The latest slime oozing out of the Zumasphere is disturbing, complete with Nkosazana Zuma-Mncube accusing her half-sister Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla of selling 18 South Africans to Russia to go and die in its meat grinder in eastern Ukraine. But, while the truth will out, I would suggest that the explanation provided by Jacob Zuma is no less chilling.
Until recently, the plight of the 18 (or 19, or possibly 20) men had been painted as an upsetting administrative mix-up: the men, we were told, had been sent to Russia by Jacob Zuma and his MK party to be trained as “bodyguards”, but things unravelled when they were either conned or coerced into signing basic infantry contracts and soon found themselves on the front lines.
News24 reported that Zuma Snr had been trying to intervene since September, writing to the Russian defence minister to ask him to extract the men, explaining that time was of the essence because “we are currently suppressing the information, but our ability to do so is limited”. (I think it goes without saying that “Our Ability To Do So Is Limited” should be the title of every definitive history of the modern ANC.)
However, in the last couple of weeks the focus has shifted from Russian press gangs to South African traffickers, with one of the unfortunates telling News24 that “it’s clear that we were sold, and it looks like we shouldn’t get out of this alive”; and here the story will stay.
Which is a pity, because I think we need to ask at least a few questions about MK’s explanation. Even now, it continues to talk about the men receiving “bodyguard training”; and yet in WhatsApps to the terrified men published by News24, Duduzile reassures them that they won’t be sent to the frontlines but will instead “just patrol or be put on cooking duties or gun cleaning” — none of which sound particularly bodyguard-ish.
Likewise, at the weekend the Sunday Times published a photograph of the group’s commander, Blessing Khoza, wearing military fatigues and posing inside a fortified position with what is alleged to be the flag of a Russian airborne unit.
I also haven’t seen Zuma’s whole letter to Moscow, but there is certainly no mention of bodyguard training in those sections quoted in the press. Instead, he enthuses that the men were sent to Russia to “learn from the world’s finest, so that they may one day return to Africa as capable leaders and steadfast champions of our common cause”.
Finally, and most tellingly, the press-ganged MK member who expressed the belief that the group had been “sold” to the Russian army also said that “the military programme we enrolled in was never a military training programme to begin with”.
Now, I don’t know anything about being a bodyguard, so I must admit that all of this might be entirely routine. It’s possible that confiscating trainees’ phones and bank cards and sending them to bunkers in a war zone to clean other people’s weapons is just the first semester of Bodyguarding 101.
Still, to this layman it does seem that before it all went nightmarishly wrong for them, those MK members were offered the chance by their party to get military training in Russia. All of which leaves a rather important question dangling over the whole fiasco: why?
Is the official opposition in our constitutional democracy, led by a man in whose name the 2021 insurrection was organised, sending party loyalists to an antidemocratic autocracy to be trained to kill people?
Send your answers on a postcard.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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