South Africa and Jacob Zuma
So many lives have been lost already for nothing, because fighting to prevent one of the most corrupt individuals in South Africa’s history — Jacob Zuma — is not worth it.
Zuma is not just an ordinary
South African. He served as president, which makes him special. But he is not above the law, although while he served as president he did so many terrible things that made even the ‘Father of the Nation’, Nelson Mandela, slip into a bout of depression over Zuma’s general conduct.
Now, days of rioting in sections of that country has resulted in, at last count, 238 people being killed in fighting between those ill-advised to want to prevent Zuma from going to prison, and local security officials. Come to think of it, few, if any of those who gave their lives to Zuma, would have benefited from him in any way while he served as president.
All that Zuma, South Africa’s fourth black president, has to show is that he was a member of the African National Congress when white South Africa was in command, and he, like Mandela, was imprisoned illegally.
But for people of that great country to be putting their necks on the chopping block for such a vulgar individual, they are only sending a message to the world that they stand for nothing.
The people of South
Africa are otherwise very nice. For what they went through during the time of apartheid, they are owed medals of tolerance and discipline. They love Jamaica like how our women love to visit the hairdresser, and our real men love women. On my only visit to South Africa, nearly two decades ago, while Thabo
Mbeki was serving as the country’s second black president, after a retired Mandela, I was shocked, pleasantly, upon entering the University of Cape Town, to be greeted by portraits of four great men of our time on a wall — Mandela, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, and, yes, Marcus Mosiah
Garvey, Jamaica’s first national hero. That told me how much Garvey, and by extension, Jamaica, meant to the people, because one had to be well respected to have been so recognised.
There was nothing of Zuma, and it was not hard to see why, although his strange popularity in the African National Congress(anc) saw him elevating to the presidency in 2009 and serving until 2018.
The current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, whom I had the delight to interview when he was in Jamaica for a People’s National Party conference during the early 1990s while he served as secretary general of the ANC, has a tough task ahead. With people like Zuma having such an influence over so many, Ramaphosa will need to make key decisions, fast.