When+the+wheel+of+fortune+turns,+Brown+and+Mde,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 10 May 2006
=When the wheel of fortune turns=


 * Karima Brown and Vukani Mde**

A DAY is a long time in politics. A year is an eternity. Nowhere is this adage demonstrated more aptly than in the political fortunes of Jacob Zuma. This week, the man who last year was summarily dismissed as deputy president of SA, and charged with crimes personal and financial, walked out of court a free man. Moreover in his reaction to his exoneration, Zuma demonstrated a magnanimity and humility rarely seen from any of SA’s politicians.

To start with, Zuma has been found innocent of the heinous crime of rape. It does no good to beat about the bush on this score, playing legal semantics with the differences between “innocent” and “not guilty”. The bottom line remains that the only objective forum that could have pronounced on Zuma’s culpability in a serious crime found, unequivocally, in his favour. Zuma’s detractors, whether in the African National Congress (ANC) or in gender rights and other civil society groups, may have wished for a different outcome. But since they would have a vested interest in only one result, they cannot be trusted as neutral arbiters.

We also cannot pretend that only the complainant in the rape trial was bruised by the process. Rape trials are by their very nature harrowing experiences — for the victim where a rape occurred, and for the accused where none did. A man who has dedicated himself to the struggle for liberation in SA since the age of 16 found himself opened up to personal scrutiny of the most virulent kind, with his expressed views on HIV and AIDS, sexual relationships and everything in-between probed and castigated in public. Unusually, in our modern permissive age, even the morality of his sex escapades became something of national debate, and he has been roundly condemned for his extramarital sex with a woman half his age.

Some of the criticism levelled at him has been well deserved. As a public figure there are expectations Zuma failed to live up to with his behaviour on November 2 last year. As a man who only months before had taken to saying the most sensible things about HIV and AIDS, prompting people to make favourable comparisons between him and President Thabo Mbeki, Zuma had no right to act the way he did, even in the privacy of his own bedroom. Such scrutiny is the price of leadership and is not indicative of malice.

But despite this, idiotic sexual behaviour that places one at risk of a killer disease is not the same as being criminally liable. The bigger tragedy of Zuma’s lapse last November is that it is wholly in keeping with the general behaviour of most South African men.

Our anti-AIDS messages do not address the politics of sexuality and the dynamics of desire that fuel our pandemic. Most men who find themselves without a condom at the precise moment it is needed, go right ahead anyway, placing themselves and their partners in danger. They cannot conceive of the possibility that such actions could have devastating consequences for them. In other words, our fight against AIDS is hamstrung by the sheer power of personal denial. In order to defeat this it is necessary for us to speak openly and honestly about the political denial that gives our personal behaviour a veneer of respectability.

Sadly, on this score, we lack the necessary leadership. Yes, Zuma’s actions and his later pronouncements on AIDS were dangerous and worrisome. As his detractors do not fail to point out, they placed a question mark over his suitability to lead the ANC and this country. But Zuma has atoned. Moreover, if idiocy on AIDS is a measure of suitability for high office, Mbeki should be dismissed immediately. Instead, some are speaking openly about giving him a third term as ANC president.

Mbeki has never met anyone with HIV or AIDS, while Zuma was foolish enough to have unprotected sex with one. Mbeki has never known anyone who died of AIDS, though some of his cabinet members have buried their family members because of the disease. He is not convinced of the link between HIV and AIDS, holding instead that the link is between poverty and AIDS. As a possible way out, both he and his health minister promote everything from untested vitamins, herb mixtures, and a medley of vegetables. Is a shower really that big a leap from this official quackery?

Those opposed to Zuma’s succession should and can state openly what their objections are. If they are about criminality, then they should naturally fall away, as and when he is criminally absolved. If they are about judgment and personal wisdom, it is doubtful many in the ANC’s leadership would make the grade.

No doubt the ruling party has many capable leaders in its ranks. None of them is personally infallible, and it is not certain that they should be to deserve their positions of leadership. We should hold them all accountable to a set of standards that is transparent, objective and applied universally without fear or favour. Among these standards should be honesty, integrity in both personal and public affairs, the talent to rise to the challenges of leadership, empathy, decisiveness, the gravitas to command respect at home and abroad, and the ability to unify.

Most important, where such a person has failed in one or more of these, is the humility to acknowledge failure openly and make amends for it. This last quality was demonstrated this week by a man whom many have damned as a villain.

Unfortunately, with Zuma’s hand suddenly looking strengthened and so little time to go before the ANC’s all-important national conference next year, our politics will not exhibit an abundance of the above qualities.

Until now the ANC has peddled the fantasy that no succession race is under way in the party. If this is indeed the case, they have not told the president, who looks like a man on the campaign trail. The ruling party must level the playing field in this regard. It must encourage its various structures to begin nominations for the national executive and office-bearers. Those who accept nomination must begin to speak to ordinary ANC members to convince them of their suitability. They must go through a rigorous process of scrutiny as in any democratic election.

While many will argue that the ANC has always chosen its president by “consensus”, increasingly this has become unlikely. It may in fact be undesirable. As a modern party, surely the ANC must be able to choose a leader democratically and openly without either clinging to archaic and antidemocratic methods or tearing itself to pieces?


 * Brown is political editor. Mde is political correspondent.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A197689**

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