Our long-suffering president, JG Zuma, is under siege again. I thought his situation was neatly summed up in Zapiro's Sunday cartoon. We saw Zuma, replete with shower head, carrying five massive suitcases on his back.

Out of each protrudes one of the following people or groups of people: the Gupta brothers; "relatives" - not very good drawings of Duduzane Zuma, Zuma's son by Kate Mantsho, and Khulubuse Zuma, the president's robust nephew; Manyi, as in Jimmy, the government spokesperson; Cele, as in Bheki the national police commissioner; and, finally, Gaddafi and the arms sales that the government has made to him.

The "scandals" precipitated by these people and by previous arms sales to the Libyan despot are perceived to be Zuma's main burdens at the moment - to which we could also add a recent story about a shopping list, to buy for the Presidency: "gravy ladles of gold, cut-glass champagne glasses, dozens of new paintings and 48 Persian carpets fit for a president ...".

Interesting to me is that the above "problems", for which Zuma is being hammered, are pretty funny. Well, they're not really; nearly all the problems that these people represent have, or could have, devastating consequences on many "innocent" people. Still, given the dramatis personae, all or most of them are indeed funny.

There are the three roly-poly Gupta brothers, who on the one hand wander about trying to ingratiate themselves with all and sundry, while bringing out an embarrassingly anemic newspaper that doesn't ever seem to be distributed. On the other hand, they are making, hand over fist, very tidy sums in various business deals, not disconnected from Zuma or Duduzane.

Then there was Duduzane who inordinately impressed his Radio 702 host, John Robbie, by actually going to the radio station to say that everything he has recently achieved had nothing whatsoever to do with his surname; that his success was completely and only related to his "getting up in the morning and working hard".

I happen to like Duduzane - and Khulubuse too - so just how gullible Duduzane is, or how gullible he thinks we are, I won't comment on. But you will note that this view about his success seems a trifle off the mark.

Manyi is one of the worst things that has recently happened to us. But he, like the president of the ANC youth league, is so patently a caricature of bad Africanism that he's simultaneously really funny. Sometimes, with the two of them, I don't know whether I'm watching a serious press briefing or live comedy. And then there's General Cele, who has taken over from various other folk in our history as a champion of the foot-in-the-mouth syndrome.

So what do we learn from this? That the Zuma government is often something of a comedy routine and that you need to have a pretty good sense of humour these days? Yes.

But what I also find worrying is that Zuma is not being targeted for some of the things for which he and his government should really be targeted. In other words, as is so often the case with Zuma, the media and also, to some extent, the opposition are playing the man and not the ball - it's the good old ad hominem stuff.

Let's look at just one example - and I am choosing this one because I work at the Wits Justice Project (WJP), which, operating under the aegis of the journalism department, investigates miscarriages of justice. This being the case, we do most of our work inside, and we investigate, the so-called criminal justice system, including prisons.

Now, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, the minister of correctional services, has announced the holding of public hearings on proposed name changes to 11 jails.  In a full-colour advert in the Sunday Times, she invited members of the public to attend the hearings and to make oral submissions.

Given overcrowding, prison gangs, ongoing corruption, poor compliance with laws and policy, and simply cruelty, does she really believe that she should be spending public money on trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?

She's a minister of Zuma's and an integral and important part of his government. Yet is anyone hammering Zuma and the government for this sort of contemptuous and money-wasting nonsense? And this is just one example.

Seems to me that this is sort of thing for which Zuma and the rest should be hammered - not innocent-eyed sons, foreign businessman, or Malema wannabes.

Jeremy Gordin is a veteran journalist and director of the Wits Justice Project. This article first appeared in the Daily Dispatch.

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