Multiple sources have told The Common Sense that former president Jacob Zuma has suffered a medical event with serious consequences. The implications for the future of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), the stability of KwaZulu-Natal amidst current flare ups of violence, and the broader stability of the country, especially in the aftermath of the November election are considerable.

The starting point to understand those implications lies in the political data around MKP.

Polling conducted by The Common Sense in conjunction with the Social Research Foundation at the end of the second quarter of this year showed MKP enjoying the support of 16% of all voters and 24% of black voters. The latter figure represents exactly two-thirds of the support enjoyed by the African National Congress (ANC) among black voters. In the assessment of Frans Cronje, "that 24% is a sufficiently strong foundation from which MKP, with shrewd strategy, could grow to rival the ANC in size...one plausible outcome by 2029 is a three-way split of South African politics in which the Democratic Alliance (DA), ANC, and MKP each command between a quarter and a third of the national vote.”

The chart below compares the latest MKP poll data by political constituency to that of the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) (fresh numbers are expected this week).

Take that national picture down to a more local level and consider that in two of South Africa’s most important November electoral battlegrounds, Johannesburg and eThekwini, the MKP will have the potential to force a balance of power by allying itself either with the DA or with the ANC and its splinter elements.

See the chart below which sets out the data for MKP support in Johannesburg and eThekwini.

According to Cronje, "There are very interesting green-shoot indications that the party is beginning to break out of its narrow KwaZulu-Natal constituency...it also looks like the MKP should, with the appropriate strategy, be able to maintain its Zulu nationalist roots while simultaneously extending its appeal into broader political constituencies...it is not assured that MKP's longer-term growth prospects need to be constrained by the boundaries of its original support base".

Data on Zuma himself shows that his national favourability rivalled that of President Cyril Ramaphosa. Cronje said, "this defeats the assumption, common among South Africa's elites, that Zuma and, by extension, the MKP are widely reviled".

On the contrary Cronje argues that South Africa's high unemployment rate creates a constituency for aspects of the MKP's populism and provides a foundation from which the party may continue to grow. The electoral appeal of Zuma and the MKP is therefore considerably broader than the perceptions of the country's political establishment might suggest.

The chart below compares the favourability of Ramaphosa to that of Zuma over the two most recent quarters.

Cronje notes that, "while Zuma's figure amongst ANC voters is low, that relates only to the 35% or so of voters that remain in the ANC, amongst those who have left it is considerably greater".

In immediate campaign terms the MKP also possesses a great strength that neither the ANC nor DA may replicate which is the targeting of foreigners. See the data below on answers to the question of whether foreigners are the cause of South Africa's economic malaise.

Separate data previously published by The Common Sense shows that a 61% majority of South Africans believe it would be right for communities to take the law into their own hands and expel migrants.

The Common Sense's assessment is also that the MKP is an expertly run political organisation and that contrary reporting misunderstands the party's internal strategy. The repeated churn of its leadership is deliberate. It prevents the emergence of an organised internal opposition that might otherwise acquire sufficient influence to challenge or sabotage the party's leadership. The frequent changes in personnel should therefore not automatically be interpreted as evidence of organisational weakness. The MKP also enjoys broad and expert support from third party sources interested in securing a seat at the table of any future South African government.

The appointment of Duduzane Zuma as the party's first deputy president has, in this newspaper's judgment, gone a considerable way towards completing a viable succession strategy for MKP. We regard the younger Zuma as a capable political strategist, and his appointment provides the party with a means of maintaining continuity.

Under Mr Zuma the younger it is expected that the three central elements of the MKP's campaign strategy to date will remain unchanged. The first is to appeal to nostalgia surrounding South Africa's liberation era and the role that Zuma played in it. The second is to acknowledge that mistakes were made during that period and that those mistakes require correction. The third is to demonstrate that the ANC has become increasingly distant from, and even contemptuous of, the voters whose support brought it to power. Together, these arguments allow the MKP to claim the political inheritance of the ANC while simultaneously presenting itself as the vehicle through which the ANC's failures may be corrected.

Further in the MKP’s favour is that third-party actors in civil society, including organisations such as March and March, will remain well positioned to advance causes and campaigns that have the effect of strengthening MKP's electoral appeal.

The collective consequence of all the above is that Zuma's demise will not undermine the MKP's medium-term political trajectory. The opposite may be more likely.

According to Cronje, "South Africa is a conservative society in which serious illness and death is treated with great reverence. Zuma's situation could therefore produce an increase in sympathy for him and, by extension, support for MKP ahead of November's elections".

It should also be relatively straightforward therefore for the party to sustain his political legacy in a manner that preserves its electoral support into at least the medium term. This would be especially true if the ANC continues, as it likely will, to repel sections of its traditional support base.

As for the immediate risk of political violence and disorder in KwaZulu-Natal, either now or after the election, Cronje argues that this kind of thing needs to be placed in its proper historical perspective. South Africa has been a volatile society for four centuries, and its modern history, particularly since the end of the 1800s, has been punctuated by episodes of violence and disorder.

Take the example of the chart below which tracks key moments of violence since 1880 through the Boer War, to the rebellion of 1914, the Bulhoek Massacre, the Rand Revolt of 1922, the Second World War, Sharpeville, Soweto in 1976, the low-intensity civil war in Natal of the 1980s, Boipatong in 1992, the 2008 xenophobic riots, the Lonmin Massacre at Marikana in 2012, and the "insurrection" of July 2021 – amongst many others.

Cronje said, "the chart is not to displace the seriousness of these things but rather to act as a reminder that South Africa has faced many terrible things and come through them and that nothing happening in the present is to suggest that the long-term arc of the country's history is changing...our experience as a country has been that we do this at regular intervals but it passes and we move on...this is a tough place".

The country has consequently developed considerable experience and resilience in managing such events.

The immediate risk now is that a specific incident triggers a broader period of unrest. This could include the state mishandling developments surrounding Zuma, the contestation of November's election results in KwaZulu-Natal, an incident in which a South African is killed during a confrontation involving migrants, or something along the lines of an incident in which police panic and fire on a crowd. Each of these would have the potential to transform an already tense environment into a wider episode of violence.

Fortunately says Cronje, “the response we have seen from the state to date, and specifically the deployment of the military over the weekend mitigates against the risk, as does the experience the intelligence services and private security actors gained from managing events in 2021…over the weekend we put the odds of an eruption at 40/60 against and may lift these to 30/70 within the next week based on what plays out”.

“On the balance of probabilities our expectation is that order should be maintained into November. Even should a further episode of violence occur, the expectation is that it would pass, while private actors are now considerably better equipped to manage its consequences”.

The broader political conclusion is therefore that Zuma's personal circumstances and the MKP's electoral prospects should not be treated as the same question. Zuma was historically central to the party's identity and political appeal, but the constituencies, political incentives, organisational structures, and campaign arguments that underpin MKP's growth are not dependent on his continued public appearances or leadership. His demise may produce short-term uncertainty and heightened security risks. It does not necessarily weaken the forces that have made the MKP one of the most consequential developments in South African politics. On the contrary, the balance of the evidence and the party's strategic position suggest that the MKP may emerge from the present developments with its electoral prospects intact, and potentially strengthened, ahead of November and into the 2029 national elections – a result that would emerge as much from the parlous state of the economy and the very high rate of unemployment as from any other factor.

The Common Sense sends its best wishes to the people dear to him. It maintains, as it has written before, that had his coming to power been handled differently after 2008, including by the business community and elite society, then South Africa might have avoided a lot of the nastiness and risk of recent years.