Zuma has run out of ideas
IT may be hard to believe but there is a silver lining to the shameful scenes at last week’s state of the nation address. It is this: the days of the presidency of the empty suit that is Jacob Zuma are numbered.
The country has turned against him. He has turned against the country. He has now entered his final march to Nkandla.
Zuma walked into the chamber last Thursday having already turned popular sentiment against his presidency. Thousands of police personnel were deployed in the people’s parliament.
Soldiers in full uniform walked up and down the red carpet after he requested a doubling of SA National Defence Force personnel for no apparent reason.
Zuma himself, paranoid and afraid of his own people, was surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards.
It was as if we were watching “Die Groot Krokodil” (P W Botha) back in 1985, unable and unwilling to cross his own Rubicon.
Zuma faced a country that is crying out for economic growth and jobs.
These are two areas where he has failed dismally since he took over in 2009.
Instead of taking this challenge by the scruff of the neck and giving us real plans and timelines, he waffled on about a concept – radical economic transformation – he seems to barely understand or have thought about deeply.
That told us all something. It is that he is desperate.
The August 3 election, when under his leadership the ANC lost major metropolitan areas, rattled him deeply. That is why he has stolen from the EFF’s policy playbook – suddenly he wants land, he wants the mines and he wants the farms.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that it is all words. No action will come of it. He speaks radical language on the one hand and is a sheep when he has to act.
Worse, he talks tough on land, for example, when he knows full well that the legislation he spoke about in Sona is neither new nor radical.
Zuma told the nation he would be referring the Expropriation Act back to parliament for more public participation so that they could continue to pursue land reform and land redistribution.
Radical? No. New? No. Any indication that this policy would be pursued with vigour? No.
Zuma then said the government would continue to implement the Strengthening of the Relative Rights programme, also known as the 50-50 programme whereby farmers sell half their land to farmworkers. That is also a grand plan, but neither new nor radical.
Further, one cannot help but be cynical about Zuma’s land consciousness when his Rural Development and Land Reform Minister, Gugile Nkwinti, is reported by the Sunday Times to have influenced the sale of a R97-million farm to an ANC crony.
The farm fell into disrepair immediately after Nkwinti’s crony took over.
That is the type of rot that underlies Zuma’s new-found enthusiasm for radical economic transformation. His policies are not about the people. They are about looting the fiscus for friends and family.
It won’t last, though, and Zuma knows this very well. Over the next few months watch as more of these types of deals are done.
The truth is that this year’s Sona had nothing new to offer a country begging for good news and implementable plans. Zuma has run out of ideas.
His comrades in the parliamentary benches know that he is taking them towards a cliff, and many will now be working to get rid of him.
This was Zuma’s last Sona as leader of the ANC.
Next year he will not be able to make up policy on the hop as he has been doing lately.
He will have to listen to the ANC and, given that his machinations to get his former wife, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to take over are taking strain, he may have to listen to a president who is not too enamoured of him.
That man may be Cyril Ramaphosa, who is now reportedly so disgusted by his comrade that they barely speak to each other.
What happens in January next year? The new ANC national executive committee of the ANC will meet to prepare their January 8 statement and after that will hold an NEC lekgotla to give direction to the cabinet.
Everyone in the room at that NEC meeting will be painfully aware that a national general election will be due in 18 months from the time of their meeting. Do they want Zuma to still be president as the ANC campaigns?
Who in that room will want to be the person trying to justify Zuma’s legion of scandals? Someone will raise their hand. Another will raise theirs in support. The new ANC secretary-general will do a tally. It may be curtains for Zuma.
If his comrades don’t rid themselves of Zuma next year, the Gauteng province and perhaps two others will fall into the hands of the opposition at the 2019 elections.
It will be curtains for the ANC.
The country has turned against him. He has turned against the country. He has entered his final march to Nkandla