JOHANNESBURG - Here, then, is a not entirely gratuitous (I hope), selective snapshot of my life for 12 hours beginning at about 8pm last Tuesday, March 30th.

The first thing that happened - this was during dinner in a sumptuous Johannesburg northern suburbs home - was that a leading advocate, who is also an acclaimed expert on constitutional law, turned on me and said: "You're the fine fellow who lionised our President in that book you wrote. What have you to say now?"

"You must be referring," said another dinner guest, before I had had a chance to open my mouth, "to our polygamous President?"

"His polygamy, love children and apparent dislike of condoms are the least of the problem," said the advocate. "I'm talking about Zuma's complete lack of leadership. I'm talking about that shambles of a cabinet and government in which everyone is squabbling."

"Nolo contendere," "I do not wish to contend," was all I could think of by way of reply. In other words, I was lying down on my back with my tail between my legs and, at least for that moment, admitting defeat - and, for once, not coming to the verbal aid of Zuma.

Later, as I drove home, at about 10.45pm, I made the mistake of flicking on Radio702 to hear Gwede Mantashe, the secretary general of the ANC, and Kieno Kammies, the late night presenter, having a debate about the decision by an acting judge, South Gauteng High Court's Judge Leon Halgryn, to ban the words Dubul'ibhunu ("Shoot the Boer") in the song Ayesaba Amagwala ("The Cowards are Scared").

Kammies was so excited at having the SG on his programme that he got into the swing of things by talking as loudly and incomprehensibly as Mantashe - and both the volume and the number of heroic non sequiturs climbed exponentially when, after about five minutes, the president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, deigned to join the debate. (Clearly, when Malema is busy of an evening on some wood-working projects in his Sandton workshop, he listens to 702.)

In fairness to Kammies, he was trying to suggest to both Little Julie and Mantashe that, whatever the cultural merits of singing "Shoot the Boer" and notwithstanding the genocide perpetrated against the Khoi San, singing a song about killing boere is not likely to make a massive contribution to reconciliation. In fact, it's probably not very nice to hear the ditty if one is, for example, a boer. (Which I, for example, am not; I merely eat, at sumptuous dinner parties, the stuff the boere produce.)

But Mantashe and Malema weren't going to have any of that. They didn't want their theories on the cultural importance of the above-mentioned song to be sullied by any sweet reasonableness - from Kammies or anyone else. And in fact Malema had a little temper tantrum (or so it seemed) because he hung up the phone.

The next morning the media was full of the most unutterable rubbish about the "banning" of the song. Some of the pieces, in their breathtaking foolishness, trumped even the ANC's statement of the day before, which seemed to have been written by Mantashe. All were unadulterated agitprop that must have had George Orwell spinning in his grave.

My morning grew worse when I realised that one of the barbs that the advocate had thrown at me the previous evening - that Zuma's visit to Zimbabwe had obviously produced absolutely nothing - was apparently accurate. Clearly nothing is going to change while Robert Mugabe remains as president; and the shuttling back and forth and talk is absolutely worthless.

But what - I hear you cry - has Zuma to do with all this?

My answer is this: there was and is no response to the advocate's contention that there is no apparent leadership in the government. Which is a good point for me to say that my morning was not entirely wasted because, following the suggestion of one of my many rude fans, I read Allister Sparks' column of 31 March, "Obama, Zuma and a question of leadership" in Business Day (see here) in which he compares, from the point of view of leadership, Zuma and Barack Obama.

I am not certain that I agree with all of Sparks' arguments and assumptions. But I do agree with his point that: "At almost every level innovative thinking is stifled because of Zuma's policy of governing by a process of consensus, which means perpetual compromise, to keep his broad coalition together. There can be no bold leadership in such a process."

And not only is there a dearth of leadership, but the national debate has fallen into the hands, or rather mouths, of demagogues such as Mantashe and Malema, and irrationality and silliness are the queens for the month.

And what has been Zuma's response? To quote yet another commentator (this time Tim Cohen writing for Maverick on line on 18 March): "From Richard Nixon to Mikhail Gorbachev, from George Bush to Gordon Brown, unsuccessful politicians all share a single devastating characteristic. They think their problems emanate from ‘poor image management'. The reason they think that is because the only alternative explanation is that the problem really lies with them. And that would be a thought more frightening than death."

In short, all that Zuma's done recently has been to fiddle a little with his spin doctors - as if a "change of image" is going change the present political bottom line - and to call for a national talk about our "cultural differences".

Then on Saturday night Eugene Terre'Blanche was murdered. I don't think anyone is much interested in a quiet chat right now.

Jeremy Gordin is a veteran journalist and author of Zuma: A Biography. This is an expanded version of Gordin's "Zuma watch" column that first appeared in the Daily Dispatch.

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