Kevin Ritchie
THERE’S very little that keeps Jacob Zuma up at night. Thanks to advice from his doctors he’s taking things a little easier since being booked off for 10 days in June, sparking a major health fear. There’s plenty that concerns him though.
Zuma’s slimmer than he has been, but not as gaunt as when he opened Parliament after the ANC successfully defended its majority in the May general elections.
He’s in good spirits as he steps into the drawing room at Mahlamba Ndlopfu, the presidential residence in Pretoria on the Meintjieskop Ridge south of the Union Buildings. It’s the first time, he’s granted an interview in more than a year.
I have interviewed Zuma once before – in the ANC headquarters opposite The Star in 2009. Then he was head of the ANC and on the cusp of becoming president of the country. Two years before he had beaten Thabo Mbeki in Polokwane and then seen his one-time nemesis recalled from the very building we were sitting in.
Zuma then was upbeat, broader in the shoulders and thicker in the midriff, on his toes like a boxer waiting for the bell. Now, he’s relaxed. Still animated and passionate about issues, still charming, but confident, almost serenely so.
To his right, the Farlam commission into the Marikana massacre on the platinum belt plays out silently on a 50-inch plasma TV screen incongruously placed among the Pierneef paintings mounted on tapestries, across the room from the baby grand piano.
On screen, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa is being robustly cross-examined by former ANC stalwart turned Economic Freedom Fighters commissar Dali Mpofu. A one-time ANC luminary, Mpofu is grandstanding for the benefit of the live TV broadcast, raising the ire of the other counsel and testing Judge Ian Farlam’s patience. Mpofu is a couple of hours away from calling on the commission to have Ramaphosa criminally charged for orchestrating the tragedy.
For Zuma it’s proof of just how far the country has come but also a clear harbinger of the problems he sees lying ahead if the rules of the game are not followed.
“We are an open society, we are a democracy, there’s no one who is above the law. The deputy president is being grilled in a legal, very open process. The question is how far do you go? You’ve got the deputy president here, how are you dealing with him? Because the manner in which you deal with him, with that situation, could go a long way to wrongly educate society that you can talk any way to an elder, so you need particularly the people who are professional to be measured because whatever they do is an education to the society.”
Society, Zuma believes, needs to be properly educated about the constitution and the laws that underpin it, to ensure that it and the state it describes are protected. The spate of service delivery protests, particularly in the run-up to the elections, remains a very real concern for him. Zuma blames his own party for failing to deal with what he sees as a legacy of apartheid.
“During (apartheid), violence became an instrument that was used too often in a number of areas that tended to influence those that the violence was used against to use violence in return and in defence of themselves. When we resolved our problems in South Africa, what we did not do was to realise the extent and the depth of that culture in our society. We did not then work out a programme to address that problem that you don’t break things when we are demanding things.
“You can’t say no delivery and burn things that have been delivered, burn the library, burn the offices.
“If there’s a protest by people empowered by the constitution you will find that they now break houses of poor people who might have built those houses with their own money over many years. They undermine the right of those people to own property. At times if people are striking they then go on a march and really undermine the rights of other people in the process.”
The danger is that South Africa stands the real risk, he says, of being defined as much for its violent protests as it once was for its peaceful transition from apartheid.
Another concern is the spate of crime, particularly involving children, which has the East Rand township of Reiger Park in its thrall, among others. He visited Eldorado Park, south-west of Joburg last year, after desperate mother Dereleen James wrote him a letter pleading for help in her fight against the druglords. Zuma was so touched that he visited the community.
He is horrified by the crime but heartened by the way the communities have risen up against the scourge of drugs and the victimisation of children. Winning this war will require the police and community to work in tandem, he says.
He’s confident though. “We’ll succeed because we talk about these things. If a child has been kidnapped you can see how the society gets up to condemn it, the question is how we build on that to ensure we can move forward?” he asks.
One thing that doesn’t appear to worry Zuma is the rise of the EFF under former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema.
The EFF, he says was spawned by angry people expelled from the ANC or disaffected by it, just like Cope, which was almost annihilated at the polls, and its forerunner the United Democratic Movement.
“South Africans are very critical. When we go for elections we have a huge number of political parties that mushroom, but when all is said and done and the voters are no longer listening and laughing and have to be serious, they vote ANC.”
Political parties can’t be formed on the basis of animosity: “You can’t, because you are angry, create a political party. You are not disagreeing on policies and ideologies, you can’t last. The EFF is worse than the others because firstly it is very angry and a very excited kind of party, they’ve got ideas that say we’re going to change things, but what does it stand for? Economic freedom. What does that mean? You’re fighting for economic freedom, from who? Who is oppressing you?”
If the EFF can’t deliver it will face the same fate as the other ANC splinter organisations. But it can’t do that without support – and at the moment it’s a distant third to the ANC, so its promises of nationalising everything remain a pipe dream.
Zuma is unperturbed too about the personal criticism he has faced. The furore over the millions of rand spent on his rural homestead in Nkandla is never far from the news agenda. He has been lampooned by cartoonists, castigated by columnists and fallen foul of the public protector, but he has always retained the support of the common people.
“I think people do appreciate what I’ve managed to achieve. Even those who are generally critical, I don’t ever think they’ve said ‘this man is lazy’. The majority appreciates it. They comment about it; many will tell you and even articulate what they think the country has achieved and say ‘thank you very much, it is because of you that the country is in this situation’.
“It’s part of life, but South Africans are generally a very critical society, sometimes overly critical at times when we need to say actually we have done well. We laugh at that because even when they are critical they are sitting in the RDP house which was given to them by government and they say, ‘this government is doing nothing’.”
Zuma has four years left in office in terms of the constitution. His dream is that South Africa will one day be able to solve all its problems, particularly the historic issues of inequality.
“The progress we have made in 20 years is progress that no country in the continent has made. The fact that government has a programme to build houses for people who don’t have houses, you have never heard of other countries doing so. People once they are free must look after themselves, which is why other countries have what we call informal settlements.”
Zuma has no illusions about the scale of the challenge,
On his doctors’ orders, he’s no longer holding meetings into the early hours of the morning but his diary remains jam- packed – flying to Angola yesterday for talks on the Great Lakes issue before heading to Zimbabwe for a SADC summit.
Part of the problem is the Mandela legacy, which created the expectation that South Africa would play its role in the continent, he says, and part of it is his own background. “This culture that I have comes from my background of being a struggler where there was not time to rest until you were free and of course once you are free there is no time to rest until you solve the problems of the country. To succeed you have to make things happen.”
l Ritchie is deputy editor of the Cape Times’s sister newspaper, The Star.