Good Prince Cyril vanquishes the villainous Zuma

THE departure of President Jacob Zuma from the corridors of power is imminent. With his early exit, history again executes one of those neat, ironical loops.

The man who humiliated former President Thabo Mbeki by insisting that he should not be allowed to eke out the final months of his term, is in turn humiliated. His own party will have ejected him from the saddle a full year ahead of his scheduled departure.

The wily manipulator who for almost a decade managed to obfuscate, postpone and sidestep serious criminal charges, will have been brought down.

Not by the law enforcement institutions that he had on puppet strings, but by the betrayal of his own inner circle.

It is often thus, with politicians who come to be despised. Julius Caesar, Nicolae Ceausescu, Robert Mugabe, and now Jacob Zuma, all found that constitutional protocols become irrelevant when your comrades turn against you.

Mugabe defied the world and his own people for decades. He presided with impunity over genocide and starvation.

But his ouster came swiftly and inevitably when he tried to place in charge of the feeding trough his wife, ahead of the lieutenants who had been waiting so long for their turn.

Zuma subverted the constitution with the mute complicity of the ANC. He abetted state capture and corruption. And then, in his most audacious move, in order to keep the extraction processes rolling and the prosecutorial processes stayed, he tried to ensure that his former wife would succeed him.

He failed in his mission when Cyril Ramaphosa beat Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma by the narrowest of margins.

But with the all-powerful national executive committee of the ANC still tilted in his favour, Zuma must have felt assured that at least he had a year to fashion for himself some kind of post-presidential immunity.

However, once power starts shifting, it shifts fast. It’s the “rats desert a sinking ship” phenomenon.

It took mere days for some of Zuma’s most vocal supporters, like the self-described “Mr FearFokkol” Fikile Mbalula, to start lauding the supposed genius and statesmanship of Ramaphosa.

They all knew that the good ship Zuma was sinking and none intended going down with it.

Zuma, the arch manipulator, has been out-manoeuvred. Reportedly, he keeps plaintively telling the emissaries sent to solicit his resignation that he has never been found guilty of doing anything wrong and that the people love him.

It’s delusion of epic proportions, grandiosity on a Shakespearean scale. In fact, it is a reminder that whatever the Bard’s dubious usefulness in a failing education system where most kids matriculate barely able to read and write, he remains relevant for understanding the political world.

Mbeki often quoted Shakespeare in his speeches. Presciently, his favourite play was Coriolanus, in which the eponymous, aristocratic Roman leader is thwarted and deposed by populist rabble-rousers. Enter Zuma, stage left.

Although Zuma has similarities to the rotund, self-important, boastful and cowardly Falstaff – a comic character who appears in a number of Shakespeare’s plays – no doubt a bitter Mbeki would view him as the traitorous Brutus, in Julius Caesar.

Or maybe as Macbeth. Macbeth, after all, is about a man whose ambition causes him to murder the king who pulled him out of obscurity into a position of trust.

One scene in the play perfectly encapsulates the present moment in our politics. Faced with her husband’s increasingly distraught behaviour when he sees the ghost of the murdered Banquo, Lady Macbeth addresses her dinner guests, entreating them to leave.

But in the context of presidential recalcitrance, Shakespeare’s words could as appropriately be addressed to Zuma, on behalf of almost the entire South African nation:

“He grows worse and worse. Question enrages him.

“At once, goodnight. Stand not upon the order of your going,

“But go at once.”

So, in short order, we will have had a philosopher-king and a clown as leaders.

Whether Ramaphosa can step in to be the hero that we are all so emotionally invested in him being, remains to be seen.

If there is any lesson from literature, especially Shakespeare, it is that kings and presidents are invariably flawed. We shouldn’t allow our perfectly justified antipathies towards Zuma to make us foolishly euphoric about what his successor might achieve.

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