Opinion & Analysis

We’re reluctant to flog a dead horse, but the closer Jacob Zuma comes to the ANC presidency, and to eventually running the country, the more insistent the little voice on our shoulder asks: “Just who is funding this guy?”

Zuma is on an expensive tour of the world right now — India, the UK and the US. We’re told he’s meeting “investors”, whoever they may be, in order to calm nerves ahead of what is beginning to look like his formal return from political purdah.

But while the trial and subsequent jailing of Schabir Shaik taught us who had funded Zuma in the 1990s and early years of the new century — and Zuma’s willingness to be thus “kept” — it’s not clear now. And the answer may be important in years to come.

How is Zuma able to swoop in to boutiques in the best hotels and take clothes without any evidence that he has paid for them? Who pays for the bodyguards and the big black Land Rover Discoveries? Who pays for the homes and accommodation in Johannesburg’s Forest Town and elsewhere? Who is paying for what Shaik used to pay for? Some say it’s Muammar Gaddafi , the Libyan leader. Others say it’s just “friends”. Both answers are frightening.

Zuma’s political allies haven’t got two cents to rub together, so fears about him being in hock to the left are probably overcooked. But what if he owes Gaddafi? Or a secret cabal of businessmen and/or foreign “investors”? It would be really encouraging to see the Zuma camp make a public declaration about his finances.

Of course, we all know where President Thabo Mbeki has got the money to run his campaign for re-election as party leader. It is from us taxpayers, so Zuma is at a considerable disadvantage.

But that, in the long run, won’t excuse obfuscation of the truth. If, as seems increasingly likely, Zuma is going to hammer Mbeki at the ANC elective conference in Polokwane in two weeks, then President-in-Waiting Jacob Zuma would do the country a huge favour by talking openly about the financing of this, current, phase of his political life.

What better way to signal a fresh start for a scandal-fatigued country?

With acknowledgement to Business Day.