Publication: Sunday Independent Issued: Date: 2005-10-16 Reporter: Maureen Isaacson Reporter:

Zuma Turns Up the Heat to Get the Mass-action Rands Rolling In

 

Publication 

Sunday Independent
Date

2005-10-16

Reporter

 Maureen Isaacson

Web link

 

When the going gets tough, talk positive. Say we are winning although a parasite threatens the ANC. Call that parasite "ignoble, bloodsucking and corrupt".

President Thabo Mbeki is on the offensive and the defensive.

Just five months after giving former deputy president Jacob Zuma the boot, Mbeki has himself been razed to the metaphorical ground.

By burning effigies of his face on t-shirts outside the Durban magistrate's court, Zuma supporters have warned Mbeki that he is playing with fire.

As above, so below. Zuma's incendiary words and conspiracy talk reveal feelings of betrayal. By saying his pending corruption trial recalls apartheid, he has in turn betrayed the ANC's perceived achievements. He has questioned the judicial system. And he adds a new twist to our continually inflamed racial debate.

Surely nobody would want to blow 10 years of democracy out of the water in this way, some say. But Cosatu, the Zuma-supporting federation of trade unions, is staging a nationwide strike tomorrow. The reason: unemployment has not been adequately tackled by the government.

Who to believe, the statistician Mbeki quotes in this week's newsletter, saying 500 000 jobs were created in the past year, or those in search of work? One of the reasons the official unemployment rate has declined, says Cosatu, is that people have grown tired of looking for work *1.

On Monday the unions will call on the government to put pressure on business to save jobs. The goals are defined. Government policies must increase employment and trade policies must create jobs *2, they say.

An obvious gulf separates the reality of Mbeki's postulated higher economic and development growth path and the reality of the grassroots.

But the world of political adulation is not as simply divided.

Don Mkhwanazi, the chairperson of the Friends of Zuma Trust, is confident millions of rands will come rolling in. Translate support for Zuma into cash, he said. Zuma's trial, scheduled for July, will be a money guzzler. What with legal fees and accommodation, a man who rocks up at court in a Humvee doesn't come cheap.

And money, remember, is what got us into this mess in the first place. That is, if we do not believe Zuma that Judge Hilary Squires was wrong when he found the former deputy president enjoyed a corrupt relationship with Schabir Shaik, his financial adviser.

The t-shirt burners do not want a trial. They want Zuma for president. They do not want Mbeki's high-flung imagery. Increased consumer spending and the "sagoodnews" website on the internet are just words in a tussle that has this week proved how ugly it can turn.

Makhosini Nkosi, the spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which is responsible for investigating Zuma, fears for his own family's safety. "If not for the job, I would be right behind you," Nkosi told Zuma this week.

The NPA's Scorpions unit is in peril. And this has blurred the line between the Mbeki and Zuma camps. S'bu Ndebele, the KwaZulu-Natal premier and Mbeki supporter, was lambasted for trying to show public solidarity with Zuma. This is a sure sign that you can no longer fool any of the people any of the time.

The promise made by Mbeki and Zuma in September, to keep the movement intact, has bombed. Mbeki's continual carping, last week at NGOs judged not sufficiently African, has not increased his popularity. Detractors say his focus has been wrong.

But he is not fiddling while the country burns. The ANC supports Zuma precisely because "standards of right and wrong" must be defined and upheld, says an unattributed ANC website letter.

Pledging "support for a comrade facing challenging circumstances" does not obliterate Mbeki's condemnation of "the corrupt who plunder the people's resources". His own website letter is as strong as it gets. It is consistent with his expulsion of the former moral regeneration leader.

His reasons - Zuma's alleged immoral conduct - have apparently not been adequately spelled out on the ground. The law must take its course, says the ANC letter. Only once the law has been allowed to take its course will the present crisis have been addressed.

Burning effigies will not do the trick.

With acknowledgements to Maureen Isaacson and Sunday Independent.


*1  The biggest potential employer in any emerging free market is the SMME sector *2. But this stupid government and its more moronic political partners and its ridiculous labour laws make it very difficult *3 for SMME's to give permanent employment.

*2  Every tenth person should employ five people - get it?

*3  It's called the Labour Relations Act, Act No. 66 of 1995.