An election is currently underway in South Africa. Jacob Zuma is President of the ANC. People here vote the party. The ANC will by all accounts win the contest. Failing a political tsunami, Zuma will become President of the country on April 22. He has not had an easy ride of late. Acquitted of rape charges last year – probably a set up - Zuma, during testimony, admitted to having had unprotected sex with the woman who accused him – the daughter of a family friend – despite knowing she carried HIV. The press suggested at the time that Zuma believed a post coital shower was enough to cleanse and protect him from the virus. Zuma has denied this ignorance. But the story has stuck. Whenever popular cartoonist Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) sketches his likeness, Zuma’s pate is faithfully anointed with a shower head
Regardless of this folly, one must at minimum question Zuma’s judgment, and pity his four or five wives who, one assumes, must continue to perform their marital duties.
Just as troubling is the fact that Zuma’s financial advisor Schabir Shaik, was convicted of fraud and jailed with a 15 year sentence last year on charges stemming from an arms deal consumated with France’s Thompson CSF. The country’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) subsequently charged Zuma with two counts of corruption in 2006, upping it to include racketeering and tax evasion in 2007. Within the past several months Shaik has been released on medical grounds – apparently he is terminally ill – (or is it that he threatened to sing if Zuma didn’t do something?) and just this week, the NPA dropped charges against Zuma because, they say, the process has been tainted by recently produced evidence of possible political interference (read former President and ANC rival Tabo Mbecki who may have been behind the NPA’s bringing charges in first place). How this exonerates Zuma I don’t know. The case apparently remains strong against him. One theory is that if the NPA were to proceed as originally intended, South Africa would be investigating former and future Presidents for corruption and meddling, and this wouldn’t look good in the eyes of the world community.
The farce is, that if this bullshit stands, rule of law falls. If it falls, so falls democracy, the future well being of the country, and the dream that Nelson Mandela so marvelously brought to reality back in the early 1990s. Is this what so many struggled for? What a great sadness if Mandela’s legacy is betrayed and ends here; if no honest, young champions emerge to fight for and bring to fruition early promise. If South Africa turns into another Zimbabwe.
Not that multi-national companies haven’t always bribed government officials to land big ticket public sector contracts, or that sex scandals aren’t part of everyday western political life. Look at the smoke around Berlusconi, Mitterrand and Chirac, the governors of Illinois and New York, Bill Clinton, Mark Thatcher, Brian Mulroney even.
It just seems more disappointing here in South Africa, where the new democracy showed such promise. Where now everyone knows what’s going on – the papers are full of it – and nobody seems capable of exacting justice. Perhaps it’s true: we get the governments we deserve.
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