When is an ANC T-shirt not an ANC T-shirt?

THERE was another, somewhat smaller prayer vigil on Thursday evening. Here at the Mahogany Ridge, we rolled out the supplication mambo in the hope that Jacob Zuma’s date in the dock not be subjected to further delays and that, notwithstanding the anticipated procedural postponements, his corruption trial gets under way sometime this century.

Admittedly, ours wasn’t that much of a prayer vigil. More of a pagan bacchanal. True, time was spent on our knees, but that’s because we were legless.

This follows reports that Zuma’s lawyer, Michael Hulley, wanted the case pushed back “until a reasonable time” to first deal with bids to have his client pay back the millions in legal fees stumped up by the state over the years in which he’d kept Accused Number One out of court.

More to the point, and being the wily agent from below that he is, Hulley also wants to take on review National Director of Public Prosecutons Shaun Abrahams’s decision that Zuma face the criminal charges that were dropped in April 2009.

And why not? Considering how the matter has dragged on, Zuma’s indictment and the summons to appear in court, served not quite six weeks after he was forced to resign as president of the country, do appear to be thoughtless, reckless acts.

Why this unseemly haste? If one was to uphold the principle that, regardless of our station in life, we are all equal before the law, then surely many more years should have passed before Abrahams decided to bring Zuma, now an “ordinary citizen”, before the beak.

And, of course, why should there be a trial if Zuma was innocent?

This was the thinking among supporters at the all-night vigil in Durban’s Albert Park, who prayed that angels, and not just Hulley, protect their hero when he appeared before Judge Themba Sishi yesterday morning.

Black First Land First leader Andile Mngxitama was there, claiming, that, once again, white monopoly capital was behind Zuma’s problems – thus providing further proof that conspiracy theories, no matter how outlandish, remain extraordinarily useful in providing the hard of thinking with an intellectual veneer.

There was, as expected, singing.

One tune apparently suggested that were Zuma to be prosecuted, a cow would give birth to a human being.

Some Ridge regulars have posited that something may have been lost in translation. But others have argued it could explain the current ubiquity of Carl Niehaus. These days he claims to be the spokesperson for the MK Military Veterans’ Association. But that may not be the case at all.

What is certain, though, is that, like Chicken Man, Niehaus is everywhere, a crazed photobomber with a supernatural ability to appear in the background of any news footage of any political rally in any part of the country over the past two years. Was he teleporting from cow to cow?

It was hardly surprising, then, that he was at Albert Park, giving some hapless reporter the fashion low-down on his wardrobe.

Something of a style maven, Niehaus has brought a certain élan to the MK uniform. He fastens, for example, his web belt somewhere between his navel and sternum, thus avoiding the boep-over-the-buckle travesties that are customary when paunchy men of a certain age take to camouflage.

It also helps when doing the toyi-toyi, which in Niehaus’s case is certainly very different.

Now, however, he was explaining when an ANC T-shirt was, in fact, not an ANC T-shirt. This followed a ruling by the party’s executive committee that members attending the prayer vigil not wear official ANC regalia, a decision that Zuma supporters openly ignored.

“We can’t really try to prescribe to people what they can sell at the vigil and also we can’t prescribe or police what people will be wearing when they arrive (on Friday),” Niehaus said.

“I’m not wearing an ANC T-shirt tonight. I’m wearing a T-shirt of the Inkululeko Foundation, which is an independent non-profit organisation that supports military veterans. I’m wearing specifically this T-shirt because Comrade Zuma is a military veteran.”

Who knows, but there may even one day be a fashionable Zuma T-shirt with a prison number on it. And maybe some good will come of it, rather like the 46664 Aids benefit concerts in honour of Nelson Mandela.