Publication: Sunday Independent Issued: Date: 2006-08-06 Reporter: Karen Bliksem Reporter:

O Come All Ye Noble and Honourable, as I Bury Myself on Bended Knee

 

Publication 

Sunday Independent
Date

2006-08-06

Reporter

 Karen Bliksem aka Jeremy Gordin

Web Link

www.sundayindependent.co.za

 

So Mark A Zuma stepped forward at the funeral pyre of his own presidential ambitions and spoke out in a carefully typed affidavit: Friends, Seffricans, countrymen, lend me your ears, your newspaper columns and your cartoonists: I come to bury myself, not to praise me, and also to tell you why you need to strike my case off the roll, one time, baby, one time.

The evil that men do lives after them whether they shower or not. The good they have done is often, alas, buried with their bones, poems and condoms. So let it be with me.

The noble president has often told that I am ambitious, that I want to be president. If this is true, it is of course a grievous fault - and grievously am I answering it: preparing to sit through the most mind-numbing trial that ever a man has had to sit through. Oy vey! Beware, I tell you, not of the Ides of March but the forensic auditors, the lawyers and the journalists!

Now, with the permission of the president and the rest, all the female hopefuls and fat businessmen who believe they can do a man's job - for the president and the rest of the girls are all honourable people - with their permission let me speak at this trial, my political funeral.

I have been faithful and just to the people; I have even excessively loved and massaged some of the younger, female ones. Yet the president says that I am ambitious, and the president is an honourable man.

Not once, but many times, did I fight the good fight in the mighty Struggle; not one year, but many, did I dig in the quarries of the dreaded island; not once, but many times, did I tell the noble Shaik and the gentle Munusamy to fill the general coffers. Did this seem in me ambitious?

When the poor have cried, I have wept. When the boer has addressed me in halting isiZulu, colonising the syntax of my forefathers, I have grinned. When the scurvy members of the fourth estate have walked in their big and smelly shoes on my ancestral lands and asked me riddles, I have answered politely.

Ambition, I think, should be made of sterner stuff. Yet the president has suggested that I am ambitious and the president is an honourable man.

You have all seen that on numerous occasions at one or another national executive council meeting - or whatever the painful bloody things are called - I was presented with a kingly crown, or at least the first cup of poor coffee - and every time I refused them. Was this ambition?

I am not here to disprove anything anyone has said or claimed about me - for they are all honourable men. I am here to speak only what I know and what the noble UnKempt and the noble Hulley-gully tell me that I know.

All of you loved me once and not without cause. What cause prevents you now from loving me? What has happened to judgment and reason? Has it fled to brutish beasts, to the hoi polloi dancing in the streets?

Oh Blade, oh Zwelinzima, oh Fikile, oh you honourable working men who live by the sweat of your bodies and toil of your hands, who bring in the grain from the fields and juice from the vines, stand by me here, for I cannot believe the depths to which the beloved country has sunk.

I come now, friends, Seffricans and countrymen, to the heart of the matter. The state will not talk to me as men talk to men but has sent me a computer hard drive in a virus-riddled format featuring frightening pictures of men and women making the beast with two (and even three) backs. Yet the men of the state are all honourable men.

The state, friends, has plundered the general coffers, using a number of experienced senior prosecutors and senior advocates from private ranks to harass me. Yet they are all honourable men. I was dismissed as deputy president of the beloved republic as a result of charges brought against me - the very charges the honourable men of the state now say they are not ready to go to trial on. Was ever a man so ill-used?

Even the former director of public prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, he who has travelled the world to assist his wife in search of cranes, and is a deeply honourable man, saw fit to discuss me with the scrofulous members of the fourth estate.

Yet I know, since he is an honourable man, that this was doubtless merely a rush of blood to his head.

What of his successor? He too is an honourable man. But what did he tell the president on their journey to the shores of South America?

It is after all inconceivable that the president, an honourable man, would have instructed Vusi Pikoli to prosecute me without proof. What then happened to these honourable men in the taverns of Santiago?

I had nothing to do with an arms deal. I merely signed letters placed in front of me without reading them, as is the duty of all politicians.

It was the president who had much more to do with the arms deal. Yet he too has been scurrilously accused of being party to improprieties *1. This cannot be so - for the president is an honourable man and I know he shall come to my defence.

O, woe. I have been left unemployed and unemployable and shall be forced, like all unemployable (but honourable) people, to be a consultant or an editor.

My broken heart is in the virtual coffin with myself and poor Willy Shakespeare whose words I have this day shamelessly plundered and plagiarised - a far worse crime than playing arms dealers at their own games.

Bring me my machine gun, mama.

With acknowledgements to Karen Blikem and Sunday Independent.


*1       The president indeed stands accused of being party to improprieties in the arms deal acquisition process, but not scurrilously.