WE were thinking the other day, here at the Mahogany Ridge, about bunkers and why on earth President Jacob Zuma would want one at Nkandla. If history teaches us anything -- and it would, if we bothered to pay attention -- then it is that to install a bunker in one's crib is to court the worst fate imaginable.
Adolf Hitler? He had a bunker. Didn't help him much, did it? Joseph Stalin had one, too. He didn't die there, though, but in his bed. It was not a peaceful death. He'd suffered a major stroke and lay in helpless agony for five days before finally succumbing simply because those closest to him were too scared to come to his aid. More recently, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, too. Proud owners of top-notch hidey-holes, both trapped in dirty ditches and then executed.
Even the "democratisation" of the bunker, if I may put it that way, won't guarantee a dignified exit. Back when Albania was the sort of people's socialist republic that the higher education minister, Blade Nzimande, is reminded of whenever someone insults the president, practically every family had one. During the 44-year reign of the paranoid Enver Hoxha more than 700 00 bunkers were built in Albania -- one for every four citizens. And for all that, he died unloved and in a pathetic state, a puddle in a wheelchair, suffering from diabetes and a brain ischemia.
With communism's collapse, Albania's bunkers were abandoned. Some were converted into cafes, shops and shelters for the homeless, but most were left to rot. A few briefly saw use in the Balkans conflict in the 1990s, but their most common use now is said to be as a handy spot for youngsters to lose their virginity.
Build a bunker, it seems, and something horrible happens. Still, their allure persists. It is that little extra for the despot who has everything.
Which brings us to the "Stalingrad strategy". This, we're now told, is how Zuma is avoiding his day in court to face corruption charges, and how he has battered the legal institutions senseless in a process that has cost taxpayers millions of rand. It is a mystery why we should pay his lawyers' bills but we will continue to do so for some time. This is how he is able to exhaust and confound every legal avenue and loophole available to him, no matter how absurd. "Every loss," as Business Day columnist Tim Cohen put it, "was then taken on appeal and the appeal was then appealed against."
A retreat to the bunker, then, could well be the final gambit in this strategy. The contempt Zuma and his allies have shown for the Supreme Court of Appeal, with regard to the handover of the "spy tapes", and Parliament, over the refusal to allow the motion of no confidence debate, suggests that matters may be coming to a head.
Should corruption charges be reinstated, and Zuma returned as party leader at Mangaung, then we could have a situation where our president will be spending much of his second the next few years in court. That is, of course, if we continue to uphold the notion of equality before the law as enshrined in the bill of rights, and we wish to restore credibility to the justice system.
The ANC have been quite successful in frustrating the opposition parties' wishes with regards to the motion of no confidence in the president. Dismissing the motion as frivolous and a waste of their time, they forced the Democratic Alliance to take the matter to the High Court, where they lost their application, and now to the Constitution Court.
Slyly, the ANC has now agreed to the debate -- but only in February next year, when the heat, as it were, of Mangaung would supposedly have died. The party's chief whip, Mathole Motshekga, has argued that MPs -- being the hard-working chaps they no doubt are, and simply not content to lie around doing nothing now that the National Assembly has risen -- had loaded their diaries with committee meetings, important foreign visits, international study tours and various other pressing engagements and it would be too much of a hassle to get them all back for the ding-dong.
The motion, if it is heard, will in all likelihood fail -- but so what? The bunker beckons. Having built it, that's where the Zuma era is now headed.
And what of afterwards? What happens to the bunker then? Hopefully the teenagers and schoolchildren of KwaZulu-Natal would not want to lose their virginity there. For that purpose, there are toilets at soccer stadiums that are far more romantic.
This article first appeared in The Weekend Argus.
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