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=Why Zuma’s bravado is brutalising the public=

Loyalty to the family that is the ANC cannot be allowed to ride roughshod over the pain of South Africa’s raped women and girls, writes **Njabulo Ndebele**


 * //"Zuma is angry with The Family. He wants to force it into a state of tension and anxiety"//**

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 5 March 2006
AS THE early stages of Jacob Zuma’s rape trial unfold, I am intrigued by Deputy Judge President Phineas Mojapelo’s explanation as to why he was unable, “for personal reasons”, to preside over the case. He is reported to have considered it “highly unethical” for him “to try his former comrade for rape”. This position suddenly revealed to me dynamics of the Zuma drama that have been elusive.

Judge Mojapelo precariously balances personal loyalties and the public interest where these converge in politics. Personal loyalties, having merged with political sympathies, may have led him to the view that he would not be perceived as impartial.

At issue here are webs of social and political relationships that may bedevil professional conduct. It is how Zuma resolves such conflicting loyalties that may explain his apparent disregard for the broad public in his dramatic appearances before his supporters immediately after two recent court appearances on the rape charges. He just seems unaware of the rest of us. His single-minded focus is his political home: the ANC and the “broad alliance”.

It is a complex political home with a strong private dimension to it forged over many years of exile, and which is capable of exerting a powerful public impact. The metaphor of the ANC as a “broad church” often goes with that of the ANC as “a family”. These metaphors refer to intimate and intricate relationships forged out of oppression; out of common dangers faced; joys shared over marriages, births and personal triumphs; and grief over deaths of comrades in combat, assassinations, suicide, sickness or old age.

Even gossip about affairs and the anguish of divorce is a string that deepens bonds. It provides the validating intimacy of shared personal secrets, which sooner or later everyone in the network knows, but few outside ever get to know. The organisation was an ever-expanding network of social siblings, nephews, nieces, uncles and aunts.

There must be many in the ANC who now look at Zuma and his problems with deep pain. It must cut even deeper at the realisation that they are compelled to resist the family instinct to rally round him. It must have been in recognition of that instinct that even President Thabo Mbeki had to throw a reassuring gesture towards his brother and comrade when he attended Parliament recently. More than an act of political management, it was a gesture of personal reassurance: a psychological hug.

Zuma can choose to be influenced by it and behave or, should he consider the stakes too high, ignore it altogether and defy its affective intent at the next rally outside the court, when he will rhythmically, in body and in song, call for “umshini wami [my machine gun]”.

Zuma is angry with The Family. He wants to force it into a state of tension and anxiety; unsettle it through public displays of power. Feeling betrayed, he threatens to reveal everything at the right moment. This way he secures the attention of The Family.

Nevertheless, despite his anger, I can see no likelihood of hatred between him and The Family; only various degrees of unhappiness.

It is for this reason that in this battle the rest of us are an anonymous mass, despite strong notions of public morality in this country. It is the force of this morality that has many of us wanting to see even faint signs of pain on the face of a public figure facing a charge of rape.

The more Zuma postures his power to affront The Family, the less he seems to have it. The Family anxiously knows this too. It is a paradox located at the core of Zuma’s tactics. The conflicting loyalties to family and to a constitutional public result in a psychological blind spot in which the public is invoked only to embarrass opponents, not because it is itself seen as aggrieved.

The ability to see the public as aggrieved would almost certainly have resulted in different strategies and tactics. Instead, this blind spot, accentuated by the personal nightmare of his fall from grace, has distorted Zuma’s judgment.

He has yet to give us a convincing indication of his understanding that Mbeki, in the aftermath of the Schabir Shaik corruption trial, had little choice in deciding to uphold the rights of the constitutional public above those of historical, affective loyalties. When he did so, Mbeki pointed his party in the only sustainable direction it can take into the future.

The responsibility to uphold the rights of the constitutional public points to the unsustainability of the family ethos in the transaction of state business. In a constitutional democracy of increasing complexity, it can have devastating consequences. It can paralyse judgment and encourage indecision, until indecisiveness begins to define the image of the government.

It can lead to easy assumptions of correctness and certitude. “Family members” may experience increasing opportunity at the same time as they do not feel equally the pressure of professional and ethical constraints imposed from within the family. The instinct to protect one another must now be unlearned. The family ethos must transform in the direction of a robust public and professional culture. The ANC has called on everyone and every institution to transform. It is time it, too, did so.

But the family ethos should never be totally discounted. It can be invoked to humanise public life. That is why Zuma must now call off his supporters. His ability to do so will expose him to yet another test. What are the limits of his capacity for self-mastery? This latter attribute is vital for whoever aspires to high office. It will enable him to spare me, and others among the public, the pain and revulsion I felt when I saw him on my television screen calling for umshini wami. Was he knowingly and defiantly inviting me to make horrible connections between the AK-47 and the invasive penis? The public morality issues at stake are as graphic as this.

That is why, as he sang and danced with his supporters, images of South Africa’s raped mothers, sisters, daughters (some, infants), nieces, aunts and grandmothers, raced through my mind, torturing me. Are their pain and the broad sense of public morality of little consequence in the settling of “family” scores?

Msholozi, we presume your innocence until proven guilty. We owe this to you, with all the respect you deserve. In turn, please spare a thought for the rest of us.

Ndebele is vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town and author of the novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela and other texts.

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 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=1932282