Zuma feels hatred of friend shows the worst side of South Africans

Jacob Zuma, the ANC president, has lashed out at South Africans for wanting Schabir Shaik dead *1.

Speaking exclusively to the Saturday Star yesterday, Zuma said he had been "deeply saddened" by the fact that many South Africans had made up their minds about Shaik's medical condition and concluded that Shaik was lying about being at death's door *2.

Shaik, Zuma's erstwhile financial adviser, was jailed in 2005 for 15 years for corruption and fraud.

He was released on medical parole two weeks ago after serving less than three years of his sentence.

Zuma said that even though people could not see the report - because of patient-doctor confidentiality - they should have had faith *3 in the processes that were followed.

"You can't say so many officials, all the way up to the minister, were all corrupt and dishonest and wanted to smuggle a prisoner out - it can't be *4," he said.

"What has saddened me is how South Africans could be mean about somebody's life. Why is there such a problem when medical doctors who were working with the man say 'this man is sick, he needs to be out of prison'?"

South Africans, Zuma said, were behaving as if Shaik was a mass murderer whose release would harm other people. It was a very negative side of South Africans, which he found very saddening.

He denied, as was reported in other media before Shaik's parole, that he would have pardoned his friend if he became president.

"The point I was making was that if there was medical evidence for him to go on parole, why would I not? Because I would do that for anyone, because that is within the law."

Zuma has not yet seen Shaik, although he has phoned him since his release last week.

"He sounded okay. All that dominated our discussion was how happy he was to be with his child, particularly the fact that the child was not bothered to go to the mother but instead came to him. He was very happy to be with his child," Zuma said.

Zuma said he had not been able to see Shaik yet because he had been so busy campaigning for the April 22 elections.

"I'm sure that at some point I will see him when I have a chance to get to Durban."

Zuma said he was confident that the elections would be incident-free and that the ANC would return to head the government with an even greater majority than the 66% it won in 2003. The excitement among the people in South Africa to take part in the elections was overwhelming, he added.

Zuma scotched rumours about which of his wives would be the first lady.

"There is no first lady. I think it's an old debate between those who have been colonised and those who were colonising.

"It's a wrong debate which people write long columns about. There's no magic about the 'first lady'. If you've got wives, what is important is that you are able to deal with them *5. If there is an occasion, one day we will have the wife we are with, another day we will have another one, it's not an issue."

The question was not how many wives a person had but the capacity of that person to do the job *6, he said.

"It's not the first wife, or the second wife, or the third wife that's involved," he said, "it's the president. Is the president able to lead a country?"

On that issue, he said there was no doubt.

"If I was a person talking about Zuma, I would say this is the man I believe in who would go through everything.

"You would be confident that, because this man has gone through so much, there is nothing he cannot go through."

His ongoing legal travails with the National Prosecuting Authority over his alleged involvement in the arms deal, he said, was not baggage.

"Rather than think that that is a weight that pulls you back, you should actually say that that is the weight that propels him forward *7.

"Because it's not always easy to discuss your past, but it is always easy to say how you move forward."

With acknowledgements to Kevin Ritchie and The Star.