ATTENTION BACK TO ZUMA PRE-MANGAUNG

1.        For the past 12 or so months I have been observing Mr. Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma (The President of South Africa’s ruling  African National Congress-ANC and ipso facto the President of the Republic).

2.        My aim was to pick up what for me will be the most indelible memories of him prior to his kiss goodbye to ANC leadership come Mangaung Elective Conference of the organization in December this year.

3.        It saddens me to report here that I have seen nothing new and I have seen nothing old in his way of doing things.  Those weaknesses that around January 2012 or even September 2011 stood in his way towards a scintillating performance (which he well could have achieved) are still standing even as of this moment, barely four months before, as he clearly so wishes, he contests a second term as leader of the ANC.

4.        On this post I am therefore reflecting on those same old issues as they stood around the beginning of the year.

WHAT NOW, FOR MR ZUMA?

5.        No state president can stand without loyal and enlightened support that is also not afraid to call him to order when he takes a wrong step.  State Presidents, being mere incumbents are normal human beings always standing to be corrected.

6.        Depressing indeed it is to observe this tenet of power, a principle much older than our modern and French-styled statehood and democracy, tripping  a man who went to jail and to exile claiming he wants to see it erected in South Africa.

7.        He will say he is an African doing things the traditional African way; but where in ancient days our African ancestors said Inkosi YiNkosi Ngabantu Bayo is exactly where the presidency fails even as he says he prefers pre-colonial attitude to power and religion.

8.         Just where Mr Zuma is supposed to succeed, we see him running all over the show making all kinds of outrageous statements some putrid enough to shut down TV channels.  Yet women and men of scholarliness around him, like Ntate Motshekga, for whom I previously held a lot more respect than I suspect I still do, watch on to make only weak defensive statements every once the good name of Mr has been so frequently damaged!

9.        I made the humble request the other day to Princess Zindzi Mandela to employ me as her Public Relations Officer.  I am making the same request to Mr Zuma.  Sir, I can deliver Mangaung to you on a silver platter! Please don't avoid or persecute me for my ideas! If you want to be great (and great rulers of the past like Shaka were characterized by their appreciation of opposing views and not persecution), rather employ my talents.

10.     Of course, that will obviously be per condition (which I am sure is not too tall an order for you) that you please reconcile with your dynamic anti-tribal Youth League as it is/was under Mr Julius Sello Malema!  But, back to my previous train of thought.

11.     We know, or don’t we too? That the phenomenon called Zuma presidency came about through massive grassroot support because everybody was  gatvol of then Mr. Thabo Mbeki highhandedness.

12.     Gatvol because Mbeki had lectured to scientists as to how to deal with a virus.

13.     Horrified, I and thousands of other African people spent many of our personal Rands texting messages and money for Zuma support against both his rape and criminal trial so that he could bring to us a better day from the suffering, most of it of a presidential tribal origin as from the days of apartheid and so though the days of post-apartheid.

14.     That eventuality, it saddens me to report, has of now at best turned debatable in the late afternoon of a Zuma's watch reportedly preoccupied with shadow-boxing punches against a religious opponent only known to himself!  That is the cap “Pastor Zuma” (as he was once elevated by a certain denomination during his anti-court struggle where he never protested that [Christianity is ‘as a foreign and pernicious religious dogma, too unacceptable for him to accept the position of a Pastor’]).

15.     Eschewing albeit briefly the spiritual about Zuma we return to his forte, politics

16.     We also know that the support that brought President Zuma to power is no more the selfsame one supporting him at this moment. Even though during his inauguration, he had gone to publicly vow eternal appreciation and repayment to the popular support we had given him from the doors of prison to the staircases of the Union Buildings, we now know he vowed falsely.

17.     Per his own inadvertent confessions recently, he is not a religious man. Irreligious men, I declare, do not have in their dictionaries words like vow, promise, honour.  Where do they base such words with a concept of the presence of a holy God or at least the absence of such God where there is sanctity of human life?  Zuma is neither of those two camps of religion!

18.     He had said he was going to live and die with those of us who had propelled him to power, saying it in the Zulu language: "ngizofa nani nina" (and please play that SABC TV clip where he so declared in Zulu: “I’m ready to lay down my life in defending your welfare as my people”).

19.     The welfare that he in fact referred to on that rainy Presidential Inauguration Day was clearly in reference to his own personal particularly around the female form.  Messrs Cassel Mathale and Julius Sello Malema of Limpopo Province may well have  been the first living proof in signs of a country-wide disillusionment with the man.

20.     Mr Zuma has disdainfully refused to honour the CONTRACT made with South African citizenry!

21.     Yet the man still stands to this day  of 28^th August 2012 (which I must confess I had never thought was possible in any modern democracy).I had written him off a long time a go!

WHO IS SUPPORTING JACOB ZUMA?

22.     So who is supporting President Zuma? Where are these supporters? And for what service in return?

23.     I wish there were still enough of us supporting our dear President and first citizen and even wishing him a second term in office.  But I know I am lying to myself. Or at least, I don't believe what I am saying to myself loudly can be a doability at this moment for South Africa.

24.     In short, I do not believe Mr Zuma has supporters.  I believe those (of course never all) closest to him now are his worst enemies or Judases, which I should suppose is too Eurocentric for a Mr Zuma hankering after the days of "pre-Christianity Shaka Zulu's times".

