JAUNDICED EYE
The departure of President Jacob Zuma from the corridors of power is imminent. With his early exit, history again executes one of those neat, ironical loops.
The man who humiliated former President Thabo Mbeki by insisting that he should not be allowed to eke out the final months of his term, is in turn humiliated. His own party will have ejected him from the saddle a full year ahead of his scheduled departure.
The wily manipulator who for almost a decade managed to obfuscate, postpone and sidestep serious criminal charges, will have been brought down. Not by the law enforcement institutions that he had on puppet strings, but by the betrayal of his own inner circle.
This is often the fate politicians who become despised. Julius Caesar, Nicolae Ceausescu, Robert Mugabe, and now Jacob Zuma, all found that constitutional protocols become irrelevant when your comrades turn against you.
Mugabe defied the world and his own people for decades. He presided with impunity over genocide and starvation. But his ouster came swiftly and inevitably when he tried to place his wife in charge of the feeding trough, ahead of the lieutenants who had been long awaiting their turn.