A casino might seem a perverse setting for a presidential hopeful to address anybody, let alone what purported to be a gathering of the KwaZulu-Natal legal fraternity in Pietermaritzburg on Tuesday evening.
The Golden Horse Casino is a succinct answer to those who wonder what has gone wrong in our society. On that evening rich, poor, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, black, white, Indian, coloured, Pakistani were gambling there by 8pm on a Tuesday.
Jacob Zuma’s road to Polokwane has, in the past two weeks, seen his carbon footprint acquire mammoth proportions. He told the legal fraternity that he has been from Mumbai to New Delhi to London, then to Texas and Los Angeles on the last legs of his campaign for the presidency of the ANC.
Then he tripped locally this week.
In addition to the casino, he visited Engcobo in the Eastern Cape and criss-crossed KwaZulu-Natal in an SUV blur.
He attended a day-long traditional cleansing ceremony to rid his (Nxama-lala) clan of bad luck in Impendle, about 70km north-west of Pietermaritzburg, on Wednesday. In Durban he dropped by his praise-singing maskandi group Izingane Zoma (which has sold 150Â 000 copies of the Msholozi album), which had serenaded him outside court during his rape trail. There was also a prayer meeting at his Nkandla homestead on Wednesday. And another mass prayer meeting organised by the KwaZulu-Natal Christian Council and the South African National Civic Organisation at the Pietermaritzburg City Hall on Thursday morning. The Zunami would appear an act of God, above all else.
The imminence of Polokwane brought Zuma’s “home-boy” essentialism to the fore this week as he also sought to consolidate his image with an audience with and blessing from Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini at the Enyokeni Royal Palace in Nongoma on Thursday.
Speaking, unprepared, on Tuesday night, he constantly played down the need for an intellectual president, deferring to the organisational “collective” and playing up his “just a man from Nkandla” routine.
Zuma’s entire campaign has been fought on the strength of personality and of the various personae he employs; his is not a battle for ideology and policy, as much as his allies might make it out to be so.
“In the United States we had lots of discussions. I met lots of companies and politicians for that matter,” said Zuma.
“And they understood that the ANC is not an individual. Some asked me: ‘Well what is your policy if you were to win elections?’ I said: ‘Sorry, I’ve got no economic policy, all policies are ANC policies.’
“There is no individual who has ever had his own policy, they are all ANC policy. You may ask him what strategy lies behind the ANC policy.
“I said to them that there are times we have mistaken the style of leadership for policy, but it is not policy. The ANC remains an organisation that weighs up policy, sits down, analyses it, researches it and says: ‘This is policy’.
“So don’t feel there is a problem after Polokwane, the organisation is in charge and therefore things will move in the direction that you said it should move in when you voted on policy.”
Referring to his trip to the financial heartland of London’s banking district, Zuma said: “They were praising South Africa saying it’s the only country among the developing countries that has a surplus in terms of its budget. Well, I said: ‘Well I’m not an economist, I just come from Nkandla.’
“I used to irritate those in the Cabinet, when I was in the Cabinet, when I used to say: ‘Guys, I don’t know economics with graphs and everything, I know Nkandla economics and it’s very simple: If a neighbour has no food, what do you do? You give them food.’
“And I asked them: ‘Statistics South Africa says that there is a widening gap between the rich and the poor [so] how do you answer the question that there is a surplus in the budget? How does that come?’ And they said: ‘You know, you are right, why is that?’ ‘Well tell me, you are an economist,’” said Zuma, apparently forgetting that South Africa’s budget surplus was produced this year for the first time — well after he was sacked from government by Mbeki.
While international business people and politicians would have liked Zuma’s strengths (his warmth, graciousness and bonhomie), his projection of himself as “just a man from Nkandla” would probably have appealed to them even more.
One can almost imagine heads of business casting leery glances towards South Africa. What sort of opportunities will open up with a government and a network of patronage headed by someone who professes to be “just a man from Nkandla”?