Jacob Zuma is rightly being humbled, for he really has disgraced himself

By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

One should treat this matter rather cautiously because the matter is still going through the courts and one does not want to prejudice the case against former South Africa president Jacob Zuma (JZ), who was admitted to jail on Wednesday for contempt of court.

It is important to state that Thursday morning dawned with a sense of relief after the world was informed that JZ had driven himself to the jail where he had been assigned without further incident after a rather threatening past week.

The spectre of a former president going to jail has its novelty, and for some time people across Africa had been debating whether it was even possible. As crowds gathered outside JZ’s home in Nkandla, and the modern-day Zulu impi were apparently spoiling for a fight, some of us wondered whether the crumbling South African state had indeed come to the end of its tether.

Ancestor spirit

But some depth of forbearance saved the day when Zuma, heeding the counsel of I do not know which ancestor spirit, decided to travel the road to prison rather than go down to the wire. Didn’t we hear his impudent son say that to get to his dad they would have to transit through him?

We have come to this point basically because Zuma defied a court order to appear and testify in a case that had drawn great public attention.

The court officials had pleaded with him to comply but his refusal left them with no choice but to order him to hand himself over.

His initial defiance in the face of that order must have come from ignorance, not having known this kind of situation before, in his country or anywhere else in Africa.

You see, in Africa, presidents order judges, not the other way round. When the head of state says, “Arrest that man!” the police have no clue what the offence may be, but they go ahead and arrest. Now, that the big man himself, though now deposed, should be the one being arrested, that is rather rich.

There is a sense of entitlement around our rulers in Africa that baffles me. On the one hand, African rulers go through the motions of a modern political process — constitutions, elections, bills of rights — but at the same time they instinctively want to behave like they own us: we are nothing but their chattels.

The South African apartheid nightmare came to a close in the early 1990s with a constitutional dispensation that we all haled as a model for the whole continent, with a most forcefully expressed ideals of people’s power, limitation on the powers of the Executive, freedom of the Judiciary, the works! Generally, a desire to live in a well ordered, functioning polity.

In short order, all that was tested by the frailty of the spirit of agency in the body politic.

Good laws

In situations such as our own — even in those cases where polities have been “civilised” — it comes down to the education of the last man, or woman.

It does not matter how good a constitution, how many good laws and how many good law enforcing agencies you deploy, the agency of every man and woman is pivotal when it comes to ensuring proper behaviour on the part of our governors.

Otherwise, tell me, how do the men and women we place at the head of our countries — literally making them our gods — turn out mostly to look like we always scrape the bottom of the barrel to get them? How can it be that this happens all the time, however much we have been made to suffer from our previous encounters with the scoundrels we crowned?

I know we want to lay the blame at the doormat of someone else: the colonialist who abused us and who never taught us good governance; the African traditions, which tell us to never challenge the chief; the poverty which every incoming chief must get rid of, for himself and his kin — all nonsense.

The bottom line is that we have very little sense of public service. Every opportunity that comes our way, even if it came to us in a largely honourable manner, is another opportunity to ‘eat.’ And the eating I’m talking about here is one that denotes humongous appetites. I look at the numbers of zeros cited in some of the cases surrounding African rulers, and I ask myself just how much they were trying to eat!

I will reserve any further discussion of African leaders gastronomical disorders for now, and focus on Zuma’s plight. He is being humbled because he really has disgraced himself.

Still, there is something that stabs everyone of us in the gut when we see a person who in any way came to symbolise our collective soul at some stage in the past dragged into the mire.

I noted Zuma saying that sending him to prison at his age amidst the raging pandemic would be tantamount to sending him to his death. That needs considering.

What we need is admonition, not execution.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]