Heed women’s message about a president beyond shame

IT was probably appropriate that President Jacob Zuma should have been totally oblivious of the drama that was playing out right in front of him as he droned on at the election results presentation last weekend.

He must have thought the young women were putting on a show for him, as obviously befits a head of state. But alas, they were there not to praise him, but to bury him.

Zuma’s speech turned out to be ornamental and of no consequence. It was completely overshadowed by the women’s message which transfixed the audience and those watching at home. Their action was so daring as almost to be unbelievable. It was a fitting commemoration of women’s month and a reminder of the terrible abuse still suffered by women in this country.

It’s no surprise that it was female cabinet ministers who were especially outraged by the women’s action, demanding apologies and heads to roll. Slaves are always too keen to please their masters.

But it was apposite that those courageous women and the message they carried should have been facing us. We need to get that message loud and clear.

Apart from those — like Bathabile Dlamini — who want the young women to be hung, drawn and quartered, many have tended to see the incident as the shaming of Zuma. Ten years on, the story goes, the rape trial — in which he was acquitted — is back to haunt him.

We’re missing the point. Zuma is beyond shame. Besides, it’s not his problem anymore. It’s our problem.

You break it, you own it, said Colin Powell, cautioning US president George Bush snr about invading Iraq in 1991. By electing Zuma as our president we now not only own this tawdry affair and the slew of his other scandals, we’ve absolved him of them. We’ve embraced him, warts and all. And we put him on a pedestal by electing him president, the highest honour the country can confer on any citizen. Such a flawed character, we nevertheless gave him the greatest gift one can give to a fellow human being: trust.

It’s not as if we didn’t know. Khwezi, the woman who accused Zuma of rape, described the incident in graphic detail. She told of her horror on opening her eyes to see the man she’s always regarded as a father stark naked and about to mount her. Picture the scene. Freezeframe it. Such a man we continue to call our president, a man worthy of our respect.

Khwezi, meanwhile, has been hounded out of existence — nameless, faceless and even stateless. We still don’t know her name; we still don’t know what she looks like or where she is or whether she’s being looked after. We just don’t care, because if we did Zuma wouldn’t be our president.

We’ve tended to regard the bedraggled louts who religiously turned up at the trial to hound her as the only lynch mob she had to contend with. The entire left-wing establishment, the so-called champions of the poor and downtrodden — Cosatu, the SACP, the ANC and their fellow travellers — proudly lining up behind Zuma was almost like a badge of honour. He was their hero. The victim had become the villain.

I remember a gender activist saying he didn’t believe her story; that it was all a set-up by Thabo Mbeki to discredit Zuma. That there was no evidence to back up such a libellous claim didn’t seem to bother him.

And it’s that sort of attitude that morphed into something like a Molotov cocktail that propelled Zuma to power. In electing Zuma, we hardly paused to think of the damage we were inflicting on ourselves, a society in which women live a nightmarish existence. The figures tell a horrific story.

Transformation has become such a buzzword it’s almost been denuded of its true meaning. We like talking about it in political terms, as in the transformation from apartheid to a nonracial society. What is required is the transformation of our value system. Those principles and moral codes proudly reflected in our laws and constitution should not simply be decorative or just for show. We should live up to them.

Zuma’s election is a clear indication that our actions and general behaviour are a betrayal of what we say we are. At one point, struggling for an adequate answer to a question during his rape trial, Zuma fell back on how or when in his culture men are allowed to avail themselves of women.

We miss the teaching moment by regarding Zuma’s rape trial only as yet another stick for his back. It is, in fact, a comment on the type of society we are. It was therefore appropriate that those women were facing us. Zuma didn’t seize power. We got him onto the podium. We therefore need to take the message on those posters to heart. Otherwise true and meaningful transformation of societal values won’t be possible.

Khwezi has been hounded — nameless, faceless and even stateless