A Bad Day for Zuma

Wednesday, March 16 2016, was the sort of day that Jacob Zuma must have wished would never happen.  In that one day, already threatened by the arrival of the Moodys team to consider the downgrading of South African investment instruments to junk status, was made worse by the declaration by a former ANC Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Public Works, that she had been offered a Ministerial position by the Guptas, while Jacob Zuma was skulking in an adjoining room so that he could claim not to have been a part of the Constitution-breaching act by his co-conspirators.  That was aggravated by the statement of Mcebisi Jonas that he had been offered the position of Minister of Finance by the same Gupta family, an act also in breach of the Constitution and strenuously denied by the Guptas, Zuma and the ANC.  That was exacerbated by the incredibly stupid comment by an ANC spokesperson that the offer could not have been made, as every appointment to the Cabinet was made by Zuma, in his capacity as State President, after close consultation with the Cabinet.  Either Zuma and the ANC are lying, or the whole Cabinet, who expressed clear surprise, as well as lack of foreknowledge of the replacement of Minister Nene by a backbencher, whose sole qualifications for the job (later strenuously denied by Zuma, claiming that van Rooyen was the best-qualified Minister of Finance that the country had ever had) were that his house had been torched by exasperated residents, and that he was more compliant in allowing the Guptas, as well as his son, to advance their personal interests at the costs of the citizens.  That statement implies that the entire Cabinet lied to the people, on more than a few occasions, when they disclaimed having had any part in that disastrous act by the State President.  That came after the Court judgement condemning in very strong terms the permission granted, surreptitiously, to al Bashir, a wanted murderer, and saying that the Government, almost certainly at the direction of Zuma, had committed an act of international criminality in failing to observe an unequivocal Order of the High Court to place the wanted man under arrest and in disregarding a binding Warrant of Arrest by the International Criminal Court.  Then, just to top it off, FIFA has declared that the South African Government paid a bribe to get the 2010 Soccer World Cup, and then lied about its actions in covering up that act of criminality.  Those last chickens are yet to come home to roost, when the facts are revealed of who authorized the bribe, who paid it, and who benefitted from the World Cup, then hailed as a major achievement of the country.  What is the betting that the names ‘Zuma’ and ‘Gupta’ will be part of those revelations?

These facts are a vindication of the increasing level of disgust felt by the average South Africans about the man who tries to fill the space left behind by Nelson Mandela.  It is no surprise that the word ‘Zuma’ is now viewed by South Africans as a swearword, embodying every evil perpetrated by the ANC under the man.

The next question is ‘now what?’

Zuma can take the honourable course and step down from his role as Head of State.  That is unlikely.  Zuma has proved repeatedly that he is a man totally devoid of honour, of any feeling of responsibility for the honest management of the economy in the interests of the people.  In addition to that lack of honour there must also be the fear of the punishment that any halfway decent replacement will wreak on him.  Quite apart from his many criminal acts as State President, he still has to face the 783 criminal charges that were made to disappear in order for him to embark on his role of accumulating wealth while he destroyed the South African economy and spread racial disharmony throughout the population.  The chances are that Zuma will spend the rest of his life behind bars, to the extent that the fellow criminals will permit him to live, given the seemingly prevailing view that Zuma is the Anti-Christ.  The chances seem to be good that Zuma will try to prevent this happening.  That would imply that he is able to enlist the support of the Cabinet Ministers in order to tough it through, spreading liberal amounts of largesse, even more than he has done so far to keep his corrupt group of cronies in office, in order to buy their support.  It seems unlikely that the thinking members of the Party will believe that that process will be able to endure for too long, with the country already on its knees and likely to hold on for much longer in the face of the punishment that will almost certainly be meted to the country for the actions of their leaders.

The chances seem to be good that the only way out for Zuma will be to declare a state of emergency as soon as the impending ratings downgrade becomes reality, making the already tight financial constraints on the country infinitely worse.  Zuma, in his mind a proven State President with the practically unlimited resources of the Gupta family to support him, will take full control of the economy, appointing his henchmen to key positions (those key positions that are not already in his control) and bypassing Parliament altogether, rather than by means of using his horde of witless and unthinking ANC cadres to rubber stamp his insanities.  He has the example of several friends in Africa, people he admires limitlessly, such as Mugabe and al Bashir, that strongman tactics are the best and the easiest.  In addition to that, he has proven, to himself and to the world, that it is possible for the State President of a modern, supposedly civilised country to disregard the Constitution, to lie to Parliament, to ignore questions relating to his conduct, to enrich himself and his family beyond imagination, to brazenly appropriate the funds of the State to his own benefit, and then to suborn a supposedly respectable and honest Cabinet Minister to provide a cover up for his actions.  He has openly displayed his contempt for the laws of the country, even the most important of them, the Constitution, he has repeatedly breached his sacred Oath of Office, he has misled the Ministers of his Cabinet, supposedly honourable men and women sworn to uphold the Constitution and the law, he has ignored the Orders of the High Court on several occasions, and he has got away with it.  Why not now, when his entire future hangs on it?  He has misread the mood of the people, of the country and of the international investment community, and he has believed, and continues to do so, that he is above all of them.  After all, the Speaker of the House has told the world that the President is above the laws that apply to others, that he does not answer to them.  There is certainly nothing, in the sly but untutored mind of this goatherd made good, that can stop him in his quest for complete control, no answerability to Parliament or the people, no overarching rule of law, no moral compunction, to prevent his taking the country as his personal fiefdom.  To strengthen that view, Zuma has a personal security force of seven thousand, paid by the people, and answerable only to him.  He has the Hawks, the South African Police Service, the National Intelligence Agency and the South African Defence Force in his pocket.

What is the betting that we will see a move in this direction in the next days?

While today was a bad day for Zuma, the heavy clouds on the horizon portend much worse for the country in the near future.

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.