Zuma+fear+also+a+case+of+common+class+snobbery,+Pierre+de+Vos,+B+Day



=Zuma fear also a case of common class snobbery=


 * Pierre de Vos, Business Day, 7 December 2007**

A journalist phoned me to ask “just a few questions about some constitutional technicalities”.

Driving to work past the shacks of people who have so far resisted government efforts to remove them from next to the N2 to far-off Delft, I clutched my fancy cellphone while he fired away.

“When members of Parliament are convicted of a crime they lose their seat, hey? So, will Jacob Zuma lose his position as president if he is convicted of fraud and corruption after being elected president?”

To me this was a clear sign that the chattering classes (of which I am a paid-up member) had woken up to the nightmare of a Jacob Zuma presidency. After the initial glee at the defeat of Thabo Mbeki in the provincial nomination process, panic about a possible Zuma presidency is setting in in the middle and upper classes. The subtext of almost all the conversations I have been part of is that it is “too ghastly to contemplate” that an “uneducated” peasant with 20 children, several wives, at least one mistress and a coterie of aggrieved hangers-on could take over from that other guy we do not really like either. Then there is that shower head growing out of his head that will make us the laughing stock of the world.

It is a bit like progressive Americans hearing that George Bush was killed and thinking, “Thank goodness we are rid of Bush,” only to realise, “We are stuck with Dick Cheney!”

So much has been said about Zuma’s various moral weaknesses that it is difficult to keep a level head on the matter. It does not help when Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is reported as saying people should vote for someone who would rule the country correctly and that there were some who aspired to govern the country but had no “understanding and sophistication”.

Is this smug middle-class chauvinism, which assumes an “unsophisticated” person such as Zuma cannot rule the country “correctly”, not at least a bit shocking and embarrassing when we are supposed to believe in the egalitarian society envisaged by our constitution? Is it not perhaps the very reason for Zuma’s popularity with the African National Congress (ANC) rank and file who may also not see themselves as “sophisticated”.

Such remarks make the anti-Zuma lobby come across as arrogant snobs who look down on the ordinary people who vote for the ANC.

The problem is that the ANC has — with some laudable exceptions — refused to judge ANC cadres negatively unless they have been convicted of a crime. The “innocent until proven guilty” mantra came to subvert and eventually delegitimise the political morality based on whether a person acted wisely and ethically, or at least had not acted completely selfishly, stupidly or morally reprehensibly.

Thus, the ethical bar was set so low that Zuma’s misdemeanours seemed rather tame. The highest court in the land may have confirmed that the deputy president of the ANC had taken more than R1m from a convicted fraudster and then did some favours for that fraudster, but was this very different from police commissioner Jackie Selebi’s friendship with a gangster?

When Mbeki then fired Zuma as deputy president of the country even before he was charged with any crime, it seemed deeply unfair to ordinary people. It sent a signal that the “sophisticated” snob was dealing with the “unsophisticated” Zuma because he was becoming too “uppity”. Thus Zuma’s presidential campaign was born.

All through this debacle those of us in the chattering classes cheered on the Zuma prosecution in the hope that it would stop this “unsophisticated” man taking over “our” country. For what it is worth, I am not sure the courts or the constitution will save us from a Zuma presidency.

But the fact that these issues are even being discussed means those who cannot imagine a Zuma presidency are perhaps once again hoping that the National Prosecuting Authority and the courts will save us from the man from Nkandla. So far all their best efforts have failed, so I would not count on a conviction to make the “Zuma problem” go away.

Maybe it is time to brush up on our class sensitivities instead.


 * de Vos is a law professor at the University of Western Cape.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A653006**

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