Zuma - The Beginning of the End

Jacob Zuma’s legal team, accompanied by similar teams representing the Speaker of the House of Parliament and the Minister of Police, suffered a humiliating defeat in the Constitutional Court today, a defeat that went a long way to confirming to South Africans that Justice is alive and well in the country. 

Just one day after President Zuma appeared on SABC TV in the company of sycophantic ANC supporters, and announced that ‘the people love the ANC, the people love the President’, the legal counsel representing Zuma was forced to beg, in the most humiliating plea ever seen in a Court case involving the President or the ANC Government, that the Constitutional Court should not hand down a judgment that could be used by the Opposition to apply for his impeachment!  Another counsel walked herself into a tangle of contradiction and confusion before being forced to admit that the President had contravened the Constitution when he requested (instructed?) the Minister of Police to deliver to Parliament the most obvious tissue of lies ever constructed for that august body, excluding any possibility that he had breached his oath of office to uphold the Constitution, a fabrication that was swallowed hook, line and sinker by his tied ANC Members, for whom Zuma must be close to a God to behave in the unthinking and undemocratic manner the President and his Party have coerced them to.  The next embarrassment arrived when the third counsel talked himself into an admission that the Minister of Police had delivered that whitewash report on the instruction of the President, knowing full well that the President was in breach of the Constitution and his Oath of Office, excusing the conduct by stating that the Minister had acted under Zuma’s orders!  That lamentable statement, the equivalent of the excuses offered by the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials, that they had acted under orders, was pounced upon by a Judge of the Constitutional Court, asking if it was the full truth.  After some stumbling, the counsel retracted the statement, saying that it was not his intention to state that, but the damage was done.  The truth is out – Jacob Zuma has bribed or terrorized his Cabinet into doing precisely what he orders them to do, regardless of the rightness of it, or of their duty under the Constitution, the laws of perjury and even of their personal sense of honor.

Judgment has not yet been handed down, but the writing has clearly been engraved in the concrete of Zuma’s office wall.  He is guilty of a breach of his Oath of Office, of is duties under the Constitution and of his duties to the people he claims to represent.  Zuma has admitted in writing that he is no better than an odious slug, feasting on the carcass of the nation that he was elected to lead, and lying repeatedly about it.  The only question that remains is how long the citizens of the country will tolerate this disease in the highest office?

And so the mighty shall fall

Jacob Zuma has capitulated.  He has made an offer to settle the ongoing Nkandla debate by coming to an agreement to ‘pay back the money’. 

What Zuma seems to fail to appreciate is that any payment, no matter even if it is the whole amount swindled by him from the taxpayers, would not undo what he has done.  Jacob Zuma has long been suspected of taking money by illicit means from the citizens of South Africa.  Numerous Press reports, as well as other rumors and detailed accounts of his activities, almost always through front men, have circulated for years, many starting before his ascension to the Presidency.  Many of these acts are alleged to have taken place at an early stage in his career, and many of them have been the subjects of criminal charges brought against him, yet Zuma has managed to avoid the charges coming to trial, it has been alleged, by inducing the National Prosecuting Agency to withdraw the charges, making it possible for Zuma to continue on his path of destruction of the economy of the country and of the Constitutional Rights, which so many of the citizens held so dear at the time of Mandela.

By agreeing to ‘pay back the money’, Zuma, no doubt, hopes to avoid the potential huge damage that may accrue to him and his Party during the trial by the Constitutional Court in an action brought by the EFF and the DA.  He also hopes, no doubt, that this gesture will bring a reversal in the swelling tide of criticism against him and his Party for their continuing abuse of the Constitution and the Office of President, clearing the way for the Local Government elections to be held later this year.  One hopes that the ever-patient electorate that has returned the ANC to power in each election will, at last, realize that the collapse of the South African economy, which has brought destitution to a large number of citizens over the years that the ANC has been in control (if one may be pardoned for using ‘control’ as a description of the chaos wrought on a previously-strong economy by mismanagement, corruption – as a purposeful aim of those in power or as a bye-product and by the imposition of laws and regulations that cannot be read as anything other than a new Apartheid) must be laid squarely at the feet of the Association for Corruption and Nepotism.  Jacob Zuma is the figurehead of the Party, and a willing leader in the actions it and its top brass have taken, but the leaders of the Party must also accept responsibility for their role in what he has done, and permitted to be done.  Each one of them, the leaders, the Members of Parliament sitting there on an ANC ticket to represent the people is, in reality, doing no more than rubber-stamping the actions of Zuma and his Cabinet, and is complicit in the corruption, the mismanagement, the dishonesty that have become the hallmark of Government in South Africa. A brief overview of the highlights is as follows:

