Scandal goes on

SO THE money for the non-security features at Nkandla has been paid back, but unsurprisingly perhaps, the scandal around President Jacob Zuma, the man who owed the money, continues.

And the main reason for that is our experience of him: that he seems to have to be forced at the end of a sword to do the right thing.

Even then, we haven’t always known whether it’s Zuma doing, by choice, what appears to be the right thing – or something akin to the right thing – or whether he’s being driven by other forces.

Either way, he is something of a master at not convincing us that he truly feels regret for the many concerning things he has done. We only have to think of how he slipped around the actual meaning of the Constitutional Court’s judgment on Nkandla.

Anyone who didn’t know much about that debacle might have come away thinking that the president simply hadn’t been advised properly around the powers of the public protector and the significance of the supreme law.

And when one of the impacts of its judgment was that government officials were made to look like fools, and effectively take the fall, it didn’t seem that Zuma was particularly moved. Some analysts went so far as to say he threw his own appointees under the bus.

Hence the fact that not all of us immediately believed the president simply took out a home loan from a reputable institution and agreed to pay it back at stunning amounts of anything between R77 000 and R107 000 a month for possibly the next 20 years.

Many of us are curious to know how Zuma intends to repay instalments on a loan of this quantum at his advanced age of 74.

Many of us would also like to know a lot more about the Venda Building Society Mutual Bank which gave him the loan. Others are wondering whether it is a common act to have a bond issued on ground that may effectively be part of a tribal trust.

Once again, though it appears the president has done the right thing, there seem to be some details that need clarifying. We wait in high anticipation.