One more prod to topple teetering Zuma

AMEXICAN standoff, says my dictionary, “is a confrontation amongst two or more parties in which no participant can proceed or retreat without being exposed to danger. As a result, all participants need to maintain the strategic tension, which remains unresolved until some outside event makes it possible to resolve it.”

The Constitutional Court ruling on Nkandla on Thursday, inspiring though it was, does not do much to relieve the “strategic tension” in the ruling ANC as senior members line up for and against President Jacob Zuma. He and ANC secretarygeneral Gwede Mantashe still have their pistols pointed at each other’s heads, unable to so much as blink. Zuma’s disgraceful address on TV on Friday and Mantashe’s equally pitiful “acceptance” of Zuma’s mumbled apology change nothing.

But the judgment does make possible that “outside event” that leads to resolution. It won’t be Nkandla. Nkandla’s done, although there’s a delicious irony in the court requiring Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan to decide how much Zuma should pay for the non-security aspects of the expansion worth about R250-million at his private home. Zuma resents having had to appoint Gordhan in December to save the currency. Gordhan, on the other hand, needs Zuma to make a call in his own Mexican standoff with SARS commissioner Tom Moyane, who he wants removed. It is critical to the people who ultimately want Zuma gone that Moyane goes first. The commissioner knows who has the money in South Africa, and what they do with it. Moyane has strengthened his position by meeting his R1-trillion tax target for 2015-16.

Zuma, he claims, is seized with resolving the row, even though he is central to it himself. In reality, Zuma is in two Mexican standoffs at the same time. With what will he hold a third weapon, should it be necessary, when the “outside event” arises?

No one knows what the outside event might look like, but I have three guesses. The obvious one involves the financial relationship between the Gupta family and the president and his son. It involves the purchase of Glencore’s Optimum coal mine, a major supplier to Eskom. This deal should have been closed already but the buyers are struggling to find the R2.1-billion to pay for it.

Here, the “outside event” would constitute any attempt to secure funding from a state-owned or regulated entity, be it the Industrial Development Corporation or the Public Investment Corporation or any of the development banks or provincial development agencies that fall under government control. Whatever the terms, any public funding of a venture in which the Zuma family is involved — as it is, intimately, in the Optimum acquisition — could invite disaster for the president.

The second would be an unfavourable decision (for Zuma) from the High Court in Pretoria on a DA petition to set aside the National Prosecuting Authority’s decision in 2009 not to proceed with fraud charges against Zuma, which allowed him to become president of the country. Setting aside the decision would not mean the NPA would have to reinstate the charges, but it would bring Zuma full circle, right back in the dwang, as it were.

The third outside event is unpredictable but growing in power all the time. There may be a natural limit to the ability of the EFF to upset the political applecart in South Africa, but we have not yet seen what it might look like. EFF leader Julius Malema was on the radio on Friday promising to “remove” Zuma from parliament should he try to speak to it. What he means one has no idea, but what do you think this promises?

“Zuma is not going to speak in that parliament. And if he does we are all going to stand on that podium with him. We have no respect for a man who doesn’t have respect for the constitution,” he told the radio station.

Zuma, if the past is any guide, will play for time and look for something or someone to blame for his predicament even though it is entirely of his own making. His wholly predictable, and feeble, apology on Friday will be spun to make him look “sensitive” to our democratic institutions just as he was a “listening president” when he reversed his stupid decision to make David van Rooyen finance minister last year.

Get your popcorn out, sit back, and watch, safe in the sure knowledge that every passing day is a day less of Zuma’s catastrophic administration.