Jacob Zuma – the political wildcard in South Africa’s election

Despite being a disgraced former president who was sent to jail, Jacob Zuma is turning out to be the political wildcard in South Africa’s election campaign.

This follows his dramatic decision to ditch the governing African National Congress (ANC) for the newly formed party uMkhonto we Sizwe, meaning Spear of the Nation.

The 81-year-old is leading its campaign in the 29 May general election, urging people to turn their backs on the ANC led by his successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“Zuma is, as ever, playing a mischievous hand,” political analyst Richard Calland told the BBC.

“He doesn’t want power, but leverage in the ANC. He wants to dethrone Ramaphosa for a more pliable leader,” he said.

The two most recent opinion polls suggest that Mr Zuma’s party – known by the acronym MK – is making a huge impact, gaining around 13% of the national vote and 25% in the former president’s political heartland of KwaZulu-Natal.

But Angelo Fick, the director of research at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute in Johannesburg, believes that the party will get fewer votes, especially in the ballot for the national parliament.

“I’ll be surprised if it gets 6%,” he told the BBC.

To back up his view, he cited the performance of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in the first election it contested after expelled ANC youth leader Julius Malema formed the party.

Mr Malema took much of the ANC youth membership into the EFF, but the party only got 6% of the national vote in 2014, and 11% in 2019.

“The MK party is far weaker than the EFF was in 2014,” Mr Fick said.

But the MK party is hoping to hold the balance of power, especially as various opinion polls suggest that the ANC could lose its outright majority in the national parliament for the first time since it took power at the end of white-minority rule three decades ago.

“Once we enter minority government territory, every single percentage matters. If the MK party gets 3%, it could be the difference between the ANC getting 48% and 51%,” Prof Calland said.

Paddy Harper, the South African Mail & Guardian newspaper’s KwaZulu-Natal correspondent, said the ANC “was potentially at its weakest in the province, and it will be a massive blow to the party if it loses control of the provincial government”.

“When Zuma was in the ANC, KwaZulu-Natal became the party’s largest and most influential province. It helped the ANC cross the 50% line in every national election since 2004,” he told the BBC.

At first, the ANC ignored the formation of the MK party but after Mr Zuma threw his weight behind it in December, the party launched legal action in the electoral court to deregister it and prevent it from running.

It also wants the High Court to bar it from using the name MK, arguing that the ANC has copyright over it.

The battle over the name is crucial, as MK refers to the now-defunct armed wing of the ANC that Nelson Mandela launched in 1961 to fight the racist system of apartheid.

So, it has deep political symbolism, with the ANC determined to prevent Mr Zuma – who joined the ANC’s armed struggle as a teenager – from claiming to be its heir.