South Africa’s former deputy president Jacob Zuma was steadily working his way to the highest office when his career crashed under corruption and rape charges.
Zuma, who goes on trial on Monday for the rape of a 31-year-old woman, rose from poverty and moved rapidly through the ranks of Africa’s oldest liberation movement, the governing African National Congress (ANC).
The plain-spoken and bespectacled Zuma probably has enjoyed more grassroots support than President Thabo Mbeki and is seen as a man of the people.
But the charismatic number two suffered a body blow when Mbeki fired him last June and he was charged with two counts of corruption. Then a rape charge was brought against him in December.
Born in 1942 in South Africa’s eastern Zulu heartland, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma — the son of a policeman and a domestic worker — was brought up in extreme penury by his widowed mother, having lost his father at a very young age.
He missed out on school but taught himself to read and write.
”I didn’t have a father and circumstances did not permit me to go to school … So I took it upon myself to help myself. I would use other people’s books and ask lots of questions,” he once said.
”People without formal education are looked down upon and often feel shy … I have done everything the educated have done.”
Zuma worked as a cowherd to supplement his mother’s meagre income and joined the ANC when he was 17.
As a member of its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) he was arrested in 1963 and served 10 years in the infamous Robben Island jail for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government.
Following his release, he moved to Zambia where he was entrusted with running the ANC’s underground cells and its intelligence department.
When the ban against the ANC was lifted in 1990, Zuma was one of the first exiled leaders to return home and start operating on home soil.
This was where he proved his skills as a diplomat as he helped ease ethnic tensions in his home province KwaZulu-Natal where fighting had broken out between supporters of the ANC and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party.
When Nelson Mandela stepped down from the presidency in 1999, Mbeki, then his deputy, took over the top post and picked Zuma as his deputy, making him the frontrunner for the presidency in 2009, when Mbeki’s second and final term expires.
As deputy president, he successfully led South Africa’s peace efforts in Burundi and his diary was filled with public engagements, making him one of the most accessible politicians of the Mbeki administration.
But a lengthy investigation and the conviction last June of his financial adviser and friend Schabir Shaik for corruption sent Zuma’s political fortunes into a tailspin.
The Shaik trial highlighted Zuma’s penchant for expensive designer suits and showed that he lived well beyond his means, even building a traditional Zulu ”village” for his spouses.
Zuma, who headed the government’s moral regeneration programme, has denied any wrongdoing, saying ”my conscience is clear because I know that I have not committed any crime”.
He has maintained his innocence throughout, hinting at a plot to prevent him from succeeding Mbeki.
”One day I will say there has been a political campaign against me by individuals,” Zuma said. – AFP
