("Zuma's in a 2014 state of mind", July 12). But it is not about the election – who cares who holds which posts in the organised crime cabal that is Cabinet? It's about the aftermath.
Zuma and his cronies are expecting a serious defeat in 2014: there is an outside chance that the ANC's support may fall below 60% and that some provinces will see still steeper falls. This is likely to lead to an intensification of grass-roots hostility to Zuma's mismanagement of the party within the ANC's membership.
Getting rid of potential challengers to Zuma and replacing them with weaklings dependent on his survival makes perfect sense if he is preparing to dig in defensively for his last five years of power. (It closely resembles Helen Zille's strategy after she took control of the Democratic Alliance.)
It is significant that this purge has been so widely welcomed by the media. This shows that the corporate crooks who control the press along with Zuma are troubled by the possibility that their agent might lose control of the situation and that Zuma's corporate paymasters might lose complete control of the economy.
We can anticipate that, as happened between September 2008 and April 2009, there will be a surge of uncritical press endorsement of Zuma, and readers should be prepared to start discounting this.
That is assuming that readers still believe what the papers say. – Mathew Blatchford, Fort Hare