Zumagate

He’d be a joke if he wasn’t such a destructive swine. But what Jacob Zuma has done to South Africa isn’t a joke. Mandela must be turning in his grave.

Civil rebellion, violent labour protests, deteriorating infrastructure, unemployment at 25.5%, and a president who doesn’t seem to give a tinker’s cuss for anyone but his arrogant self, is setting the country on a path to anarchy.

With one of the highest crime rates in the world, South Africans are being slaughtered on a daily basis, not only in violent robberies but also on the roads, where a high percentage of drivers hold fraudulent licences and far too many vehicles are horrendously unroadworthy. And the general public – those law abiding citizens whose taxes have been squandered on the president’s lavish lifestyle, are reaching the end of their rope.

As Durban-based singer/songwriter John Ellis so eloquently puts it: “I don’t know if I can remember a single South African politician other than Jacob Zuma covered in such a constant sticky glaze of darkness.

“Mandela’s reputation is inviolable, Mbeki was an unpresidential eccentric, Motlanthe had an uneventful 15 minutes. Zuma is an absolute one-man extravaganza of corruption, scandal and disaster of soap-opera proportions.

“Have you noticed? Literally every week, at least one day’s street-pole headlines has the word ‘Zuma’ on it followed by various interchangeable allegations of rape/theft/corruption/deceit/investigation. We, his benign servants, have grown so accustomed to this, we don’t really see it anymore. [Refer Times Live]

“Think back: during apartheid, maybe Verwoerd and Botha gained the most notoriously villainous reputations. The others were all just various degrees of run-of-the-mill white supremacy, all variously guilty of an ongoing crime against humanity. Internationally, since WW2: Thatcher, Nixon, Bush Jr, Putin and, of course, Mugabe, all have unsavoury reputations that will stain their political legacies forever.

“Zuma seems to be South Africa’s first real contribution to unassailable political infamy since Botha, covered in scandal, allegations, accusations and a pervasive stink of criminality.

“Can you think of one single happy event associated with our president in the last few years? When you see his name in print it has that same subliminal effect on your mind as other powerfully shameful names, like Enron, Saddam, Bin Laden, Bush, and again, Mugabe. You associate the word ‘Zuma’ immediately with ‘rape, lies, spy tapes, money, Nkandla, Arms Deal, polygamy…’ [Refer Public News Hub]

“A notorious man is the leader of our country, and we can do nothing about it. And even while the concrete sets around his ankles, he’s vilified last week for chartering a private plane to fly to NYC to the tune of R6 million, because the presidential plane was ‘unavailable’. Then, there’s the $10 billion nuke deal with Russia. Then, another headline two days ago: ‘Zuma’s hand on R1 trillion deal’. Did you as a South African ever believe we HAD R1 trillion? And if so, R1 trillion to make deals with OTHER than spending it on the vast ocean of miserably impoverished poor South Africans who couldn’t afford a pen to vote with even if they COULD be bothered?

“South Africans, why is there NOT a vast army of us marching to Nkandla with pitchforks and flaming torches and buckets of tar and bags of feathers? How long will we allow this predator to pillage us?”

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