The Zulu boy’s day dawns

Stephen Robinson

• Last Updated: April 18. 2009 9:30AM UAE / April 18. 2009 5:30AM GMT

Weekend profile Jacob Zuma

Back in the early 1980s, when it first dawned upon jittery white South Africans that black majority rule was inevitable, the official opposition party was called the Progressive Federal Party, or the PFP. This was the party for liberal, affluent, Left-leaning whites, who said they had no horror of their black fellow South Africans being enfranchised.

As the right-wing Afrikaners cleaned their guns and dug in for prolonged civil war, it slowly became clear that many of these whites – the “Progs”, as they were known – were taking the chicken run, and heading to Britain, Canada, and Australia. So the initials PFP acquired another meaning: “Ach man, so you’re Packed for Perth, are you?” How South Africa’s racial cynics would scoff when liberals spoke sympathetically about the prospect of black majority rule.

Now, 15 years into the grand experiment in non-racial democratic governance, the wheels seem to be coming off. Whites did well at first under Nelson Mandela and his successor as president, Thabo Mbeki. The economy expanded briskly as it slipped the handcuffs of apartheid-era restraints on business and foreign capital. There was a property boom that made the price explosions in London, New York, and the Gulf states seem trivial.

But now, mingle with educated black and white South Africans around the barbecue and all you hear again is doom and gloom, of crime and corruption, and of contingency plans to leave should the going get any rougher. A recent survey of final year students at the main university in Johannesburg found that a clear majority of South Africa’s academic elite of all races would like to emigrate. As another old saying of the 1980s went, the difference between an emigrant and a refugee is only a matter of timing.

So why, then, this sudden sense of gloom about South Africa’s future? The answer comes in the 18-stone, 67-year-old form of Jacob Zuma, the man who next Wednesday will, barring assassination or last minute Act of God, be confirmed as South Africa’s new president.

First they had Mandela, Nobel Laureate and international hero, the man who forgave the whites for the indignity and murderous cruelty of apartheid. Then South Africans had Thabo Mbeki, something of a faux intellectual, a cold fish with no people skills, but an educated and experienced figure, who was unceremoniously overthrown last year in a party putsch.

And from Wednesday, the day of South Africa’s fourth non-racial, democratic election, they will have a self-styled “100 per cent Zulu Boy”, complete with his youthful, sinister supporters who constantly dance around him in T-shirts bearing that legend. They will have a man with fewer years in formal education than he has wives, the son of a Zulu domestic servant who, through cunning and flinty ambition, rose through the guerrilla ranks of the African National Congress to become its chief of intelligence in the 1980s.

Thus, he not only knows where the bodies are buried, he knows who put them there, and when, and with which weapons: earlier this month, the ANC was forced to deny reports in South African newspapers that Zuma, as intelligence chief before the transition to black government, had ordered the murders of ANC activists living in exile who had failed to toe the organisation’s line.

To say that Zuma is a controversial, divisive figure is wholly inadequate to the task. He embarrasses educated black South Africans by appearing at political rallies, and then dancing around in leopard skin accessories, wielding a ceremonial shield.

When pressed to make a speech, he will not delve into a lengthy exposition of his economic policy, but break out into the opening verse of his favourite ANC guerrilla marching song, Bring Me My Machine Gun. (The reason few whites attend his campaign rallies is that they understand perfectly well that in the Zulu popular imagination, the machinegun Zuma refers to would be used on them.)

Zuma is an unabashed polygamist, credited – and in Zulu culture, that is the correct term – with fathering 20 children by nine women. Officially the ANC disapproves of polygamy, because the leadership believes it reinforces the stereotype of Africans as backward and uncivilised.

Zuma refuses to be defensive on the matter. He points out, quite reasonably, that most African politicians and businessmen take mistresses, and that they father children with various women. “Many of them have wives, girlfriends and children that they try to hide. I think that’s terrible. I love all my wives and children and I’m proud of them, so I’m completely open about it, that’s the only difference.”

But there is a more reprehensible side to Zuma’s philandering. In 2005 he was charged with the rape of the 31-year-old daughter of an old ANC comrade. There is some evidence that he was set up by enemies within the party who were well aware of his inability to resist sexual temptation. The alleged victim, who has since left South Africa, said she had gone to Zuma’s house where he overwhelmed her with his substantial physical bulk.

Zuma did not deny that sex had occurred, but maintained it was consensual. “In Zulu culture you cannot leave a woman if she is ready,” he explained to the judge.

“To deny her sex, that would have been tantamount to rape,” he said, claiming that it was obvious she was ready and willing because she turned up at his house in a short skirt.

Most bizarrely of all, Zuma conceded in court that he had known the woman was HIV positive, yet he had not used a condom.

“I had a shower afterwards,” he explained, causing utter consternation to anti-Aids campaigners, who have desperately been trying to alert black South Africans to the disaster of the Aids pandemic enveloping their country. Zuma also embodies the other great anxiety of contemporary South Africa, the lapse into the sort of endemic corruption which is standard for the rest of the continent. In a country with the most rudimentary health and welfare provision, the ANC government, then under Nelson Mandela, signed a wide-ranging arms deal in 1998 that will end up costing some £10 billion (Dh $54 billion).

At first, South Africans wondered why they, a country with no identifiable potential enemies, needed submarines, warships and fighter planes they lack the pilots actually to fly. Then the answer came when investigators uncovered a vast web of kickbacks paid to – according to western intelligence sources – virtually the entire cabinet.

Schabir Shaik, Zuma’s financial adviser, was one of the few men who stood trial for corruption as the ANC, under Thabo Mbeki, assiduously kicked over the traces of the arms deal and other corruption scandals.

Shaik was convicted of making several illegal payments to Zuma, and in effect underwriting the cost of his substantial private home to accommodate his various wives and children. The trial judge who sent Shaik to jail called his relationship with Zuma a “mutually beneficial symbiosis”. Earlier this month all charges were suddenly dropped against Zuma, and Shaik was released early from prison, presumably to ensure his silence. So on Wednesday, South Africans in their millions will place their faith in Jacob Zuma as the right man to play official host at next year’s football World Cup.

He is a man who believes Aids can be dealt with by taking a shower, and whose escape from corruption charges sends a message to the rest of the country that graft is now tolerated at the very highest level.

South Africans who have resisted the inevitability of this national destiny had great hopes that the Congress of the People (Cope), a new party that splintered away from the ANC last year, might make great strides on Wednesday. But Cope has proved a failure, unable to produce a roster of personable candidates, or credible policies, with which to challenge the ANC hegemony.

So the 100 per cent Zulu boy, scarcely pausing for breath after the corruption charges were mysteriously dropped against him, will lead the ANC to its fourth consecutive electoral triumph, summoning up his considerable populist skills to rally the party’s black base.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s whites, and the expanding black middle class who are not enriching themselves from the corruption that has made the ANC political elite millionaires, will be wondering if this might be the time to think enough is enough, and get packing for Perth.