Jacob Zuma’s shameless and shambolic appearance at the Zondo commission of inquiry underlines the damage he has done to this country.
He collapsed our law enforcement agencies by handing them over to the likes of Berning Ntlemeza and Shaun Abrahams. These law enforcement agencies became toothless. Their ability to investigate or prosecute anyone was destroyed. Talented civil servants fled to the private sector. High crime flourished.
Zuma’s appearance clearly shows that the man should not have been testifying at a judicial commission of inquiry. He shouldn’t have been giggling and diverting attention from the real questions by raising hoary, discredited, paranoid allegations that some of his comrades are spies.
He should have been in a court of law, answering straight questions that demanded straight answers, from a prosecutor. He should have been charged with corruption, and facing real consequences for his actions.
Instead, given what the Zondo commission is, he pitched up and played victim. He coughed and joked away his transgressions. He could sit in front of the judge and, with a straight face, say he does not recall phone calls he made in 2010 to Themba Maseko, the straight-as-an-arrow former government communications head.
He could say this while he had no problem remembering with clarity a hug between Siphiwe Nyanda and an alleged apartheid spy. In 1983. There’s an expression for that: selective memory.
The truth is that he was making it up — or had invented it all up over the past 30 years in his paranoid mind. He can’t produce evidence that Nyanda, one of the key people who propelled him to power, was a spy. He cannot do the same about his allegations that Ngoako Ramatlhodi was a spy. There is no evidence. Not a shred. Just lies and balderdash.
First, Zuma wants us to believe that he allowed a situation where Ramatlhodi, who worked in the late ANC president Oliver Tambo’s office, to continue working while he knew the man was a spy? Seriously? He kept quiet as Ramatlhodi became premier of Limpopo and ascended to cabinet?
What are we to make of Zuma’s appointment of Ramatlhodi to deputy and ministerial positions? I am sorry, but Zuma’s actions and utterances make zero sense.
Zuma suggests that Nyanda celebrated the murder of his (Nyanda’s) own brother with a hug given to the alleged apartheid spy. How low can you go? Crucially, how stupid do your supporters have to be to believe such arrant nonsense?
It tells you something about the crazy mob that Zuma rushed to address after his shameful appearance at the commission last Monday that they would believe such allegations. They are not a political movement. They are a religious cult, at the sway of a discredited, lying and corrupt leader.
The sharper prosecutors in Shamila Batohi’s office will have been listening on Monday and will have realised that Zuma has no defence, just deflection
Zuma has bleated for ages that he wants his day in court. Well, the sooner he has it the better. In such a court, his repeated “I can’t remember” and his jokes will result in a guilty verdict.
There is a silver lining to this farce. When Barack Obama paraphrased the Martin Luther King quote saying “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, he could have been talking about where we are now.
Zuma and his cronies have spent the past 20 years dissembling, but the noose has been tightening slowly but surely since the ANC conference of December 2017. Cyril Ramaphosa may be on the ropes politically (particularly after the public protector’s “findings”; on Friday), and his victories may seem frustratingly small and slow to come, but they are accumulating.
The institutions that have been stolen are being fixed. Cases of corruption are being built by the NPA. The sharper prosecutors in Shamila Batohi’s office will have been listening on Monday and will have realised that Zuma has no defence, just deflection. The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.
It is a lesson that Zuma, who claims to have been schooled in the tenets of the ANC but actually represents its most regrettable aspects (such as the torture and murder of many innocents in the organisation’s camps in exile allegedly because they were “spies”), should have known and heeded.
Zuma’s appearance at the inquiry exposed him to the nation as a man who lies. He was so scared of being questioned that on Wednesday he fled the inquiry’s lawyers and their incisive probing. On Friday he ran off again, crying that he was being questioned too hard. Boo hoo, Jacob. What innocent person eager to be cleared does that?
Zuma was first charged with corruption in 2005. He has spent the past 15 years denying his guilt. When he has a chance to clear his name in front of a judicial commission of inquiry, all he did last week was claim to have a list of alleged spies.
The emperor has no clothes. He never had. He must now appear in a court of law.
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