Everything Zuma touches turns to broke
I MUST take issue with your leader of March 22: “Zuma critics damn him either way”, where you argue that President Jacob Zuma is hard done by and is perhaps being judged too harshly.
Unfortunately, as another contributor to this page observed, each time I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt, Zuma puts his foot (or relative, or crony) in it, and we are back to square one.
And instead of promptly retracting said foot from the mire he has thrust it in, he usually proceeds to grind it further in, testing the depths to find the bottom.
In the case in point, he is damned for not exercising proper oversight over Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini – and for over three years at that, after the Constitutional Court’s unequivocal stance against the Cash Paymaster Services contract. That is a long time to not do something you should have done.
When it became known that there was a crisis regarding the payment of grants, his action amounted to a solid defence of Dlamini, stating she would be culpable only if the grants were not paid on time.
This ignores her deliberate defiance of the Constitutional Court, which placed that venerable institution in the position of having to legalise something it had already declared illegal.
And now we are expected to applaud when Zuma finally decides to take the matter into his own hands? I think you are asking for too much.
And, as you point out, the committee he set up to ensure the court order is implemented is loaded with his cronies. Now it will take eight ministers to ensure that a job given to one is done.
Now there’s some action for you.
No: Zuma will only deserve praise when he acts to get rid of Dlamini, and Faith Muthambi for that matter, who, incidentally, is also part of his inter-ministerial committee.
However, in light of his spirited defence of the two, I will not be holding my breath.
It appears to me that Zuma has the opposite of the Midas touch: everything he touches turns to broke. I am, therefore, not reassured he has taken the matter into his own hands. A KHAN Durban