Jacob Zuma’s long way back to prison

“South Africa will never disappoint the legacy of Nelson Mandela!” Then-President Jacob Zuma said at the charismatic leader’s state funeral in 2013. It was not. At least he let it down. Zuma became the shame of the movement that ended the despicable apartheid system and he’s been running South Africa since 1994. And this week he went back to jail. He had already spent 10 years with Mandela in the infamous Robben Island prison. At the time, it was to fight the white supremacist regime. Now just for disobeying a court order. Again Almost 800 charges of corruption and rape of a woman remain unresolved, among other multiple charges. Mandela loved him, but he knew who Zuma was. That’s why he tried to keep him away from power. It did not succeed. As soon as Madiba retired, Zuma dedicated himself to laying the legacy of all who, like him, fought for equality in the “Rainbow Nation”.

Zuma was arguably South Africa’s most controversial leader since the end of the white minority regime in 1994. But he had a previous life as a “revolutionary hero” that began when he was only a ‘a teenager and joined the anti-apartheid movement. His defenders speak of his past as tirelessly militant in favor of the cause and his extraordinary sympathy. It is one of those types of permanent smile. Those who despise him, come a long history of corruption under the protection of a very powerful family of Indian origin, the Guptas, with businesses ranging from mining to media. And everyone admits he has always had a unique ability to navigate the corridors of power within the African National Congress (ANC), Mandela’s party.

Zuma led the party for decades and the country for nine years until Vice President Cyril Ramaphosa replaced him in December 2017. “We are the ones who put South Africa in this mess by electing Zuma as president,” was a reflection of Jackson Mthembu, another of the top ANC leaders. “We should have thoroughly investigated this man. Looking back, we made a terrible error in judgment. He said so when Zuma had to step down as president of the country long before his second term ended in mid-2019. The crisis had started six years earlier, when a crowd booed him in front of his peers from all over the world who came to South Africa to say goodbye to “the father of the country”, Mandela. However, Zuma’s folk charm, persistent alcohol withdrawal, and modest upbringing they always made it keep a loyal followingespecially in rural areas. They are the ones who barricaded themselves with him and his family last week so that the police would not enter his home to arrest him.

Zuma began life in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1942, the son of a policeman and a domestic worker. He received little formal education, but became a boy with a sharp wit and iron resolve. At 17, he joined the ANC and three years later he was arrested as a member of an armed militia group, which led him to pass 10 years on Robben Island. His ambition, his prodigious memory and his moving personality helped him to become the main representative of the ANC in Mozambique, member of its political and military committee and head of intelligence in 1987. Those who followed him overlooked his darker side, including his lush sexual promiscuity.

When Zuma returned to South Africa in 1990, KwaZulu-Natal was in the midst of a turf war between the ANC and the nationalist movement Inkatha Zulu of leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The ANC leader prevailed there after defeating ANC warlord Harry Gwala, using his Zulu charm and credentials to ensure peace. But it came at a cost. The ANC attracted some of Inkatha’s best-known assassins and a new form of violence was unleashed. This time it had nothing to do with ideology. It was all about the money.

“My first contact with Zuma was in 1989. The ANC Operation Vula was underway. It was about building an underground insurrectionary network and I belonged to one of their regional leadership structures. We were ordered to investigate whether Peter Mokaba, the leader of the African National Congress Youth League (LJCA), was a spy, ”the professor wrote in The Conversation. Gavin Evans of the University of London. “Our damning report was presented to Zuma and CNA security chief Joe Nhlanhla, who informed us that Mokaba, who died in 2002, was an informant whose relationship with the security police ran deeper than us. did not think so. Other ANC leaders joined in spreading this message, but we were told that Oliver Tambo, then head of the ANC in exile, decided that it would be better to rehabilitate Mokaba, which ‘he did,’ Evans continued.

“Shortly after, I received a visit from a senior leader of the South African Communist Party, which was allied with the ANC. He begged me to do a journalist job on Zuma. He told me that his own house in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, had intervened by ANC intelligence and that Zuma was corrupt. I ignored the request. But it was one of the many signs I had seen that Zuma was looked down upon within the Communist Party, ”concluded Professor Evans.

Zuma had been briefly a member of the party’s political bureau, but fell out of favor in part because of conflicts between the intelligence of the ANC and its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe. One of the conflicts has affected Commander Thami Zulu, described by Zuma’s allies as an enemy agent, held for 14 months by the ANC in Lusaka and who poisoned death one week after release. His death contributed to Zuma’s hatred. And this was not the only crime attributed to the ANC intelligence services.

In 2004, while Zuma was vice president, his financial adviser Schabir Shaik was arrested for his role in an arms trade and sentenced to 15 years in prison (but released after 28 months for health reasons). It was discovered that solicited bribes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for Zuma. This was followed by further charges related to another military enterprise. Zuma is on trial for an agreement for the purchase of weapons for 2 billion dollars with the French defense company Thales which took place in 1999, while he was vice president.

In 2006, he faced his other ghost. He was tried for the alleged rape of a 31-year-old AIDS activist, who he knew was HIV positive (he said he believed a shower after sex would be adequate protection). Zuma claimed that as a Zulu man, it was his duty to have sex with a woman if she was wearing a short kanga (African waistcoat), and that he could not leave her “unsatisfied”. He argued that Zulu men have sexual primacy over women and therefore he could not be guilty. Denying her sex would have been an insult, he argued. Zuma was acquitted amid shouts of joy from his supporters who sang his favorite song, Lethu Mshini Wami (Bring Me My Machine Gun). The woman, Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, had to go into exile in the face of persecution by Zulu gangs. He returned to South Africa after a decade and passed away in 2016.

The other historical ANC leader Thabo Mbeki assumed the presidency to replace Mandela in 1999 and due to internal party pressure he had to accept Zuma as vice president. In no time, the paranoid Mbeki had lost his common sense and “was strangely devoid of his former lovable charm”, while Zuma was quite the opposite. Taking advantage of popular concerns about the lack of provision of basic services, crime and AIDS, and drawing on unions, young people and the left, he cast a shadow over the president. Mbeki ended up firing him in 2005. But Zuma defeated him at the head of the ANC in 2007 and became president in 2009. He spent nine years there. The left hoped to limit its excesses, but the opposite has happened. The Guptas fed their greed in exchange for state contracts, to the point of offering ministerial posts to obedient aspirants. In the end, Zuma’s thing was extremely rude. He built a mansion in Nkandla for his family with public funds. Then he fired two finance ministers who did not want to carry out his orders to have more money transferred to them. While the country’s economy was already in historic decline, appears Cyril Ramaphosa, who won the ANC leadership race in December 2017. Two months later, Zuma ceased to be president and the Guptas quickly fled to Dubai. There were no more songs from Lethu Mshini Wami.

And obviously, his traveling companions did not understand in time the signs that Zuma was already bringing from the cradle. His second Zulu name, Gedleyihlekisa, has several meanings, but there is one that prevails in this case: “The one who smiles while hurting you.”

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