On Monday (July 15), I listened to pretty much all former President Jacob G Zuma’s so-called testimony before the Zondo State Capture Commission, so-called because the first day was mostly given over to Zuma’s opening statement, not to testimony per se.
On Tuesday (July 16), during commission time, I had other tasks which entailed driving to Pretoria, so I caught some of Zuma’s testimony on news bulletins. I also listened to the hour or so devoted to Zuma and the commission on Radio 702’s Eusebius McKaiser show – during which I thought McKaiser handled Zuma’s opening statement quite sensitively, viz., non-dogmatically, which surprised me (for one). Then I later caught up with snippets of the actual testimony on eNCA.
In 2008, my Zuma: A Biography (2008) was published; and, if my memory serves me, I last had an actual conversation with Zuma in April 2009, a month or so before he was elected president for the first time, and I was last in the same room as he in July 2010 when he formally hosted Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Pretoria.
After that, as far as the Presidency was concerned, I apparently became persona non grata of sorts. But the same happened to a few others who had known him “well” prior to his election; besides, my new decreased “status” might have had more to do with certain “advisers” around him at the Presidency rather than him.
Bottom line, though: 10 years’ ago, I did know him quite well, insofar as one can “know” Zuma – for he is an odd mixture: quite opaque, while at the same being a case of “what you see is what you get”. Having known him somewhat, then, I offer these few thoughts and observations, for what they are worth.
What surprised me (initially) and seemed also to surprise callers to the McKaiser show – and even McKaiser himself – was the mouth-opening bizarreness of Zuma’s opening statement. He was at the Commission into State Capture yet went on a weird ramble in which he said he was the target of 30-year-old conspiracy put in place by various “enemies of the people” which included, and apparently include, senior ANC comrades. What, people wondered, did this “conspiracy narrative” have to do with state capture?