The chickens come home to roost

It is a truism. You can fool some of the people all the time, and some of them some of the time, but you can’t fool all of them all of the time. Jacob Zuma is learning some hard lessons, and several of his loyal henchmen and –women are learning that you can’t trust a lying manipulator.

Zuma has lied consistently, to the ANC, to Parliament and to the public. He lied when he asserted with a straight face that he did not realize that the Government was spending R245 million on his private home. How he could ever hope to get away with a bald-faced lie of that magnitude is almost beyond belief, but he obviously did. When he was found out, he convinced his Minister of Police to lie for him, to aver, in an outright breach of his Oath of Office and of his duties under the Constitution, that all of that money had been spent on ‘security upgrades’. Another lie, but this time the incredibly stupid Minister was found out by the Constitutional Court, as was his lying boss. The fact that the lying President was in control of the ANC stooges in Parliament, men and women sworn to uphold the Constitution and to hold him to account, enabled both of these liars to worm out of any responsibility for their lack of honesty and integrity, and the Minister of Police was disciplined, in mock accordance and a slap in the face for the Constitutional Court Judges and the public of South Africa, by a meek letter saying in effect “You’ve been a bad boy. Don’t do it again unless I tell you to.” Both of them walked away free, but the ANC received a hearty serving of egg – or something worse – on its face. But they still held to their hero worship of the worst President the country has ever had, National Party included.

The next act of dishonesty came when the Minister of Energy simply rubber-stamped a deal under which the country’s fuel reserves were sold at a price substantially below the market price, and, again, in breach of a Constitutional duty to refer the proposed sale to Parliament for approval. Zuma failed even to reprimand the Minister, or to refer the question to the Police (a bunch of incompetents firmly under his thumb), to the Hawks (ditto) or to the Public Protector (a woman of unquestionable integrity) who would have taken the Minister to the cleaners. He ignored totally the supposed Performance Agreement which, he said, had been signed with all the Minister. In total accordance with the style that one has come to accept from this man, he has never made public the terms of those supposed agreements, never mind his evaluation of the performance of the Ministers.

Zuma followed through in signing an agreement with the Russians committing South Africa to spend R1,2 trillion on totally unnecessary nuclear reactors, no doubt including, in a side agreement, a demand for payment of a ‘finder’s fee’ of 10% to the ANC and another unspecified amount to himself via an unspecified intermediary. When the public came to hear of this lunacy, the lying President denied that there was an agreement, and that the (nonexistent) agreement was no more than an intention to explore possibilities for future co-operation, under which the Russians would train several South Africans in the operation of the nuclear power stations that they hoped, fervently, one imagines, the South African Government would buy from them in a fair and transparent open-market, arms-length deal. Yeah, of course. The Russians are known as generous people, with a strong desire to help a Third World country struggling under the depredations and incompetence of a President who can’t remember the details of his much-vaunted Nine Point Plan. Of course, the Russian embassy spoiled the whole plan by publishing the non-existent agreement on its website. Unfortunately, they failed to publish that part of the agreement that said that it didn’t exist or, in case it was found to exist, that it was not binding. Or something. The resulting furore, Zuma hoped, would be sidelined by fervent lies told by the Minister of Public Enterprises and by various Eskom officials. That didn’t work. By now, the public, represented by the Opposition Parties and numerous civil society bodies, took the matter to Court, which, inconveniently, today declared that the whole process embarked on by Eskom was illegal and to be annulled That process, to foist on the unwitting (Zuma hoped) public was managed (if one can say that anything that Eskom does is managed, in the conventional meaning of the word) first under the supervision of weeping, shebeen-visiting liar Molefe and then under the good step-father liar who did not realize that his step-daughter, who lived in his house, was the Director of a company that had been handed a billion Rand contract by Eskom, under his authority. Yeah, sure.

In the meanwhile, Zuma was the subject of a finding by the honourable Public Protector that reasonable grounds existed to require that the President was an illicit recipient of favours handed to him by the Guptas, who, in turn, had been handed many favours by Zuma and his lying cohorts. Of course, Zuma denied and denied, and applied to Court for a review of the Finding, a puzzling request in view of the fact that the Finding was that a Commission of Enquiry must be established, under the leadership of a Judge appointed by the Chief Justice, again a man of unquestionable courage and integrity, for the explicit purpose of determining whether any guilt existed on the part of Zuma, Molefe or any other minions. The Public protector must have considered the possibility that Zuma would try to appoint a stooge to head the Commission of Enquiry, as he did in the cases of the Marikana Commission of Enquiry and of the Arms Deal Commission of Enquiry. One wonders why she should have suspected that. Perhaps someone might have mentioned to her that the man holding the highest office in the land was not beyond reproach in the matters of honesty and integrity. Of course Zuma lied about his reason for requesting the review, claiming that he was not given the opportunity to state his side of the case, but, unfortunately, the (now) former Public Protector happened to recall that she had interviewed this liar for four hours, and so she released a recording of the interview, which consisted not of Zuma attempting to state his case, but of him ducking the questions, ably supported by his lawyer. Of course, in the twisted state of this man’s mind, forgetting a four-hour interview with a competent (one of the few in Government) person is entirely possible. In the same way as flying pigs are possible.

