Publication: Cape Argus Issued: Date: 2005-12-22 Reporter: Max du Preez Reporter:

Press Failed Its Readers in Not Reporting the Real Guts of Jacob Zuma

 

Publication 

Cape Argus

Date

2005-12-22

Reporter

 Max du Preez

Web Link

www.capeargus.co.za

 

South African historians will one day look back at 2005 and remember it mainly for the sacking of the country’s deputy president and the charges of corruption and rape that were brought against him.

These events are an important part of the history of our young democracy. Which is exactly why we need to have a properly informed view of it now, otherwise history will once again be distorted.

Without attempting a proper critique of our media’s handling of the dramas around former deputy president Jacob Zuma, I do want to state that I think too many facts and perspectives were not properly reflected.

I want to give some examples of stories and insights I thought were under-reported or under-emphasised in the rush to publish the latest dramatic development in the series of scandals.

Some parts of the story remained uncovered. Like the fact that President Thabo Mbeki first asked Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to become the new deputy president after firing her ex-husband. It could potentially have boosted her chances of eventually succeeding Mbeki, but she declined.

I thought most media institutions, in their support for Mbeki’s decisive action against his deputy, did not tell the public enough about the other side of Jacob Zuma.

Before his name was mentioned in the corruption trial of Schabir Shaik, Zuma had a very solid record as a freedom fighter and, after 1990, as a very successful peace-maker.

I first had dealings with Zuma in the 1980s, when I channelled some apartheid policemen who spilled the beans on apartheid police practices to the ANC’s intelligence structures in Zambia.

I was struck then and since by the fierce loyalty which Zuma generated from his intelligence operatives and other cadres in the underground.

Zuma was one of the key figures who stopped the terrible bloodshed caused by the conflict between supporters of the IFP and the ANC/UDF in the early 1990s.

With Nelson Mandela and Mbeki he helped prevent the hardened Afrikaner nationalists from engaging in civil war immediately before the 1994 election, engaging leaders such as Constand Viljoen in a series of secret meetings.

Zuma’s role in brokering peace in strife-torn Burundi has also been under-reported, mainly because he preferred to be the back-room man rather than stealing the glory.

When Zuma faced the national executive committee of the ANC recently, he apparently looked at the faces around him and remarked that he was the poorest man there.

All the men and most women surrounding him – like Saki Macozoma, Cyril Ramaphosa and even the party functionaries like Smuts “I did not struggle to be poor” Ngonyama and Kgalema Mothlante – had benefited greatly from black economic empowerment deals.

Zuma never tried to get into business or otherwise benefit financially from his role in the struggle. He served his party and his country rather than his bank account.

It appeared from evidence at the Shaik trial that he, as the second most important man in the ANC, deputy to the country’s president and a man with considerable standing and responsibility in his traditional community, indeed could not even pay his bills.

It must have been with some bitterness that he surveyed his detractors in the top echelons of the ANC, some of whom are among the very richest men in the country.

Zuma supporters have been unable to conclusively prove a conspiracy behind the charges brought against him. But they – and Zuma himself – know full well that there were others high up in the ANC who should have been investigated for corruption long before he became a suspect.

Zuma knows that several of his comrades have been personally enriched by the arms procurement deals. He knows that the Oilgate scandal will, if exposed to the bone, cause at least one very senior ANC personality to be charged with corruption.

He knows that among his political enemies are those who were beneficiaries of Brett Kebble’s political philanthropy. There can’t be any other explanation in Zuma’s mind for this selective persecution than the contest for power in the ANC once Mbeki goes.

Another peculiar aspect of the Zuma saga was the unusual way the Scorpions acted. The way they arrived en masse with automatic weapons at the ready, and clothed like a US Swat team, at Zuma’s residence and the houses of others with whom he had dealings, smells of a display of power rather than a legitimate search for evidence.

One of my disappointments as a journalist from the old school was that so many in the media swallowed the SACP/Cosatu hype of Zuma as a champion of socialism and the left.

A bit of research and a few questions to the right people would have told these reporters that Zuma was never an ideologue. He has been supportive of the Mbeki/Manuel/Mboweni economic model from the start. He even stopped being a member of the SACP a long time ago.

Zuma was never a leftist or a socialist; he is simply a party man and a traditionalist.

With acknowledgements to Max du Preez and Cape Argus.


So what went wrong?

Either because he doesn't know, or because he chooses not to, there are many other things this author is not telling the public about Jacob Zuma.