THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE PUNTING DLAMINI ZUMA FOR PRESIDENT

WITH REFERENCE to the lead story headlined “Schools are anti-ANC” by Siyabonga Mkhwanazi (Saturday Star, April 15), can I suggest that Tim Gordon, on behalf of the Governing Body Foundation (GBF), has their lawyers draft a letter to Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma?

The choices will be to provide the evidence (schools, teachers, etc.); retract the statement and pay R10 million (out of her own pocket, not siphoned from the taxpayer) to the GBF. Unfortunately, now that the statement has been made, there are plenty of people who will believe it.

For those punting Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, consider these:

1. She sat on her hands during the Mbeki Aids nonsense. For that alone she should have been drummed out of the medical profession. Instead of being dragged off to the ICC, Mbeki is now portrayed as an elder statesman. What a laugh.

2. At the AU, she faffed around at the beginning of the Ebola outbreak until finally resorting to the ‘African solution to African problems’.

3. Ebola: no one ever asked, or wanted to know, why Liberia (‘independent’ since 1847) has no functioning health infrastructure. No one ever asked, or wanted to know, why Guinea (‘independent’ since 1958) has no functioning health infra- structure. No one ever asked, or wanted to know, why Sierra Leone (‘independent’ since 1961) has no functioning health infrastructure. Has anyone asked since? No.

4. Who forced former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh to quit? Not the AU.

5. Who stopped the war in South Sudan? Not the AU.

6. The AU knew for years that Joseph Kabila’s constitutional term in the DRC ended in December 2016. Did it ensure that there would be peaceful, free and fair elections before Kabila should have quit? No.

But then politics are much more important than people’s lives, right?

Peter Darley