Following his convictions for corruption and fraud in the Durban High Court, Schabir Shaik was full of pious pronouncements on how he walked in the steps of his God, in the ways of his Lord. His piety was even more pronounced after his sentencing this week to an effective 15 years in jail for his "generally corrupt" relationship with Deputy President Jacob Zuma, stemming from the bidding process of South Africa's multi-billion rand arms deal.

This made-for-television scene of belated heart-on-sleeve devoutness provided a moment of welcome levity. Unsure of Shaik's antecedents, two spectators turned to one another and speculated as to whether Shaik's God was the Christian God or the Muslim God. A third spectator who overheard interjected with the biting answer: "His God is Mammon *1."

As the pro-Zuma groupings within the African National Congress regroup, toyi-toyi in Parliament and fill the airwaves and newspaper columns with their support for the embattled deputy president, it is well to remember that this will be a time of great hypocrisy and bluster as they try to assure the future of the man they want to see as the next president.

It is also well to remember, as one plods through the multiplying thickets of verbiage and obfuscation, that the issues are simple ones of greed, arrogance and the kind of behaviour one would not expect of a national leader.

President Thabo Mbeki may have miscalculated badly. His ill-timed visit to Chile immediately after the trial proceedings delayed a clear pronouncement on Zuma's future, even although Mbeki had just days before the judgment set the stage for Zuma's hoped for graceful departure by affirming the ANC's abhorrence of high-level corruption.

Immediately after the judgment, a leading figure in the SA Communist Party conceded in private that whatever public support they were lending Zuma, they were mostly reconciled to his imminent departure. By the end of the week, the SACP leadership was beginning to think that they might, just, carry the day.

Zuma brilliantly exploited the space offered by Mbeki's absence. To be granted the floor as acting president at a time when one is supposedly waiting to be shown the exit gave the opportunity to play the aggrieved victim of a miscarriage of justice and party-political manoeuvrings with all the aplomb and trappings of the statesman.

It may be that this blunder lies behind the president's continued hesitation following his return, as he tries to regroup his forces to neutralise Zuma's exploitation of the populist strands within the ANC and its allies, the Congress of SA Trade Unions and the SACP. The stakes are personally high for Mbeki: the continuation of his ideological tradition through an anointed successor, or the derailment and reversal of the Mbeki legacy by the swayable - and it appears bribable - Zuma.

This is the biggest challenge Mbeki has faced. Not mainly because a Zuma presidency threatens his ideological heritage, however galling it might be for Mbeki. Nor because it would prove Mbeki to have been posturing on the international stage when he assured the world that a regeneration of the continent is possible because its leaders have the political will to reverse a half-century during which the word corruption became synonymous with the word Africa.

It is because it would be devastating blow to a still fragile democracy. As Steven Friedman, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, wrote in Business Day, "The idea that courts should hold to account political high-ups - in this case the deputy head of state and frontrunner for president - is not a hallowed South African tradition; it charts a completely new course."

It is time for the president to postpone for a while his perpetual perambulations around the globe and seize the Zuma nettle for the sake of a government that ordinary citizens can believe in.

With acknowledgements to William Saunderson-Meyer and The Natal Witness.

*1  Mammon : the demon of love of money.

St Thomas Aquinas (1225 to 1274), possibly the greatest religious (Christian) philosopher of all time (apart from Christ) said: "by Mammon is meant the devil who is the Lord of Money".

Also refer to :

http://www.occultopedia.com/m/mammon.htm

Unfortunately, Mammon has found a lot of followers on the sub-continent.

But as it rightly said, you can't burn the devil, only his followers.

Burn 'em.