JOHANNESBURG - When I was young and good-looking, with a stomach as flat as a surf board, I had, for my sins, to do my first couple of weeks of basic training in Ladysmith - in the dead of winter.
It was beaucoup, beaucoup cold that winter; and, like our prisons today, 5 SA Infantry camp then was hopelessly overcrowded and some of us had to huddle in tents. See? No proper planning, not even in PW Botha's fascist, military-industrial complex of yore.
Anyway, we had a company sergeant-major ("sar-majoor") who was wont to repeat the following mot: "Luvvies, if you doesn't listen to what I say, you will be fucked by the fickle finger of fate." I'm not sure there was any logic to his pronouncement. No matter; like me, he loved the sound of certain words and phrases, especially "the fickle finger of fate".
His other beauties were: "While you is here, boys, I wants you to extinguish yourselves." And: "Boys, I is your mother and father now. If you goes home after basics and puts Sarie up the spout, you come and tell me. I will fix it." See? Even then English was not spoken or written correctly, though I have to say the CSM was more entertaining than most of today's news readers and journalists.
The point of this small anecdote - yet another, I hear you cry, in my long line of gratuitous anecdotes that drive RW Johnson batty and detain you from rushing back from this screen to your labours - is two-fold.
My first point - though not necessarily in order of importance - is that I have after mature reflection (a full eight or nine days) realised that President JG Zuma has indeed been screwed - not so much by the fickle finger of fate or by an incarnation of Sarie (Ms S Khoza), but by the fickleness of those he has tried to appease.
In other words, to put it in a banal manner (so that Johnson, say, will understand) the problem with trying to be all things to all people is that you end by pleasing no one. In short, Zuma, it seems to me, is in trouble. We shall return to this point in a minute.
Second, I no longer have a stomach flat as a surf board - in short, I am older - and the advantage of being older, uglier and maybe a tad wiser is that I am able to say that I am wrong; I have been mistaken.
Okay: so on 31 January, we heard that the president's 20th child was born out of wedlock and, as I wrote in the preface to the new edition of Zuma's biography (on which I'm working at the moment), "all the Mother Grundys in the land [will] soon be grumbling and buzzing, like massed vuvuzelas at a soccer match, that the man [is] an incorrigible disgrace".
I was indeed correct; and in last week's column here, I expressed my view that the small collection of Mother Grundys and drama queens whom I had encountered - Redi Direko, Justice Malala, Phylicia Oppelt, Helen Zille, the Rev KRJ Meshoe, MP, and Pierre de Vos - were all simply envious.
It was my sweet way of saying, "Chill down, guys, save your anguish and 48pt headlines for when the pope dies and your moral righteousness for when Barack Obama gets caught doing a naughty (trust me, it's the goody-goody ones that you really have to watch) - and please, guys, don't make a facile, knee-jerk connection between the struggle against HIV and Zuma having a penchant for slipping the big chiluga without a condom."
It was also my way of suggesting that the fuss about Zuma's sexual peccadillo and new babaloo was going to pass pretty quickly.
My gentle call for perspective and humour was all in vain. The reaction from just about everyone reached a crescendo last week - so much so that people of all sorts and sizes have been looking at Zuma with much the same feeling as my maternal grandmother regarded pork.
At the weekend, I think it was, a fellow with the remarkable name of Eusebius McKaiser wrote a piece here on Politicsweb in which he also called for a little perspective about Zuma (see here).
Now, I suppose his piece smacked a little of the "Xolela Mangcu school of Seffrican pseudo-intemallectuallity". But, listen, McKaiser was between a rock and a hard place. What he was really wanted to say - if I may interpret a little - went something like this: "Listen up, you honkies, you don't like Zuma because he's other, he's different, because he does things and has values with which you cannot cope. So, okay, trim your expectations a little, and don't be so bloody morally hysterical - because if he were a whitey, we wouldn't be listening to this stuff from you guys."
But of course this being Seffrica - and Seffricans being as sensitive as they are at the minute, for various reasons - McKaiser could not put it that way. He had to write it the way he wrote it - and I thought it was an interesting, alternative take on the situation.
Boy o boy did this guy get in the neck from you guys. That's YOU! - you there, the reader of Politicsweb. Some of you folk can be bloody nasty, some of you folk can be unbelievably racist, and some of you can be the most unbelievable caricatures of antediluvian white capitalists, with a strong spiritual resemblance to the late Ian Smith. Yussus, why don't you let a person have his/her say and then disagree, if you want to do so, in a rational and measured way? We don't all have to behave like Little Julie Malema, you know; it's not written into the constitution.
But never mind all my words and your words and Zapiro's nasty little cartoons and all the moral indignation.
What is way more interesting has been the reaction from the tri-partite alliance. There has hardly been one. Remember a while back when Helen Zille made her ad hominem attacks on Zuma? Remember how the alliance, and especially the ANC, reacted? They turned on Zille. They turned on anyone who dared criticise Zuma. Actually Little Julie said he would kill for Zuma (or maybe that was on another occasion - but you get the picture).
But now? Now there has been a cold, cold, an icy, silence from everyone - in the ANC, the SACP, and Cosatu. They are seriously pissed off with Zuma - hence, the apology of last weekend (versus the silly first reaction from the presidency, the one about the press report blighting the life of an innocent mother and child). And this silence - this lack of obvious support for Zuma - is actually very serious for him (for which "insight", by the way, I thank Anton Harber for pointing out to me).
It seems clear that Zuma has been trying to appease everyone: the venal group, who are there for the gravy from the trough and want inter alia to plunder the SA Reserve bank and the mines; the lefties, who are annoyed that some vaguely sensible people, e.g., Trevor Manuel, Pravin Gordhan, have been left in charge of the economy and that the attack dog Malema has been allowed to continue running up and down the yard without a leash; the young nudniks, who have gone to war with the lefties and with Barbara Hogan and Gwede Mantashe; the economic apparatchiks, e.g., Manuel and Collins Chabane, who seem frozen in some kind of no man's land; and the okes who are out for themselves, e.g. Tokyo Sexwale ....
But the trouble, as we well know, with trying to appease everyone is that you please no one, that you can't keep all your promises to everyone - and then on top of it all, with all our seniors at one another's throats, it turns out that Zuma has mostly been focused on having a good time ... no wonder that the seniors are seriously annoyed with him and are giving him the cold, silent shoulder.
In short: I was wrong. JZ's relationship with Ms K, and their baby, is not going to go away in a hurry and - never mind all the righteous smoke - could prove to be the most expensive political gaffe Zuma has ever made.
His relationship and child out of wedlock is a political watershed moment for JGZ; I believe he has been speared by the fickle finger of his sort of conciliatory politics; and his peccadillo has served to demonstrate just how annoyed and irritated all his "supporters" are feeling just now - because no one's got what they really want yet.
It's always a mistake to underestimate Jacob G Zuma - as many have discovered. But it's going to be a really chastened man who presents the state of the nation address, one who is in a state of vulnerability that he probably thought he would never ever be in again after corruption charges were dropped against him last year.
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