No marriage of ideas for Jacob and his ex
Is President Jacob Zuma still talking to Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma? I know she’s his ex and his chosen candidate to succeed him as ANC leader in December, but can we just assume they communicate?
I ask because Jacob, in a sham “interview” on the Gupta TV channel this week, denied vigorously that state capture even exists. It’s not a thing. In his defence, much of his interview was incoherent. He does not do well off the cuff in English. Second or third languages are hell. But the clear message I got was that not only was state capture a figment of someone’s imagination, but that he would soon create an inquiry into this thing that doesn’t exist and then the people who say it does exist will “regret it”.
Ah, there we go. A threat. The fact is, it is more likely that JZ’s angry as hell. He’s been cornered, caught with his pants down or his hand in the cookie jar or whatever, and it isn’t nice.
And then there was Nkosazana just recently in this very newspaper, on the page opposite this one (in newspapers, we call the page opposite the editorial page the op-ed; as newspapers start to disappear digital publications have begun to claim the term for themselves. It is ridiculous. Most of them don’t even have editorial opinions, let alone anything worthy of being “opposite” them), setting out her economic policy stall in a very measured way, I thought.
She clearly thinks state capture does exist. Otherwise why would she have written this sentence after discussing how bleak a future the majority of young South Africans face: “All these [problems] are compounded by a slow, unresponsive public service, corruption, state capture, declining confidence in public and private institutions and lack of trust among South Africans”?
She wrote that, or at least allowed her name to go on top of it. And I think despite all the awful photographs showing her being embraced by tobacco smugglers (for visitors to SA, that is literally true) in the past few days, she understands perfectly what the general public mean by state capture.
But while it is clear that Jacob would organise a judicial inquiry designed in such a way as to deliberately miss the point and leave the Gupta-Zuma project intact even as it winds down, the bigger question is surely what Nkosazana would do, having correctly identified state capture and corruption as major problems.
If you take them both at their word then Jacob would have to be recalled (or retire early for health reasons ) as state president even if Nkosazana beats off Cyril Ramaphosa in December and wins the ANC presidency. Zuma himself is all over the place on this.
One of his ideas, seriously, is, or was, to somehow remain in the new top six — to be elected ANC chairman in December in order to avoid the problem of him being in charge of the country but not the party. I don’t think Nkosazana could live with that.
If she wins she would want to get as far away from the Zuma shadow as possible. I cannot think of a single scenario where JZ remaining in the party leadership or as head of state does Nkosazana any good after December. By the time she has won the ANC job there’s the January 8 statement to give, an inevitable repeat of the 2017 debacle over the security of welfare grants, and then it is probably less than a year to the 2019 election.
For Nkosazana, life is already a blur and the pressures on her might explain their divergent attitudes to state capture. I mean, you don’t get much farther apart than “it doesn’t exist” and “it’s a serious problem”. It may well be that JZ has begun to drift off on a tactical tangent, checking out other avenues of survival.
He would not have calculated the faintest possibility, when he first concocted the scenario in which he enriches himself and then protects himself by getting her to succeed him, that even if she got his job she couldn’t help him. Getting her out of the muck of local politics and into the AU was genius, but once back in the domestic fray the reality she now faces is that he is an enormous political burden. For me, the key phrase in the Nkosazana quote earlier was about the lack of trust among South Africans. She is absolutely right.
But fixing trust means fixing everything and doing it together. Sadly for him, Jacob Zuma cannot be a part of building trust between South Africans. He is too divisive.
“To build a developmental state around these two [land and education] absolute priorities,” Nkosazana wrote, “we must root out corruption, ensure a responsive public service and local government, and state-owned enterprises that are at the centre of transformation and fulfil their mandates.”
I’m probably being naive but I just can’t see the person who wrote that standing by meekly while JZ continues on his destructive way.
His plan for free secondary education borders on the lunatic. If you’ve got the money, fine. If you haven’t you, have to borrow it. And we haven’t.
Nkosazana will have to stop him. He’s digging her grave.
ALL THESE PROBLEMS ARE COMPOUNDED BY ... STATE CAPTURE AND LACK OF TRUST AMONG SOUTH AFRICANS
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma ANC presidential contender