels of international politics, economics, and diplomacy. In fighting apartheid, he did very brave things too – that put his life at great risk.

That he was not a liberal democrat goes without saying. He was no angel (his tenure as the ANC’s security boss was brutal) – but he was real, he led the ANC, he held the office of the president of the country, and millions of people believed in him.

South Africa’s wealthy elites treated him with contempt. They accused him of rape – which was false. They belittled him and sniggered at his speeches and his manner of talking (you try and deliver the State of the Nation address in your third or fourth or fifth language after having been denied much by way of formal education). They saw him as nothing better than a goat herder from Zululand (they were detached enough to think that was an insult) who did not deserve to breathe the same rarified air they did.

Zuma was blamed for load-shedding – it was openly stated by business leaders that he had caused it, when that was false and the lights were already going out before he was in office. It is forgotten that it was Zuma who saved millions of lives by the driving the ARV programme. And the ANC under his leadership voted to block expropriation without compensation in Parliament.

The point is not to resuscitate Zuma’s reputation or present him as something he was not. Quite the opposite, the point is to the present him as he was and therefore that the strategic position in the country was more complex than it was made out to be. There was nuance at play and internal contradictions, and these needed to be understood and managed on their merits. That was never understood and advice that it should be, was met with the stupid response that it was partisan.

Foolishly, those same elites came to involve themselves in the internal affairs of the ANC and plotted to determine its leadership – passing around vast sums of money in the process. When they were advised instead to respect the office of the president for what it is, understand that what was behind Zuma was real, and then think very carefully about the wisdom of interfering in internal ANC processes, they responded with a nonchalant arrogance.

That hurt Zuma and isolated him and later came to embitter him. Advice that he was an extremely capable actor and must not be underestimated was dismissed with the same familiar arrogance. The result was to exacerbate the consequences of what befell South Africa after 2008.

Don’t make that mistake again. The MKP are not angels and hardly liberal democrats. But they are real and there is real momentum behind them. And behind that momentum are millions of real people who live in poverty and without jobs for many reasons that extend beyond corruption and cadre deployment to the fact that South Africa’s elites continue to drive equally damaging ideas from a net-zero policy the taxation of capital in the name of empowerment – twin ideas that have killed industrial growth and therefore the country’s most important avenue of job creation. Those are the same elites who brought President Cyril Ramaphosa to power and supported him despite his aversion to reform, the chain of counter-productive decisions he took in office, and the now serious corruption allegations he faces. In all those decisions they share the culpability for where the country is at.

Watch Duduzane Zuma here speaking on Biznews and think for yourself.