Zuma’s budget vote response is as intellectually bankrupt as his jokes
27 May 2015
The EFF expresses its utter disgust at President Zuma’s response to the budget vote. President Zuma must explain what is presidential about his constant and misplaced blame of apartheid on everything including his own incompetence to deal with contemporary challenges facing South Africa. He accused the opposition of “political poverty”. Zuma must explain what is “politically rich” about his constant “my babo” refrain or if that is a political concept worth responding to.
If Zuma thinks there is no substance to the opposition’s diagnosis of his meaningless speeches, then he must ask himself if he is not the problem, because one cannot preside over so disorderly a situation with so much platform and power and think he is not responsible for the degenerate conditions of debate.
What is really there to debate with a President who thinks we must not “think like other Africans generally”? What is there to debate with a President who thinks highways in Gauteng are not like “some road in Malawi”? What is of political substance about a person who says when he grew up homosexuals would not stand in front of him, because he would beat them up? What can you gain from a man who thinks women are inadequate if they do not have kids, because having kids trains them to be better women?
Zuma must realise that he degenerated political discourse because of his utterances that teenage pregnancy must be resolved by locking young girl up in Robben Island. He must explain how he is contributing to politically substantive debate when he holds views like “the ANC is more important than the constitution” of South Africa.
He must ask himself what ideas he will be remembered for. What ideas will people associate him with? If Mandela is associated with the idea of “reconciliation”, Mbeki with “African Renaissance”, then what will generations to come say were his ideas? The reality is that there is no meaningful idea he espouses nor engineered because in his long life, from Nkandla to Robben Island, back to Nkandla and then to exile, he did not generate any ideas of his own and never cultivated his intellect.
We all wonder what happens behind closed doors when he meets men of high aptitude like Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, Xi Jinping and other world leaders. Does he cope with them? Do they patronise him and pretend he is making sense when he is not? Does he take proper decisions about South Africa or like he has done before, does he vote for the killing of Gaddafi and realise afterwards that he just sold out an African leader to Western gallows for slaughter?
The truth of our situation in this country is that there is nothing to debate with an ANC of vulgar and uncouth executives, ministers who lie in Parliament and then claim to be joking, and of MPs whose core competency is more about voting and clapping hands than to raise substantive critiques to the opposition. If this ANC provided any substance like the ANC of Thabo Mbeki, Joel Netshitendze, and Sidney Mufumadi, the opposition would probably have something to nibble on; but on Zuma’s table of discourse is only unrelated sophomore broken speech accompanied by super unethical and uncontrollable parasitic appetite for public resources. We are confronted with an inarticulate homophobic, sexist, afrophobic and a kleptomaniac who now thinks he is the ideologue of our times.
The EFF does not only boast a robust, fearless and unwavering ability to speak truth to power and hold it accountable. We also pride ourselves with capacity for revolutionary ideas and unmatched intellectual fortitude. Today not only did Zuma embarrass himself, he has painfully degenerated into delusions of a cat that looks into the mirror and sees an image of a lion. To us, he remains as empty as his jokes.
Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, May 27 2015
