Jacob Zuma ANC South Africa

Respect Jacob Zuma!

 

... and hope that he will do the job Thabo Mbeki didn't do.

Yes, Jacob Zuma was tried for rape, but he was acquitted. Yes, he was accused of corruption, but the charges were dropped – again and again - and many ordinary South Africans celebrated when they were.

They did so because, despite the ten year vendetta against him, Jacob Zuma earned the respect of the majority of ordinary South Africans the hard way.

Jacob Zuma was jailed for 15 years on Robben Island from 14th February 1964 to March 1979. After his release he organised internal resistance for two years and then, after setting up ANC intelligence networks, he joined the Central Committee of the ANC.

In comparison to Nelson Mandela, Jacob Zuma is, what the Chinese would call “an uncarved block”. Although Nelson Mandela, was a high ranking member of the Tembu Royal House, he rejected tribal customs, ran away from an arranged marriage, studied law at the University of Witwatersrand and set up his own Law practice. Jacob Zuma, on the other hand, had no formal education, he is self taught, and he lives like a traditional Zulu chief with three wives and 18 children.

Still, perhaps it was partly this unpolished traditionalism that helped Zuma in the early 1990s, as ANC Chairperson of the Southern Natal region, persuade the Zulus to turn away from bloody conflict, and to persuade Inkatha to sign peace accords and channel its energies into democratic competition in the elections of 1994. In succeeding, Zuma and the ANC sabotaged the last gasp effort of the Apartheid regime, in collusion with Inkatha, to Balkanise South Africa: to shatter the new born 'Rainbow Nation' and set up black enclaves and white enclaves.

But, five years later, Zuma attracted the enmity of Thabo Mbeki after he began to speak out against Mbeki’s neo-liberal policies and the failure of Thabo Mbeki’s government to redress the structural problems of inequality created by Apartheid.

In doing so Jacob Zuma, nominally a socialist, also attracted the support of many people on the left in the ANC and the Trade Union movement (COSATU) and in the South African Communist Party. It was no surprise then when an orchestrated campaign against Jacob Zuma began. Zuma came to represent the alternative to Mbeki. The "Zuma Matter" - as it is known in South Africa - began with a press conference given by Thanda Mngwengwe, the Head of the Scorpions.

Subsequently, the corruption charges brought against Jacob Zuma were dropped. But the attempts to stop him from reaching the presidency continued. On the following two occasions the charges were dropped against Zuma because, according to Judge Chris Nicholson and then Mokotedi Mpshe (head of the National Prosecuting Authority), the judicial process against Zuma was manipulated by Thabo Mbeki. In the second instance the accusation was backed up with evidence: recordings of Thabo Mbeki caught discussing how to make political capital out of the Zuma Matter with Leonard McCarthy, the former head of the disbanded and discredited elite anti-crime unit, the Scorpions – initially responsible for bringing Zuma to trial and investigating him.

The opposition appealed and, with the help of judge Azar Cachalia, suspected (and with good reason) of having a personal vendetta against Zuma, and judge Louis Harms, (who conducted the "Harms Commission" in the 1980s in London which effectively exonerated the Apartheid regime of war crimes), they tried to reopen the case.

However, when representatives of the western media like Simon Jenkins and Simon Tisdall sided with the opposition to Jacob Zuma, perhaps they were not offering the high-minded independent opposition to a corrupt and discredited South African politician they thought they were. (1).

Perhaps what they were really doing was taking sides in a messy internal South African struggle and opposing a future president, who, representing the ANC, many South Africans hope will set finally about righting the structural inequalities the Apartheid system created, something that Thabo Mbeki and his government clearly failed to do.

(1) In fact Jacob Zuma took the Guardian to court for slander as a result of these articles and Zuma won. I submitted an earlier version of this article to the Guardian's comment site as a response and, although they had previously published my articles, they refused to publish this one on the grounds that it was not critical enough of Zuma. 


Subsequently, I was boycotted by all the editors at the Guardian. In this way the Guardian proved to me that, when push comes to shove, the liberal media will always side with reaction.