You had your chance, Mr Zuma, now let your successors get on with it

Dear Mr Zuma; We do not normally use this space to write letters to politicians. Today we have decided to do just that and plead with you to back off. SA and its leaders face a mountain of challenges. If we are to come out of the technical recession, turn the tide against crime and put more South Africans into jobs, we all have to work together. We need our leaders to focus on nothing else. We don’t want them worried about being stabbed in the back. Your actions of the past weeks, which were exposed in a front-page article in this newspaper last Sunday, threaten to derail the plans that have been put in place, distract ANC leaders and destabilise the government. That is why we have decided to write to you because we believe that as a veteran of the struggle, a former prisoner on Robben Island and the ANC’s former head of intelligence, you must have an appreciation of the difficulties facing your comrades who have been deployed in government. Mr Zuma, you played a key part in dismantling the apartheid state and were instrumental in the negotiated settlement that paved the way for this democracy. In your home province of KwaZulu-Natal you will be remembered for your interventions to broker peace between the warring ANC and IFP. Despite your shortcomings, the ANC placed its trust in you, electing you its deputy president.

We will not dwell on the deterioration of your relationship with your comrade Thabo Mbeki and how he ultimately had to remove you as deputy president of SA. You fought back from that setback and emerged as the leader of the ANC in Polokwane in 2007. Two years later you were head of state and entrusted with managing this dynamic country. Many of us did not support your election, but accepted it. Our doubts proved well-founded as, instead of leading, you empowered your family and close friends, including new-found ones like the Guptas, giving them keys to the vault so they could plunder the state. Sadly, the ANC stood by you through it all, through all your blunders and your failure to govern. We all watched in disbelief as you turned our country into a kleptocracy.

But your term had to end at some point. And thankfully it did, in February, when your party asked you to leave the Union Buildings. This was because you tried to anoint your own successor. So your party fought back and removed you from office. The ANC elected Cyril Ramaphosa to lead it and decided it had had enough of you in government.

The new man in charge is no messiah, but he has gone about trying to fix the mess you created. The compromised ministers you appointed at the service of the Guptas followed you out the door; the state-owned companies that your pals had turned into a piggy bank now have new boards that are trying to turn them around; your friends have run away, refusing to account for their years of impunity. But it seems, Mr Zuma, that you have not given up. In our exposé last weekend, we reported that you take part in clandestine meetings during which you plot against Ramaphosa. We revealed how you met ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule and those leaders of the ANC youth and women’s leagues loyal to you. Despite denials by Magashule and his trusted loyalists at Luthuli House, you are yet to deny the meetings. We may not care much about the ANC, but we care deeply about this country. If we are to fix SA, we, unfortunately, need a stable ANC as it is the party voted into power by millions.

By destabilising the ANC, you are destabilising the country. Your clandestine meetings with those ANC leaders who are refusing to accept change are nothing but an attempt to bring you or your anointed leader back to power via the back door. Why, Mr Zuma? Why? You had a chance and you misgoverned this beautiful country and left it in ruins. Please turn and go back to the dustbin of history where you belong.

If we are to fix this country, we, unfortunately, need a stable ANC