JOHANNESBURG - According to the learned Karima "Pajamas" Brown of Business Day, Sdumo Dlamini, the president of Cosatu, said on Monday that Jacob G Zuma - he's the president (at least for the nonce) - should "fire his political advisers for being a ‘disaster' and axe his communications team for failing to guide him through a series of PR nightmares that have plunged his presidency into crisis a mere 10 months since taking office" [my emphasis, as the scholars say].
That's an odd way of putting it, because what Brown is calling a "crisis" has been on the cards ever since the motley crew that swept Zuma to power started jeering at the old farts on the podium in Polokwane in December 2007.
Some people, such as I, hoped it (the "crisis") wouldn't happen at all. But it was only a matter of time before the squabbling started between various factions (the "businessmen" vs. the Lefties, the piglets such as Little Julie Malema vs. the straights such as Gwede Mantashe, the Zulus vs. the rest, and so on), with JZ doing nothing about it.
It was only a matter of time before Zuma was nabbed making babies (though the making of the love child pre-dated his inauguration) when he ought to have been busy instead giving the various factions detention or even a patsch on their collective tuchis.
It was only a matter of time before a big mouth such as Malema, or a facsimile thereof, started screwing around with foreign investment with this shrill and barely comprehensible squeaks about nationalisation.
The only question was this: how long would it take before the wheels fell off (and, as I said, there was also the hope among folks such as I that the wheels wouldn't fall off, but ....). Things went along pretty well until the love child - which is when everyone realised that they were irritated with JZ because few of them were getting what they thought was their due.
Now there is a question being asked, among the chattering classes (even if not in the ANC national executive committee): will Zuma last his term?
Yes, of course he will. He is needed by the various factions - and, what's more, I think (and it's not an original thought) that he's going to shep much naches (an Irish phrase meaning "to get much pleasure and gratification from") from the soccer world cup. In fact it's going to save his bacon (if the naches sheppers will pardon the phrase). The problems are going to come later; the ANC's NGC (national general council) is, I believe, in September and it's going to be hairy for JZ.
But to return to Dlamini, with whom I began. He's obviously been reading Politicsweb, for clearly he has been reflecting on my article of 3 March about Jesse "James" Duarte and Lakela "Kenneth" Kaunda and on my point that that it is a pusillanimous, feckless and none too creative a bunch that are handling "comms" (as they used to call it in the old SADF) at the Union Buildings. ("Man, I've got zero-zero-fuck-all comms here," as a signalman of my acquaintance was wont to say.)
And, actually, as a learned friend of mine was saying today, some of the "stuff" - e.g. the love child - has been handled so badly that it's almost as though someone at the Buildings is consciously sticking, as John Lennon would have said, a Spaniard in the works. Or a knife into JGZ.
Anyway, this being the case - I thought to myself today - isn't it a good thing that we now have two other national spokesmen to speak out for all of us on national affairs?
The first one is Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. She inter alia allegedly told Nadira Naipaul, who visited Winnie with her husband, the writer VS Naipaul, in Soweto, in August last year, that her former husband, Nelson R Mandela, had agreed to a bad deal for blacks and should never have agreed to a truth commission, and that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu was a cretin.
Of course one doesn't know whether the interview was on the record; whether Nadira, VS or a re-write person at the London Evening Standard wrote it (both VS and his wife are in any case shit-causers from way back); why it was published now; and so on. And neither the Naipauls nor Madikizela-Mandela is available for comment. I must say it reads pretty credibly - actually a very good read and very interesting too; you should have a look at it. But I find it difficult to believe that Winnie would have framed it as an attack on her former husband; especially not as they have had a recent toenadering.
No, I think that was just the way the writer, whoever it was, set the piece up. And it's about time that certain things were said - such as Mandela being a "corporate foundation" who was and sometimes still is "wheeled out to collect the money". If anyone had bothered to listen to his former attorney, Ismail Ayob, which of course they didn't, they would know that there is more than a grain of truth in that claim.
But the rest is pure Janus-faced Winnie nonsense. It sounds good - and she no doubt believes it - but why she thinks Mandela et al struck a bad deal, one does not know. They got the whole farm. What else could one want?
And there were many - in which number I include myself - who would have preferred to have seen Nuremberg-type trials (for both sides, mind) rather than the TRC. But it wasn't possible. Mandela would have woken to find the Union Buildings ringed with tanks. It had to be softly-softly. I think, pace Anthea Jeffery, the downsides of the TRC process were far outweighed by the upsides.
But what I find interesting about Winnie's alleged bitter and passionate outburst is that another learned friend of mine - who seems to get these things correct - has suggested that there is a method to Winnie's apparent madness.
He suggests that she was asked to do a little softening up of the body politic - in preparation for a huge reparations payment that is going to be announced shortly, in terms of which the MK veterans, who have come back into prominence under Zuma (and who mainly sat on their butts in exile and did not do much actual fighting), are going to be collecting handsomely.
Oh well, time will tell.
Our second national spokesman is of course Little Julie - who to my surprise came out firing this week. I saw him on TV singing "Kill the boer" - for which Dr Pieter Mulder has laid a charge against him. Malema will doubtless claim that someone forged his voice and used his head as a ventriloquist's dummy. He also made some comments about Patricia de Lille's marital status that even I found in appallingly bad taste.
Clearly, this fat-faced creature is not entirely stupid. Anyone who thinks he is should read Anthony Butler's Business Day column of 8 March. The learned Butler argues pretty convincingly "that [t]he incredible truth, then, is that Malema has persuaded many young communists, SACP cadres and Cosatu activists to campaign for a wholly bogus nationalisation programme. What they will get is a state-owned mining house that will bail out fat cats by looting unionists' own pensions. And the left says it is Malema who is stupid?"
What I don't understand is why Zuma has not muzzled Malema. "What can Zuma do?" Butler asked me over not-the-best Caesar salad in Johannesburg. Well, for one thing, Zuma could take him to a disciplinary hearing - or, even better, get Gwede Mantashe to do so. Because notwithstanding the soccer world cup, Little Julie is causing a great deal of trouble that right now Zuma could do without.
Here's my hate speech for the week: I'd hang the little bozo upside down from a tree and let people come and pin their failed tender documents to his butt.
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