How one family’s elaborate plan to build a president came crashing down this week

A struggle hero, destined for high office in the land — perhaps even the presidency of his country — returns home from years in exile.

He is clearly the “rising man”; he has all the revolutionary credentials and a massive populist support base. He’s an astute politician and a skilled negotiator and is immediately thrown into bringing peace to his war-torn home province, a task he succeeds at where others have failed.

But the returning hero is also penniless. He has little or no financial acumen and his status, compounded by a large family, is bankrupting him.

He connects with his old comrades from his underground days, naturally enough — but in doing so opens himself up to the machinations of the shadowy brother of a trusted confidant, a man who made a name as a skilled bagman for the movement in exile.

Unsuspecting, he accepts a “loan” from the bagman-turned-businessman, and so begins the long, slippery slide.

He does “favours” for the comrade’s brother, helping him out in the odd business deal. Whether he consciously does so in exchange for the money is immaterial.

Eventually, someone speaks out. An investigation is launched; the bagman is charged and a trial held. The verdict leads to the revolutionary hero’s disgrace and removal from office.

This is the tale of the fall from grace of Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma.

He was one of the first of the ANC’s top leadership figures to return home after the organisation was unbanned in 1990.

An ANC intelligence head, he was thrown into negotiations with his former enemies. Zuma’s performance, along with his pedigree, saw him immediately identified as one of the movement’s men of the future.

Redeployed to his home province of KwaZulu-Natal, where thousands had died in IFP-ANC conflicts, Zuma consolidated his existing support, becoming ANC chairman and Economic Affairs MEC in 1994.

But he was in deep financial trouble: a man who returned “penniless”, as he was to be described years later in the trial that marked his downfall, Zuma had a large family to support and rapidly fell into deep debt.

Zuma had re-established his relationship with his comrade, Mo Shaik, whose businessman brother Schabir was running Nkobi Holdings, the core of a budding black empowerment empire.

In his judgment in Schabir Shaik’s corruption trial in the Durban High Court, Judge Hilary Squires found that this was the point at which Schabir decided to move on Zuma, helping him to live beyond his means as a long-term investment in potential — and eventual — patronage.

“The events that gave rise to the present charges ... had their genesis, for the most part, in the change of government brought about by the 1994 elections,” Judge Squires found.

Describing Schabir as “one of the expectant beneficiaries” of the new government, the judge said he deliberately spent money — much of which he could not afford — on Zuma’s upkeep, with the express aim of buying his influence in the awarding of government contracts.

In Shaik’s mind, the judge said, Zuma was a project to be invested in, a man who had to be kept in office if Shaik’s financial dreams were to be achieved. The fortunes of the Nkobi empire were closely tied to Zuma’s political career.

This was borne out by a letter written to Shaik by his father-in-law a few months before the ANC national conference in Mafikeng in 1997, in which he said: “When your friend becomes Deputy President — you will be in the pound seat.”

Paying Zuma’s debts — to the tune of R1,2-million — made “eminent sense if his future assistance was contemplated, as subsequent events showed was the case", the judge said.

But Shaik’s moves did not go unnoticed: ANC leaders as prominent as former President Nelson Mandela warned Zuma against dealing with the Nkobi boss. Shaik himself confirmed this when he told the court that he hid the fact he was paying Zuma’s bills from Mandela because he knew the former President did not approve of him.

ANC resentment of Shaik did not end there. Following the death of ANC treasurer-general Thomas Nkobi — who had taken Shaik under his wing at Zuma’s request — Makhenkesi Stofile, his successor, cut Shaik loose.

In a 1995 letter to Shaik, Stofile reminded him that he held no ANC office, told him to stop punting himself as an ANC representative, and said his plan to cut the ANC in on empowerment deals was dead in the water.

But, as Zuma’s star continued to rise and his debt-trap deepened, he ignored the warnings, which came not only from above, but also from ANC comrades in KwaZulu-Natal.

Several interventions were made on Shaik’s behalf while Zuma was still MEC and wielded influence in the province.

And the payments escalated with, Judge Squires found, the aim of keeping Zuma on tap.

There was “a readiness in both Shaik to turn to Zuma for his help, and Zuma’s readiness to give it”.

In December 1997 Zuma was elected as ANC deputy president — and that year payments started to grow to a “noticeable extent”.

Throughout this period, Shaik used Zuma’s name at will: threatening competitors with interventions from above, invoking it to bully unwilling investors, and mentioning their relationship in conversations, in letters and at meetings.

Schabir was not the only Shaik to seek Zuma’s help. His brother Chippy, the government’s former head of arms procurement, also sought Zuma’s help in “landing a deal”.

Schabir went further, soliciting a bribe of R1-million for Zuma, to be paid over two years in exchange for his protecting a French arms dealer from arms-deal investigators.

The encrypted fax seeking the payments showed there was a conspiracy to get Zuma money that was sorely needed for his Nkandla project — the erection of a family compound — at a time when Shaik was broke.

Other benefactors also appeared on the scene during these years and, later on, some even after Zuma was appointed deputy president in 1999.

One is Vivian Reddy, a Durban-based electrical contractor who had done well from contracts with the apartheid-era House of Delegates to wire schools for electricity.

Reddy had, before the ANC ascendancy in KwaZulu-Natal, been a benefactor of both it and the rival IFP, making donations to both parties and securing the friendship of leaders of both.

Reddy helped secure the bond for Zuma’s Nkandla homestead, stumping up around R200000, acting as surety and making regular mortgage payments on Zuma’s behalf.

Reddy has denied any act of dishonesty, although Judge Squires described the Development Africa Trust — of which Reddy was a trustee — as nothing more than “a banking arm of Reddy” and his “alter ego”.

On May 31, the Shaik-Zuma project crumbled: Shaik was found guilty of corruption, with Zuma the one corrupted in a relationship in which all he had to offer was “the influence and weight of his political office”.

The damage did not end there: Nkobi was fined a total of R4,2-million, payable by next year, and left leaderless after Shaik resigned, something he was legally forced to do.

Reddy did not escape a public lashing by Judge Squires’s arid tongue, while Ahmed Paruk, Shaik’s auditor, has been reported to professional bodies.

On Tuesday, Zuma’s boss, comrade and friend of 30 years, President Thabo Mbeki, announced that he had taken the only decision open to him, and would “release the honourable Jacob Zuma from his responsibilities as deputy president of the Republic”.

A hero had been unmasked as a man with feet of clay.

With acknowledgements to Paddy Harper and the Sunday Times.