Our long-suffering president, JG Zuma, is under siege again. I thought his situation was neatly summed up in Zapiro's Sunday cartoon. We saw Zuma, replete with shower head, carrying five massive suitcases on his back.
Out of each protrudes one of the following people or groups of people: the Gupta brothers; "relatives" - not very good drawings of Duduzane Zuma, Zuma's son by Kate Mantsho, and Khulubuse Zuma, the president's robust nephew; Manyi, as in Jimmy, the government spokesperson; Cele, as in Bheki the national police commissioner; and, finally, Gaddafi and the arms sales that the government has made to him.
The "scandals" precipitated by these people and by previous arms sales to the Libyan despot are perceived to be Zuma's main burdens at the moment - to which we could also add a recent story about a shopping list, to buy for the Presidency: "gravy ladles of gold, cut-glass champagne glasses, dozens of new paintings and 48 Persian carpets fit for a president ...".
Interesting to me is that the above "problems", for which Zuma is being hammered, are pretty funny. Well, they're not really; nearly all the problems that these people represent have, or could have, devastating consequences on many "innocent" people. Still, given the dramatis personae, all or most of them are indeed funny.
There are the three roly-poly Gupta brothers, who on the one hand wander about trying to ingratiate themselves with all and sundry, while bringing out an embarrassingly anemic newspaper that doesn't ever seem to be distributed. On the other hand, they are making, hand over fist, very tidy sums in various business deals, not disconnected from Zuma or Duduzane.
Then there was Duduzane who inordinately impressed his Radio 702 host, John Robbie, by actually going to the radio station to say that everything he has recently achieved had nothing whatsoever to do with his surname; that his success was completely and only related to his "getting up in the morning and working hard".