Questions+for+Jacob+Zuma+from+Tony+Hall

Mpumalanga South Africa**
 * Tony Hall

I am a retired journalist. I have been a member of the Congress Alliance and an ordinary member of the ANC for the last 45 years, here at home, 26 years in exile, and back home again…

I support Jacob Zuma, not necessarily as our next President – though I think he is a good and loyal leading member, and a brave struggle leader who has done several most important things to help manage our transition – but like many many thousands of ANC and Alliance members, I support him in his fight against the victimizing and smearing of his name over several years. It’s been like a campaign, mainly through the media, with some otherwise good people, alarmingly, leading the attack. Some of our best journalists, our finest cartoonist, most of the gender activists, have never missed a chance to assume the worst of Jacob Zuma, and to bay after him and tear at him like hounds maddened by a scent. And who lays the scent? It has to be those who want the government to pursue a free market, IMF, capitalist agenda, and who see Jacob Zuma as potentially unreliable in that context, because, as Union leaders have said, he listens to the workers, and to the ordinary members.

There are honourable exceptions in the media, like some in Business Day, of all newspapers, who don’t do this, but so many go along with what has to be a campaign which is run by elites of all races, which spreads largely on the snobbish idea that JZ is an ordinary Jake, not as sophisticated and gender sensitive as they are. He is popular with workers, so they label him a popu**list** – a well-known swearword among the right, and some on the left.

So, there has been a groundswell among the ordinary membership of protest around the Zuma issue, against the establishment, and its ever-clearer agenda to empower the few before taking care of the many. They are turning to resolute spokesmen like Cosatu leader Vavi, who consistently comes out on issues like victimizing Zuma, the dictatorship of Mugabe, AIDS, poverty, and now SABC bannings, in exactly the way our ANC liberation movement – and our liberal spokesmen – ought to do.

ANC, helped by its Tripartite Alliance partners, has a two-thirds majority. South Africa’s only hope is that the ANC strengthens the Alliance, and returns to the aims of the liberation struggle, with the rampant power of the half-dozen mega corporates being tamed, so we can at least follow a path of genuine social democratic reform.

And that doesn’t mean putting up some mock left of center reformist candidate as next president. Things have gone too far for the mass of voters to fall for that one.

Of course JZ’s enemies now try to blame him for not coming out when Vice President, against ANC’s right wing moves. But how would a loyal VP have done that? Now, however, it time for Jacob Zuma to come out on policies that are so vital to pursue if our liberation is to mean anything. So my question would be – can you please satisfy your mass of supporters, Mr Vice President, that you will take the country away from free market policies towards socialism?

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