Publication: Sunday Times Issued: Date: 2005-12-21 Reporter: Mondli Makhanya

The Year That Was 100% Zuma

 

Publication 

Sunday Times

Date

2005-12-21

Reporter

 Mondli Makhanya

Web Link

www.sundaytimes.co.za

 

If nothing else this festive season, celebrate that you’re not the disgraced deputy, writes Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya

Some people hate this time of year because they just have to be nice to everyone.

You are compelled to wish all and sundry merry this and happy that.

You have to shell out gifts and hope someone will remember you during their shopping sprees as you have remembered others during yours. Strangers greet you and shower you with goodwill. Even the beggars are cheery and the local drunk is melodious as he bellows his tunes while walking past your home at midnight.

It is indeed the time to forget the miseries of the year gone by.

It is the time to forget about the woes of one Jacob Zuma who, more than anyone else, would probably love to have 2005 excised from the millennium calendar. For this was a year he went from presidential hopeful to object of pity.

If he cares to remember 2005, he will recall a year he entered with some semblance of hope that the Schabir Shaik case would not damage his political career. He will recall that it was during the year 2005 that Judge Hilary Squires catapulted the phrase “generally corrupt relationship” into the South African lexicon. It was this phrase, describing the relationship the two men enjoyed, that pointed Shaik towards jail and Zuma towards the unemployment bench.

As the year drew to a close, with Zuma facing a rape charge, he was a broken man. Those who still stood by him did so mostly out of pity for a man who, for one so powerful, has played the victim card very deftly.

In many ways Zuma defined our 2005.

He forced us to think about our attitude towards corruption, the relationship between business and politics, our levels of tolerance for wrongdoing and our respect for state institutions. He got us to ask tough questions about the strength and durability of our democracy and what we should do to shore it up so that it is never overrun by mindless mobs as in the country next door.

Zuma will also define our 2006 as his respective trials come before the courts. When we emerge at the other end of the year we will have an idea of what went on between the grubby foreign arms traders and our men of power back in the late ’90s.

Our collective attitude towards abuse of women will be much clearer after the word of a nobody complainant is pitted against that of a would-be president with masses of supporters and a coterie of spin-doctors.

But then again, it is time to forget the woes of the nation (and particularly those of Zuma).

There are others who have had a year to look back on with glee. Think of Whitey Basson, who pocketed R58-million this year. And Manne Dipico, the former miner who bought into the very De Beers that fired him for his militancy many years ago. And the bosses of the petroleum industry, who were so inebriated on the profits of 2005 that they forgot to prepare for the festive season.

And, of course, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who is so blind to everything around her that she is on a permanent high. They will have reason to be cheerful this festive season and you too should be able to find one or two reasons to join them in toasting 2005.

From all of us at the Sunday Times, have a merry Christmas and join us in 2006 as we celebrate 100 years of The Paper for the People.

In the words of the legendary General Yurenki Grikarov: Omhoogering!!

With acknowledgements to Mondli Makhanya and Sunday Times.