Zuma’s exwife vies for role as South Africa’s president

JOHANNESBURG: Nkosazana DlaminiZuma is a fierce campaigner against racial inequality whose hostility to big business has rattled investors in South Africa. She is also one of two frontrunners to be the country’s next president.

The 68yearold is vying to succeed her exhusband, President Jacob Zuma, as leader of the ruling African National Congress at a party vote this week end, an outcome that would make her favourite for the presidency after a parliamentary election due in 2019.

A medical doctor and former chair woman of the Commission of the African Union, a pancontinental grouping, DlaminiZuma has pledged during her campaign to ‘‘radically’’ tackle the racial inequality that persists in South Africa 23 years after white minority rule ended.

Backers of her main rival, deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa, say she is peddling populist rhetoric and would rule in the mould of her former husband, whose decade in power has been plagued by corruption scandals. Investors worry over DlaminiZuma’s hostility to international companies, which she says form part of a ‘‘white monopoly capital’’ cabal dominating South Africa’s wealth.

DlaminiZuma’s supporters point to a commitment to changing the lives of South Africa’s black majority. Lynne Jones, a psychiatrist and author who lived with DlaminiZuma when they were students together in the English city of Bristol in the 1970s, said: ‘‘Here was someone who had put their whole life on the line and given up home and family for what they believed. It was eyeopening.’’ — Reuters