South Africa’s Disgraceful Next Leader

On April 22, millions of South Africans will head to the polls in that country’s fourth national election since the birth of multi-racial democracy in 1994. That alone should be reason for celebration. And it’s hard to see how South Africans could do much worse than their last elected president, Thabo Mbeki (the country’s current leader, Kgalema Motlanthe, was appointed in September of 2008 after Mbeki was ousted by his own party, the African National Congress). The English-educated, pipe smoking, Shakespeare-quoting Mbeki was, in spite of all his Anglophilia, deeply suspicious of the West and what he took to be its nefarious designs on the African continent. This paranoia led him to contest the link between HIV and AIDS as a conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies and their bought-off lackeys in Western governments, a tragic denial that helped contribute to the death of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen through the mixed messages he sent as president and his government’s impeding the disbursement of lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs. In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where the world saw a murderous tyrant drive a once-prosperous country into the ground, Mbeki saw a fellow anti-colonial liberation fighter, and he spent the better part of a decade protecting the murderous tyrant in various regional and international fora. While crime soared to unprecedented levels and Johannesburg posted the world’s highest murder and rape rates, Mbeki and his cronies accused those who complained about the country’s lawlessness of being racists nostalgic for the order of apartheid and suggested they leave South Africa.

Given this recent history, that the ANC – which has ruled the country uninterrupted, and with over two-thirds of the seats in parliament, since 1994 – finally dumped Mbeki would suggest good tidings. But in his place, South Africans will overwhelmingly elect president a man who is a crook, demagogue and probable rapist.

To address the last, but most sensational, allegation. Yes, Jacob Zuma was acquitted on rape charges in 2006. But he stated at trial that the reason he had unprotected sex with the HIV-positive woman in question was that she was wearing a skirt with legs uncrossed, and that “in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready.” (This Zulu woman apparently disagreed.) Most egregiously, however, was Zuma’s further claim that he warded off the ill effects of intercourse with an HIV-positive individual by — I kid you not — taking a shower afterwards. This in a country where over 10% of all people have HIV. For this elucidation, Zuma earned himself a withering caricature in the illustrations of South Africa’s most famous political cartoonists, Zapiro, who depicted Zuma forever after with a shower head growing out from his neck. (Zuma has sued Zapiro for defamation over one cartoon in particular, which depicts him ready to rape a blindfolded Lady Justice).

I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether a man who saw fit to say these things in a court modeled upon the English and Roman-Dutch systems of justice is 1) likely to be innocent of the charge leveled against him and 2) irrespective of one’s answer to the first question, should be entrusted with running the most powerful country on the African continent.

That salaciousness dispensed with, onto the more tedious concerns of the incoming South African president’s job-related ethics. Zuma was in the news again this week when the South African High Court in Durban threw out corruption charges against him stemming from his involvement in an arms deal brokered in the late 1990’s between the South African government and a subsidiary of the French weapons manufacturer Thomson-CSF. What is not in dispute is that over the course of several years in the late 1990’s, Zuma received over $300,000 in payments and debt write-offs from Schabir Shaik, a shady “financial advisor” who was later found guilty in 2005 of soliciting a bribe from Thomson-CSF, which won the weapons contract from the South African government. Schaik was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Weeks after this judgment, Mbeki fired Zuma from his position as Deputy President, leading to charges from Zuma’s supporters that he has been the victim of a political conspiracy directed by Mbeki to destroy his political career.

In light of this, it’s important to note that the reason why the court threw out the case this week was not due to a lack of evidence against Zuma but because of alleged prosecutorial misconduct, as the head of the country’s National Prosecuting Authority made clear. Based upon the evidence presented in the Schaik trial, the state declared that a prima facie case existed against Zuma, and the judge who convicted Schaik declared that the bagman and Zuma had a “generally corrupt” relationship. While there has been no concrete evidence presented to justify the claim of a conspiracy against Zuma, this week’s decision by the Durban court has strengthened that meme, and Zuma and his allies will further be able to elide the legitimate accusations of corruption brought against him with the nebulous plot to do him in. The enduring “case against Jacob Zuma” is laid out convincingly and concisely here by Sam Sole of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian.

So to sum up: Mbeki was not kicked out for reasons that would bolster the reputation of South African democracy. He was not forced out because of his crackpot views on AIDS, Zimbabwe or crime, but was rather the victim of a shabby political turf-war. The one positive consequence of Zuma’s ascendancy within the ANC (and the increasing influence of his left-wing allies in the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions), was the formation late last year of the Congress of the People (COPE), a new political party formed by a breakaway ANC faction that could prove to be the first, serious black-led opposition in South Africa. If a silver lining is to be found in the rise of Jacob Zuma, it is that the possibility that this populist demagogue may at last convince black South Africans of the necessity of multi-party democracy and the weaknesses of Big Man politics.