Zuma defends honey in South Africa

Thabo Mbeki’s high education and brilliance would tower over Nigeria’s leaders while Zuma who had never had formal schooling would be suitably ignorant, illiterate and subservient. Jacob Zuma had been imprisoned in Roben Island with Mandela and the cream of the leaders of the African National Congress when he was only 15 years of age. His […]

Thabo Mbeki’s high education and brilliance would tower over Nigeria’s leaders while Zuma who had never had formal schooling would be suitably ignorant, illiterate and subservient.
 Jacob Zuma had been imprisoned in Roben Island with Mandela and the cream of the leaders of the African National Congress when he was only 15 years of age. His father had died when he was four years old and his mother worked as a domestic servant for a white family in Durban. The laws of apartheid did not allow family members to stay together in urban and white residential areas. The mother could not pay his school fees beyond primary school.  A family member converted him into joining ‘’Umkhonto We Sizwe’’ (Spear of the Nation), the military arm of the ANC. He was arrested while crossing Swaziland’s border to get military training and imprisoned for treason.
Zuma attended an informal school arranged by the ANC inside prison. He was   brilliant and a quick learner. Unlike colonial classroom cultures which alienated children from local cultures and solving community needs, Zuma’s education in the hands of highly educated adult political prisoners was especially rare and privileged. It is little wonder that when he came out of prison he built the ANC’s secret structures in Natal Province; and from 1975 to 1987 he grew to become a formidable head of ANC’s intelligence. President PW Botha bullied Samora Machel into signing the 1984 ‘’Nkomati Accord’’ which demanded that Zuma relocate from Mozambique which shares border with South Africa. In January 1987 he moved to Zambia; ever combating South Africa’s assassination squads targeting ANC activists.
 Zuma ended a fratricide in KwaZulu Natal between Chief Buthelezi’s supporters and the ANC; rose from being elected National Chairperson of the ANC in 1994; Deputy President of the ANC in 1997 and President of the ANC in 2007. His record of building ‘’underground structures’’ of a banned liberation movement was clearly formidable vote-getter in competitive politics. Ignorance and illiteracy had obviously not crippled his appeal to members and leaders of the liberation movement.
The anti-Zuma campaign has fed on his polygamy; dancing a Zulu dance while dressed in leopard skin and falling backwards to be held up by his new bride -as ordained by Zulu custom. Little credit is given to his invoking the patriotism and heroism of the Zulu nation any reversing colonial education policy privileging Xhosa people as the more educated and ‘’civilized people’’.
Zuma’s humour on 12 March, 2015 in response to demands by critics inside parliament to withdraw his pointing at them was combative. He said: ‘’I withdraw my finger’’, and followed it with taking his index finger and physically withdrawing it. His supporters roared with laughter.
 Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Front (EFF) has a point. The ANC has shown fatal flaws of leaders engaging in politics as primarily struggles for contracts  – dangled by white businesses under ‘’Black Economic Empowerment’’  – as sweatless rapid roads to earning millions. The transition from a resistance movement – based on mobilizing millions of poor black women; angry millions of unemployed youths and adults trapped in slave labour inside mines and white men’s farms – to building a caring economic democracy led by an innovative government, are derailing.
Malema desires to take over the ANC’s revolutionary fire but lacks vast reach of the ANC. His heckling Zuma inside parliament shatters the alien aura of parliament to masses of television viewers and radio listeners; but runs the risk of hiding ANC’s achievements of: 3 million houses built and shelters 15 million family members; 88 per cent of blacks getting water in 2011, and 80 per cent getting electricity by 2009. In 1993 the ANC had given 3 million social grants, reaching 15 million in 2011. While these do not match millions of Rand earned by few black business tigers, Malema’s obsession with money used to build Zuma’s home distracts attention from providing specific innovative visions to  enable  new governance deepen economic democracy.
Malema’s merit is in saving the ANC from the common African political virus of politicians being seen only at election time; of party-patrimonialism; of using the police to run debates between factions, and guarding corruption. EFF runs the risk of becoming ‘’house Negroes’’ exploited by vigilant white politicians to nurture cracks in the ANC and turn its leaders away from governance as ‘’continuous involvement of people in socio-economic development and transformation process’’. Jacob Zuma must protect this honey.