Not even the verdict in his rape trial, whatever it may turn out to be, could be as deleterious to the subject’s presidential ambitions as his own utterances in his defence, writes VUKANI MDE

Long after judge Willem van der Merwe has delivered his verdict in the matter of the State vs Jacob Zuma, and the mob has packed up the “100% Zuluboy” T-shirts and shuffled home, the former deputy president of the republic will reflect that his political career came to an end not in June last year when he was “released” from the burdens of office, but in the ignominy of the witness stand at court 4E in the Johannesburg High Court this week.

Moreover, should he choose to be honest with himself he will see that the demise was not orchestrated by Xhosas or other nefarious ethnic mafiosi in the African National Congress (ANC). It had nothing to do with President Thabo Mbeki, Saki Macozoma, Ronnie Kasrils, Joel Netshitenzhe or anyone else whispered to be in the ruling party’s official anti- Zuma wing.

Exploitative global capital and its imperialist running dogs played no part either. Nor did western spy agencies sworn to avert the calamity of a Zuma presidency. No, it was the defendant’s own evidence in chief that ended the powerful phenomenon of Zuma. How the mighty have dithered and stumbled.

In retrospect, not even the verdict in Zuma’s rape trial, whatever it may turn out to be, could be as deleterious to the subject’s presidential ambitions as his own utterances in his defence.

Whenever the accused in a criminal trial takes the stand in his defence, there is always the risk that he will incriminate himself.

This is a risk that attaches even to the innocent, hence many defence lawyers prefer their clients not to testify if they feel the state’s case can be answered without the contribution of the accused.

When Van der Merwe dismissed the defence’s section 174 application last week and forced Zuma’s lawyers to answer the state’s case, he all but closed that avenue. Because of the “he said, she said” nature of the evidence in many rape cases, Zuma had to take the stand in his defence.

From Monday it became clear that this was an unfortunate eventuality that would have been best avoided. While the strictly legal question of whether Zuma incriminated himself in or extricated himself from criminal liability will be decided only by Van der Merwe, we can say this without fear of contradiction: the man mutilated himself politically.

Zuma’s testimony, delivered as if from a deep, dark moral vortex into which the last decade of gender and social transformation had been sucked, did everything it could to give credence to all the major prejudices that attach to his name and image.

His detractors, real and imagined, think of him as the embarrassing unwashed “Zulu boy”, so on the stand he insists on testifying in his native tongue, though he has no problem understanding English. They call him a chauvinistic polygamist, so on the stand he sprouts some of the most backward anti-woman prejudices heard in public recently.

They caricature him as an ethnic merchant, so on the stand he plays to the tribalist gallery by his perverse invocation of Zulu culture. They say he is unsophisticated and unsuited to high public office, so on the stand he obliges with the most obtuse treatise on women and gender relations.

They say he is amoral and probably corrupt, so on the stand he undoes everything he was tasked to do as head of the Moral Regeneration Movement and the South African National Aids Council.

They accuse him of stupidity, saying he went through a decade in office without ever understanding what he had to do. On the witness stand, he answers this charge by advocating the most dangerously ignorant revision of the science of virology.

This was Zuma in “schoolyard bully mode”. His is a fairly straightforward psychological affliction: the fat child who believes all the other children in the neighbourhood hate him and are hatching conspiracies to destroy him.

So deliberately he transmogrifies into a heavy-breathing, antisocial slob, a general villain deserving of nothing but hate. The point about the conspiracy is proved, but the victory is pyrrhic.

Zuma still retains some pull among ordinary people in SA, however extensive the damage done to his image in the eyes of the media and other elites. That makes what happened in Johannesburg’s courtroom this week, relayed to a nation aghast at what it was hearing, very dangerous.

Whatever the government says of HIV, a significant number of men will now believe it is safe to have unprotected sex with infected partners because uMsholozi says so.

We may argue until blue in the face about the integrity of women’s bodies, it will always be clear to some men that if she wears a skirt or shows cleavage, she wants it.

Government’s ABC AIDS prevention message may as well be redubbed ABC-T: abstain, be faithful, condomise. If you can do none of the above, take a shower.

If further proof were needed that there is no cyber-conspiracy against our former No 2, Zuma left to his own devices provides it.

Who needs to conspire to annihilate the chronically self- destructive?

With acknowledgement to Vukani Mde and Business Day Weekender.