With this avalanche of misfortune still breaking about him, Zuma then fired the respected Minister of Finance and his respected Deputy, claiming that the firing was done on the basis of a remarkably unintelligent intelligence report (who would ever think that the State Security Agency could produce anything even remotely intelligent?) that these honourable men were working to harm the financial interests of the country (after they had clearly been pulling out all stops in an attempt to hoodwink the investing public into believing that South Africa was on a growth path, despite 23 years of economic decline). When he found that this did not wash, the lying President switched his story, to claim an irrevocable breakdown in the relationship between them and him. Of course there was a breakdown. Zuma was pushing as hard as he could to collect the finder’s fee and commission for the nuclear reactor deal, not to mention keep his stooge, Dudu Myeni, in her (for him) very lucrative job that has cost the South African public R18 billion so far, with another R5 billion still to strike this year, and all the while these two men were preaching a doctrine of financial discipline and fiscal prudence. Those two reasons alone would have been enough for Zuma to see red (not the SA Communist Party colour red, which, in any event, is synonymous with financial losses), but the Minister of Finance was unwilling to sign off on a renewal of an illegal contract, promoted by his Minister of Social Affairs Dlamini (surprisingly, the sister of the woman Zuma is promoting to succeed him as President, presumably to ensure that he is protected against the 783 criminal charges of fraud, corruption and money laundering, inconveniently reinstated by the Court, although still held up by his stooge, the Director of Public Prosecutions – curse those honest Courts!), to renew the contract found by the Court to have been issued illegally, after heavy promotion by the said Minster, followed by a campaign by her against the efforts of her own Department to comply with the Court Order to replace the illegally-appointed contractor. One wonders what the poor, lying, President could have done to get the Minister and Deputy Ministers of Finance on his side, when the Deputy Minister had not only refused to accept a R600 million payoff by his partners, the Gupta Brothers, but had also had the temerity to go public with the fact that the Guptas had made him the offer to become Minister of Finance. How much more could Zuma have afforded to offer, when R600 million was not enough to buy even one of the two?

Zuma followed up this campaign of lies and deceit by responding to the demonstration marches by hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens (predominantly Black citizens) by declaring that the demonstrations were racist. Of course they were, just as his description of the cause of the economic problems brought about by 23 years of unremitting economic incompetence by the ANC were actually the fault of Jan van Riebeeck, or White Monopoly Capital, or the need of the average urbanized Black for a piece of land that those unwilling Whites (who pay most of the taxes that have so carefully been diverted to the benefit of Zuma and his stooges) unreasonably refuse to hand over without being paid for it. Or something.

Now, to add to all his problems, the booted Minister Peters, responsible for the (highly questionable) sale of the country’s strategic fuel reserves at an amazingly bargain basement price and on terms that would not deceive even a grade 5 child, has requested her constituents to forgive her for the things she did wrong. Perhaps she is following the example of the President, who believed that restitution for his fraud in respect of R245 million spent on Nkandla was adequately made by apologizing to the public for the confusion they had suffered about his honest intention to repay the money (an intention which he strenuously denied in Parliament on several occasions, in case he forgets). Perhaps Peters did not get the memo explaining that fraud and corruption on a large scale usually winds up in a long prison sentence (unless pardoned by Zuma for reasons of ill-health), regardless of requests for mercy. To make matters worse, the members of the ANC top six have categorically denied that they apologized to Zuma or the ANC for statements they made calling into question their (unquestionable) support for this fine, lying President, in total contradiction of a clear and unambiguous statement made to the public by Zuma that they had apologized. The worms have begun turning, perhaps realizing for the first time that Zuma is not to be trusted, that to take the bullet for him, no matter how big the payoff offered by him to forfeit any semblance of honesty and integrity, will result in being thrown under the bus. Perhaps they have started to understand that Zuma is there for one person only, himself, and that no amount of fine talk can change the character of the man.

What next?

There are still many matters in which Zuma can be held to public scrutiny and be found wanting. The end is only a matter of time away, but this lying President, thick-skinned as he is, will not relent. He will carry on lying, because the only alternatives to lying are to declare a State of Emergency and take dictatorial power, almost certainly on the basis of a lie regarding the evil intentions of Jan van Riebeeck to destroy the strong economy that Zuma has labored so long and hard to bring about, or accept the inevitable and prepare for a long time behind bars. Realistic observers are fully aware that the end of this sorry story will be messy. The only question in their minds is how many more people Zuma will be willing to sacrifice to his ambition. Will it be only a few dozen, or will it extend to 52 million, before the ANC starts to understand that it was Nelson Mandela who set the example they should be following, not Jacob Zuma?