Jacob Zuma goes to jail

Last week, Wednesday 7 July, former South African President Jacob Zuma finally handed himself over to the police. He is to serve a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court. This heart-rending saga reminds us of the 1999 novel, Disgrace, by South African Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee.

The story is about an English professor, David Lurie, who is dismissed from his job for sleeping with a vulnerable student, Melanie Isaacs. And to make matters worse, he falsifies her grades even after she stops attending his classes. Facing disgrace, he ruminates: “So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest, his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?”

Read Also: Jacob Zuma: South Africa’s former president hands himself over to police

A former freedom fighter and former head of Umkhonto we Sizwe who was once imprisoned by the Apartheid regime; Zuma will have enough time to ruminate on the chain of events that have brought him to this sorry end.

Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, 79, was President of South Africa from 2009 to 2018. He was forced out of office by members of his own party who had tired of the embarrassing succession of corruption scandals. In 2005, he was charged and later acquitted of raping the daughter of a family friend. In that same year, he was charged with corruption over a multi-billion-dollar arms deal. In 2016, a court ruled that he had been in breach of his oath of office after using government money to upgrade his private home in Nkandla. He had to refund the money. There is a subsisting 12-count charge involving money-laundering, corruption, fraud and racketeering by the national prosecutor.

Jacob Zuma should never have been President of South Africa. He had neither the ability nor the discipline for the job

In September 2010, I met President Zuma in Brussels where I served as an international civil servant. I rather liked him. A female colleague remarked that she could understand why women would fall for him. She confessed that she found him “charming and sweet”.

Interestingly, during the December 2012 Summit of African, Caribbean and Pacific leaders in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, I was seated directly behind late President Robert Mugabe. He unfortunately reminded me of a sadistic village headmaster. An enigma shrouded in a mystery. He could be as motionless as a Roman statue; his gaze as cold and distant as the Sphinxes of Pharaonic Egypt. He pretended to be sleeping throughout, but when his turn to speak came, he not only summarised what everybody had said; his delivery was magisterial, with an elocution reminiscent of the best of Upper England. Mugabe’s father had been one of the courtiers in the palace of King Lobengula. Raised by the Irish Jesuit Fathers, he was a brilliant student who later earned a degree from Fort Hare University and four London University degrees whilst in a colonial prison.

Jacob Zuma sprang from the ranks of the unwashed hoi-polloi. Whatever he picked up by way of an education was from the trenches, unlike ANC leaders such as Z. K. Matthews, Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki, who were intellectuals.

On 9 December 2015, he fired his finance minister Nhlanhla Nene who was apparently opposed to a financially ruinous 1 trillion Rand nuclear power deal with the Russians. South Africa has faced severe power shortages for a decade now. The markets reacted badly. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange lost a staggering R500 billion. To make matters worse, Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas revealed that he was offered R600 million to back the nuclear project by the Guptas, a South African business family.

The Public Protector, Professor Thulisile Nomkhosi Madonsela, launched an investigation. The Public Protector is an independent Ombudsman mandated to support and strengthen constitutional democracy by investigating, reporting and remedying “improper conduct in all state affairs”. The ensuing report, “The State of Capture”, indicted the leadership for allowing the Guptas, to wield such undue influence in a manner that amounted to “state capture”. A Commission of Inquiry was duly set up, headed by Justice Roy Zondo as Chairman. The Commission began its work in August 2018, with more than 40 witnesses testifying. Astonishingly, members of his own cabinet testified against the president.

It soon became clear that Jacob Zuma and his lawyers were determined never to cooperate with the commission. After a couple of appearances, he ignored subsequent summons altogether. In January 2020, the Constitutional Court determined that refusal to appear before the commission was antithetical to “our concept of public order”.

On 29 June, the Constitutional Court found him guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to 15 months in prison. For several weeks, he had refused to turn himself in. Until now.

Jacob Zuma should never have been President of South Africa. He had neither the ability nor the discipline for the job. And typical of many an African leader, he could not distinguish between the public Treasury and his own private account. He surrounded himself with all sorts of shady reptiles whose sole objective was to capture the state and to use it for their own avaricious purposes. He single-handedly rolled back the gains that had been made in the New South Africa; an insult to the collective memory of the great men and women who had sacrificed so much for the liberation of the country.

It has been said that a little education is a dangerous thing. I would add that a little education with a deficit of virtue ethics is a recipe for disaster. He could not give what he did not have.

The lessons are clear: Successful leadership in our twenty-first century requires ability and character. No nation ever rises above the mindset of its leaders. Men of low degree can only pull nations down to the lowest common denominator. In these universal truths lies the path of hope and redemption for the teeming millions of our glorious continent.