• The Minister of Justice is one of the obvious culprits, for his shameful whitewash of Jacob Zuma’s enrichment in the Nkandla scandal. 
• The Speakers of the House of Parliament, every one from the time that Thabo Mbeki steadfastly refused to allow Parliament to debate the Arms Deal to Baleta Mbete, who has stated, in contravention of the Constitution, that the State President is not subject to the same rules as any other person, who called the armed Police into the House to evict all members of the EFF for disrupting Zuma’s speech of denial (disregarding the Rules in that many of those MPs had done nothing wrong), again in breach of the Constitution, who permitted (or ordered) that freedom of speech and communication of persons within the House were denied by jamming of signals into and out of the House, an extreme breach of the Constitution, must all accept responsibility for the breakdown of the economy, of racial harmony and of democracy in South Africa. 
• The Minister of Public Enterprises must also stand in the dock, accused of the disastrous mismanagement of SAA, SABC, Transnet, Eskom and the numerous other State-owned enterprises that have been permitted to bleed the economy while they destroyed the infrastructure that had been built up over many years, in addition to applying racist procurement requirements that are clearly in breach of the Constitution. 
• The Minister of Basic Education must plead guilty to a charge of depriving millions of pupils of a decent education and destroying the industrial and business base of the economy, even though she has finally admitted that she is presiding over a system that is in a state of chaos, a fact which has been clearly documented in the media over many years. 
• The Minister of Higher Education must be arraigned for his catastrophic insistence on using the universities as an alternative to unemployment, bringing about a sharp decline in the international value of South African degrees, a virtual collapse of university finances and a collapse of the intellectual base of the country, while hiding away in Parliament to avoid facing the angry students. 
• The Minister of Public Works must plead guilty to the charge of failing in his duty to manage the Department that handed out the funds so freely for the construction of Nkandla. 
• The Minister of Finance must be charged with the unreasonable use of the draconian powers entrusted to SARS, used illicitly to enforce the closure or sales on favorable terms of several mines and other businesses, as well as consenting to the misappropriation of funds by top ANC members and guiding the economy firmly down the slippery slope to junk status. 
• The Minister of Minerals and Energy is certainly complicit in the transfer of huge assets at steep discounts to ‘the formerly disadvantaged’, a family that arrived in South Africa in 1994, is resident in Dubai, and can, by no stretch of the imagination, be described as ‘disadvantaged’, unless, of course, they believe that their support of the members of the ANC and their families can be described as a ‘disadvantage’. 
• The Minister of Justice must be held to account for the shameful mishandling of cases, such as the murder of Anni Dewani, for the chaos that prevails in the ‘justice’ system, for permitting Zuma to free on medical parole (against the testimony of doctors) his close associates, like Shabir Sheik to live a life of ease and leisure. 
• The Minister of Trade and Industry must pay for the huge costs brought on the country by the BEE policies that he so actively promoted in the interests of ensuring that the ANC elite and in the process of introducing a new Apartheid, while destroying whatever shreds of racial harmony his colleagues left behind. 
• The Ministers of Homeland Affairs over the years must explain why they worked so hard to destroy the tourism industry by bringing the country and its passports into such disrepute that it is now an ordeal for a South African to travel abroad, and then followed that up with the unreasoning imposition of insane visa regulations.

These people are only a microcosm of the rot that prevails throughout the Government, built up under the ‘expert’ management of the ANC.  An exhaustive analysis of the extent of that rot and of the people who are responsible for it and who must be brought to account in the interests of truth, justice and democracy would cover thousands of pages and will tie up the Courts for decades, but that analysis must be done, to ensure that the citizens of South Africa regain the freedoms, the rights and the democracy that Nelson Mandela promised, and to ensure that the conditions that the ANC has brought to the country can never, never, and never again, be repeated.