25.     I guess, a more African English word for a "Judas" would be a "Gedleyihlekisa" which, as fate would have it, is the middle-name of my president. Fortunately the English is flexible enough to adopt new words from foreign languages even though, from the South African experience a  "Judas" may one day in this young century turn up in the Oxford Dictionary as a "Ged", rather than the longer version of the word ex-Zuma.

26.     When each of them Judases meets the president he/she, smiling wide in theprocess in order to impress him, pretends to be happy to have Zuma as president forever ("eYihlekisa" from "eZihlekisa" in the great IsiZulu language, the native language to the President).

27.     But the moment they are out of his sight, they undermine ("gedla")  just about everything that the president of the Republic of South Africa stands for per orders of the Constitution e.g. non-racialism, non-tribalism.

28.     And these few disingenuous supporters among the majority of good advisors of the President are the very people who are dangling the grim noose to asphyxiate the Zuma regime. Their actions will ultimately turn Mr Zuma (if they have not already done so) to trusting no one else whatsoever in South Africa.

29.     He is bound to trusting only people in whom he can believe to the hilt.  Of course, it is a biological law in the survival of any species that any man or woman's most trusted people will naturally be the people the president grew up with, if not speaking the language closest to the language of his mother.  That spiral is a vicious one which can only have one devastating cyclic effect.  Of course such an effect is the effect towards the miring of the Zuma administration in  (accusations of) tribalism.  KWAZULU-NATAL REGIONALISM!!!!

30.     I do not know, but I have my private fears, if as I write here the president has not already been driven to that point: The Zulu Laager or what in vernacular would be, “KweKomkulu LaKwaZulu”.

THE WHIPPING POST OF WHITE RACISM

31.     I know that generally South Africans are too afraid to air issues of tribalism, preferring to talk rather of their soft target (white racism) even where none exist while they continue to practise tribalism in their various government  workplaces!

32.     You see, allegations of white racism represent an easier but false hackney on which to ride all of South African’ social problems.

33.     White racism must be a convenient whipping post for Mandelasque Eastern-Cape-Regionalism (whose henchman Jacob Zuma is) since South Africa can strictly speaking not have any white racism anymore.  The person occupying the highest office of the land since 1994 is a so-called black man.  He has always been armed and invested with executive powers backed by a constitution that outlaws racism of any nature.  Contrary to racism howls by Struggle’s Johnnys Come Lately, the current issue in South Africa is Mandelasque Eastern-Cape Regionalism and tribalism, rather than white racism.

34.     Yes, indeed: Earlier (1940 to 2007) in the ANC, Mandelasque Thembu tribalism was doing the bidding unchallenged.  And of late, Nguni tribalism is beckoning under the Zuma watch to replace Mandela’s to lace but not to replace this intra-African-anti-white-anti-Coloured brand of racism that says Xhosa-Speaker-Shall-Rule-South-Africa.  Nguni tribalism is qualified by the addition of the Zuma’s Zulu contingent onto the 70-year-old contingent Xhosa-speaking Thembu people of Mandela, Zuma’s political mentor from Robbern Island Prison in the 1960’s.  It is an unwritten but dogmatically practised philosophy for me signified by the violent refusal on the part of Jacob Zuma to correct the tribal wrongs prior to him taking the oath of  office and subsequently lying to the nation that he will serve them by the constitution until death if need be.

35.     Jacob Zuma will claim, there is nothing to correct in the way Nelson Mandela ran South Africa.

36.     Jacob Zuma will claim, there is nothing to remedy in the doings of his predecessor Thabo Mbeki (yet another fellow Nguni)….

37.     … [“because there were no tribalism problems as reported by a Goodman Manyanya Phiri who is ‘attacking our fellow-Nguni Nelson Mandela’ of South Africa”].

38.     …“because, no, there were no issues of tribalism during Mandela.”

39.     “…No, there were none during Thabo Mbeki.”

40.     “…No, there were no issues of tribalism in the camps of exile where Zuma had over-all intelligence control in the mid-80s and was the one who was advising  whom to execute, and torturers whom to torture as a so-called Apartheid agent.”

41.     “No, Goodman Manyanya Phiri, the South African ethnic Nyasa has never been subjected to any Nguni tribalism.”

42.     “No, Phiri’s children and his first wife are not in Tanzania because of tribalism of any Nguni.”

43.     “No, Phiri has never been subjected to acts of tribalism at his SANDF workplace by Nguni Woman Ntombizodwa Zini-Bobelo and her powerful fellow-tribesmen and women in government of Zuma”.

44.     “No Phiri has never been to the Truth And Reconciliation Commission TRC to report this.”

45.     “No, Phiri’s case is definitely not in the records of the TRC”

46.     “No Phiri has never been to the Presidential office dealing with human-right abuses to query his case.”

47.     “No, Zuma’s government is not using the courts to persecute Phiri”

48.     “No, Zuma’s government has not flatly refused Phiri funds to pay his lawyers in all the court cases we have caused him with the latest being a case stalled in the Constitutional Court for Phiri who must pay for his own prosecution by us as state”

49.     “No, Phiri has never approached the government through the right channels to request such payment and even his first-ever post on his other blog does not exist to corroborate his story of being denied any rights by us.”

50.     “No, we don’t believe Phiri’s many cases we have caused him are for his side cases in support, and for the good, of the state in order to root out corruption, tribalism and other forms of racism as stipulated by the constitution of South Africa and so Phiri must pay his own lawyers even though Zuma’s case for personal corruption was paid for by the state without question.”