Zuma – Preparing for a Dictatorship?

 

The sudden and, in retrospect, unsurprising move by President Jacob Zuma to remove the sole independent voice in his Cabinet from office, and replace him with a failed ex-Mayor of a minor town has had repercussions that even Zuma in his arrogance probably did not foresee.  Nhlanhla Nene was the sole voice of anything approaching reason in the top ranks of Government, a man who stood up to Zuma, to deny his supposed right to spend R4 billion on a Presidential aircraft, to refuse to endorse a transaction by South African Airways that would probably have driven that failed State entity to demand another R60 billion support from the State with the main motivation being to provide further self-enrichment opportunities for the favored of the ANC, and to deny Zuma the payoff opportunities that he is claimed to have negotiated in respect of the unaffordable build of the Russian-sourced nuclear power stations.  There are, no doubt, numerous other extravagances that were prevented by Nene, who seems to have been one of the very few ANC glitterati to understand economic principles, and who was prepared to be an honest man in the face of a seemingly unending stream of Zuma and ANC corruption.

This column has warned several times in the past years of the inevitable outcome of allowing a man like Zuma free reign.  It has spoken of his deep admiration for Robert Mugabe, whose main achievement has been the destruction of the once-strong Zimbabwean economy in the process of amassing enormous wealth for himself.  Mugabe has retained power, even in the face of his dismal economic and democratic performance, by buying the support of power brokers and a band of thugs, and Zuma has copied this pattern, taking the ANC with him.  It has warned of the political manipulation by Zuma in the process of escaping 749 criminal charges, of defeating an unequivocal finding by the Public Protector that he enriched himself in the construction of his homestead at Nkandla at a cost to the taxpayers of over R240 million.  It has spoken of his clear determination to place himself above the Courts in ignoring the Order to hand over the Spy Tapes, and in ignoring the clear Order of the High Court to place a wanted criminal, Omar al Bashir, under arrest, by assisting him to flee South Africa.  It has discussed the statement by the Speaker of the House of Assembly, an Office charged with the clear duty under the Constitution to ensure that the Executive is held to account for their conduct.  That stooge of Zuma, clearly in awe of the man who is the fountainhead of her fortunes, stated clearly that the President is above the Rules of Parliament.  She has also breached the Constitution in bringing into Parliament a Police force to expel the entire elected membership of the Economic Freedom Fighters, regardless of the fact that a good proportion of those Members of Parliament had committed no breach of the Rules.  She is guilty of an act not very far from a coup d’etat in instructing a military-style force to stifle the legitimate demands of a duly elected political Party to obtain an explanation from a rogue President of his alleged corruption.  It has discussed the building of a security force of some 7 000 people around the President, people who are solely accountable to him and who cannot be overseen by any democratically-representative body.  It is difficult to envisage a need for a private security force of that size except in the context of an illegitimate grasp of absolute power.

And, in all of this, the ANC has been heavily complicit.  Numerous examples have been publicized of the positioning of the ANC to benefit from large State contracts, ranging from a stake gained in Mitsubishi, prior to that company being awarded a lucrative contract to supply electricity generation turbines  to Eskom, against the strong recommendation of a panel of Eskom experts, to the gaining of a stake in Shell South Africa, prior to that company being awarded an ‘exploration license’ to drill the fraccing wells in the Karoo, against the advice of numerous national and international experts in the field.

Where is all this going?

The answer lies in the fact that Jacob Zuma’s tenure as President will come to an end in 2019, even if, by some miracle, the ANC retains a majority in the election in that year.  It is clear that neither the ANC nor Jacob Zuma will willingly forego the huge cash flow that presently comes to them as a result of their political dominance, nor will they willingly hand over the power to investigate their actions since 1994 to any of the increasingly hostile Opposition Parties, whose first action will be to prosecute and jail those that can be shown to be corrupt, and to use the funds recovered from them to rebuild the economy to something near to what it should have been.  Following the Mugabe model, if the ANC is not able to gain a majority sufficiently large to amend the Constitution to permit Zuma a lifetime Presidency, the next alternative will be to declare a state of emergency, to permit Zuma and his stooges to retain control of the country and the seemingly unending flow of wealth that it can bring.  The Dictator to whom we will all answer will be Jacob Zuma, a man who will be placed above all criticism.

This is not fantasy.  Look at the people Jacob Zuma admires, and from whom he has learnt.  The list is large.  Muammar al Gaddafi, Mao Tze Dung, Robert Mugabe, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, Shaka Zulu are prominent on that list.  And every one of them gained and held onto power by brutality, by seizing power by subterfuge and by force.  Every one of them gained huge wealth at the cost of their countrymen.  And every one of them brought their countries to their knees, leaving behind a legacy of destitution, despair and destruction of the ideals of democracy that men like Nelson Mandela gave their lives to build.

The citizens of the world must be aware that a force for evil is reaching fruition in South Africa, a force that has the potential to destroy the freedom of so many citizens of the world that has been built, at huge cost, since the Second World War.  They must take action now to make their concerns known, by depriving every part of the Zuma Empire of the flow of funds that is his sole reason for being there.  They must broadcast their concern to everyone who will listen, to ensure that the lies being spread by the South African Government are not swallowed as the truth.  Zuma and the ANC present a problem to the world that is at least as serious as that posed by the Apartheid system.