JAUNDICED EYE
All the African National Congress schmaltz around President Jacob Zuma’s birthday makes me feel faintly bilious. Although 75 is a pretty number and deserves a nod from family and close friends, the practice of a populace fulsomely celebrating any national leader’s birthday is offensive.
A person, after all, is not a nation. Let’s not encourage the nascent narcissism of power by conflating the two.
In any case, who really gives a damn? Aside from, of course, those fawning colleagues and the ingratiating supplicants angling for gravy trough positions, always hoping to reap reward for their fealty.
Birthday sycophancy over politicians is an ugly habit – witness the annual hullaballoo around Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe – but the powerful are surprisingly easily flattered.
Possibly the most memorable political birthday party was that of President John F Kennedy. The Democratic Party had needed a peg on which to hang a fundraising dinner and JFK’s 45th was it.
The star of the show, however, was not the United States leader. It was Marilyn Monroe, taking that anodyne Happy Birthday ditty and breathily transforming it into the most public seduction ever.
Jacob Zuma has not been so fortunate. Instead of a love song performed before an adoring nation by a svelte dazzler with come-to-bed eyes, he instead had thousands of angry and disillusioned South Africans trampling through the Union Building gardens to tell him, up close and personal, that it was time to voetsek!
It seems that such was Zuma’s consternation at the snub that he hastily re-arranged his social calendar. A meeting with the Emir of Qatar was moved from Wednesday during the day to Tuesday night.
The president’s office has denied that this unprecedented last minute change was because of the demonstrations, saying “There is no shame to be had in a democratic protest.” So, it’s just a happy coincidence that Zuma doesn’t have to meet the Qatar delegation with a different kind of birthday cacophony in the background.
The possible upside of the visit is that the Emir is one of the richest men on the planet and Qatar is one of the wealthiest countries. On the downside, according to media reports, the Emir was supposedly livid at the insult of the hasty to-and-fro rescheduling.
Zuma should take care not to offend the Emir, for one never knows when one might need a bolthole. After all, Qatar is just a hop, skip and a jump to Dubai, where Zuma’s best pals, the Guptas, have their modest R445m mansion, in case things get too hot here, and where they reportedly have been stashing their spare cash.
Which reminds me that it is now exactly a year since Economic Freedom Front leader Julius Malema taunted the presidency with the provocative claim that Zuma had packed R6bn in suitcases and flown with the money to Dubai for the Guptas, “because when Zuma travels he doesn’t get searched by customs”.
Unless true, this is clearly defamatory of Zuma and the Guptas. At the time, the presidency did issue a statement threatening legal action over the “malicious allegations”.
Malema has not withdrawn his claim, nor apologised. Yet the most litigious president in our history and his similarly litigious cronies – who last week rushed to court over noisy demonstrators outside the Saxonwold shebeen – still haven’t served writs.
How puzzling. No doubt, in the fullness of time, all will become clear.
There was other bad news for Zuma to digest over the birthday cake. Former Hawks head, Major-General Mthandazo Ntlemeza has lost his Gauteng High Court application for leave to appeal a ruling that that set aside his appointment and ordered him to vacate his office with immediate effect.
It is Ntlemeza, very much Zuma’s hatchet man, who pushed the botched prosecution of former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan over the so-called SARS 'rogue unit’. The new Police Minister, Fikile Mbalula, withdrew the appeal by his predecessor against the judgment – a rare departure from the Zuma administration’s normal approach to judicial reverses, which is an endless pattern of doomed appeals that serve no purpose other than to delay implementation of the unfavourable judgment.
In all, not a happy week for our leader.Maybe 75 is also a good age at which to start cashing in your retirement benefits?
