Zuma cronies will defy national sentiment
4 April 2016
President Nelson Mandela was a statesman of iconic stature. His powers lay in his keen astuteness as a lawyer, innate understanding of statecraft and his unique ability to phrase complex issues in Universalist language. In 1993, addressing a Cosatu Conference, he offered the ultimate solution to the gross misuse of state power: “If the ANC does to you what the Apartheid government did to you, then you must do to the ANC what you did to the Apartheid government.” There was no moral obfuscation. His message was clear and powerful. For Mandela, whatever was morally impermissible, was politically and legally unacceptable. He was guided by an unfaltering moral compass and he therefore led the ANC to the pinnacle of its glory.
Zuma, at the other end of the scale, is offering a master class in how to make the impermissible, permissible. To Zuma, whatever is morally, politically and legally impermissible is only a hurdle to be easily leapt over. He has been offering ANC politicians a master class in how to mount a successful bloodless coup. Not for Zuma the mess of spilling blood to stay on the throne. Sucking the blood of the nation by stealth has been his specialty.
As Justice Malala pointed out today in his column in The Times, Zuma’s “greatest coup has been to capture the ANC”. Once he had ousted Thabo Mbeki, and captured the ANC, he rapidly “packed all the ANC bodies that can recall him with his own cronies” and then proceeded to castrate “the capabilities of our security agencies by appointing cronies to top jobs”. From that point the way was open for Zuma to enrich himself and to giggle uncontrollably at his cunning foxiness.
Whoever succeeds him as President will have learnt the necessity of keeping the Premier League onside and recognise the importance of allowing all the ‘patronage networks’, as Jan-Jan Joubert calls them, to remain unfettered and shielded.