The Nkandla Report

During the long wait for the final Nkandla Report, the long-suffering South African public hoped that the Minister of Police would ultimately present an unbiased report that would satisfy the public demand for justice in this apparently flagrant breach of the duties of his office by the South African President.  That hope should have been informed by the long history of dissimulation, of ducking and diving by the incumbent of that office.  The Tapes affair, in which the High Court issued a clear and unambiguous Order that the tapes recording discussions regarding the withdrawal of some 740 criminal charges against Mr Zuma, which Zuma and his stooges managed to avoid complying with by numerous examples of ducking and diving, spurious appeals and blatant disregard of the Order of Court, should have made the citizens aware that Zuma does not consider himself to be subject to the laws of the country.  His multiple attempts to escape liability for the more than R200 000 000 expended by the State on his private residence should have reaffirmed that understanding.  His fervent denials that he had entered into an agreement with the Russians regarding the building of several nuclear power stations at a cost of more than a hundred billion dollars, clearly contradicted by the publication on the Russian Government website of that contract, should have convinced even the most fervent Zuma fan that he is not a person to be trusted.  However, the gullible electorate, the sucker taxpayers, continued to hope that this President would show himself to be a man of honour.  His final sniggering comments in Parliament that the critics who have demanded an honest response from this man should have disabused any notion of intelligence, education or honour.  He made a point of the fact that some of the critics were unable to pronounce ‘Nkandla’.  This is remarkable, coming from a man who shows his lack of linguistic capability in his repeated abuses of the English language, his use of ‘commy-tea’ , ‘apar-thaid’, rather than Apart-heid’ ( a state of separation) to describe the policy that he claims to have spent most of his life fighting, his frequent ‘koting’ of authorities, rather than ‘qu-oting’ as any competent user of English would say, his comments about the ‘vow-lation’ of rights being only a few examples, now give his critics the freedom to use the same rules against him.

The Minister of Police went to great pains to explain that the cattle kraal is a cultural requirement of the Zulu people, and there, presumably, permissible as a security upgrade.  The swimming pool, at a cost of over R7 000 000 was necessary because the local fire service more than ninety minutes to respond, and is therefore a necessary element in the protection of this beloved President, ignoring the probability that the water pressure and unreliable supply of water could have been improved to the benefit of the entire community, at a lower cost.  The visitors’ Centre, it was argued, was essential to provide security to the visitors.  This, in a private home!  About the only thing that the Minister of Police said that might be considered to be true, accurate and meaningful to any of the many people who sat through this jumbled and meaningless piece of apology for the corruption of the President and the stooges who pander to him, related to the incompatibility of the Police and technology!  Virtually every citizen can relate to that!

It has been clear, since the day that the Public Protector issued her brave report, at the cost of a vicious and continuing attack on her personally and on her office by the ANC, that the President has never had any intention of complying with the law of the land or the finding of a constitutionally-established body for the protection of the public against people such as the President and the numerous corrupt people he and his stooges have placed in public office.  Even the Speaker of Parliament, a person who has the duty to ensure that the Executive accounts to Parliament for their actions, has stated clearly that the State President and the members of the tribal ‘royalty’ are not subject to the same rules as ordinary citizens.  That is a dangerous situation, a condition in which the Executive are elevated above the laws of the country, rather than being subject to a higher standard of conduct, by virtue of the level of trust implicit in the offices they hold.  It is a situation in which the newly-built private residence of a single man is given massive preference in the provision of Police services, firefighting capability and many other services above the entire community surrounding it.  It is a condition that places the comfort and personal enrichment of the servant of the people far above the essential needs of the tens of thousands of shack dwellers around the country, above the food needs of the eleven million citizens, including three million children, who have far less than an adequate supply of food on a daily basis.  It gives a man the belief that he has the right to spend two billion Rands on aircraft, when the economy of the country is going down the tubes, while the rest of the continent is growing.

Brief conversations with all levels of people, from CEOs of large corporations to men working in the gardens or sitting beside the streets in the hope of finding a day’s work to fend off starvation for themselves and their families, render a clear conclusion.  Jacob Zuma has lost whatever trust and confidence he may have commanded, before the People came to understand just what he is, and what his Party represents.