An opportunity to face our Zuma demons and march back

We should hopefully emerge stronger from the horror

Trusting ourselves to find a “political solution” to the problem of one Jacob Zuma has been the undoing of South Africa for more than a decade. The former president should have had his day in court years before he stepped into the Union Buildings, but instead his all too powerful party protected its man by all means at its disposal. South Africans watched disillusioned by it all, businesses halted investment spend and used the prevailing sentiment to invest outside the country and even outside the continent. The “opportunists” among us gave in to the new “normal” and some good men and women discarded their morals and looked to gain personal benefit from a corrupted state. People turned a blind eye to the destruction in order to protect the fragile unity within the governing party.

There’s no denying the primacy of the ANC to our early democracy, and in the days and weeks leading to the ill-fated decision by Mokotedi Mpshe to drop charges against Zuma in 2009, we all held our breath waiting for what would happen next. A threat of violence was certainly a clear and present danger from the supporters of the former president, who had emerged from a brutal Polokwane elective conference and an embarrassing rape trial just a couple of years earlier.

The cowardly thing to do, in fact, was to drop the charges and hope that Zuma would surprise us all and morph into a “good” leader despite the clear signals that it was wishful thinking at best. It was the wrong call to seek a political solution rather than grant him his

“expressed” wish to give him his day in court. By denying it we went into a period when the country’s sovereignty was abandoned in the interest of a few brothers.

But here we are. His day has finally come and the country can now come to grips with what had happened behind closed doors over more than two decades in the circles of the ruling elite. That’s what must be exposed by the National Prosecuting Authority after its decision this

Friday to reinstate charges against Zuma.

When Brazil fell into its deepest recession in nearly 100 years and ratings agencies flung the Latin American giant into junk status, the only way it was going to march back from the brink was to deal with corruption that had spread like a cancer throughout the country after the return of democracy in 1985.

Brazil’s entire body politic was stained by a corruption scandal that had seen billions looted from its public coffers, with powerful politicians and businessmen turning against each other in order to avoid lengthy prison sentences. In the past five years Brazil has seen a president impeached, and her predecessor and the ever popular “Lula” convicted of corruption and money laundering. The incumbent himself is being investigated for corruption.

It’s taken Brazil more than three decades to look at or to at least seriously face up to its demons, and yes, there may have been patches in this time that the country was heralded as one of the world’s new growth frontiers, but systemic corruption cut such notions at the knees. Yet as crippling as this sounds to any country, Brazil still stands today and just this month emerged from its three-year-long recession.

In South Africa today an opportunity has been provided by the changing of the guard at the ANC’s most recent elective conference, and it is one the country should not waste. The governing party must soberly face up to its failures, to the penalties that come with it — and to a poor electoral showing if that is how things pan out.

Charging Zuma, who throughout his years as president played the tribal card that was offered by his Zulu ancestry, will be a threat to the party’s unity drive. Ever willing to play the victim, he is likely to drum up support for his cause.

Lula, however, despite perhaps being just as popular a leader as our former president, if not more, couldn’t use that popularity to ward off corruption charges. So too should our body politic trust our constitutional institutions to delve into the mess of the past couple of decades and allow them to pursue all holy cows within the movement and outside.

And we should hopefully emerge stronger from the horror.