Think Trump is the original? Nah, Zuma did it first

Who remembers this little trick? 

When seeking a replacement for Thuli Madonsela in the role of public protector, President Jacob Zuma and his ANC decided to push for a Western Cape High Court judge named Siraj Desai.

Not widely loved in the legal community, and having made just 32 judgments in a 20-year career, Desai was also dogged by rape accusations. For the opposition, he was an odious choice, and both the DA and the EFF were willing to expend political energy and capital to bump his appointment off course. (In 2020, he became the Legal Services Ombudsman.) Zuma nodded sagely, and rubbed his chin, as if thinking. 

The ANC then proposed a prosecutor and advocate named Busisiwe Mkhwebane. At the time, Mkhwebane was serving as an analyst at the State Security Agency, and there was of course a Gupta-linked scandal that credibly connected her to a little $5,000 payment from a Gupta account.

But compared to Desai, Mkhwebane seemed positively angelic. Yes, there was some grumbling from the opposition benches, but when Madonsela’s term came to an end, Mkhwebane was in her ergonomic executive chair before it had gotten cold.

No one reading these pages needs any help remembering how that turned out.

This, I believe, is referred to as a bait and switch. A similar tactic was employed by the once and future president of the United States of America, Donald J Trump. 

In picking for his Attorney General – a Maga stormtrooper named Matt Gaetz – he tested the gag reflex of even his most faithful supporters. Reportedly loathed by his colleagues in the House, and under scrutiny for alleged relationships with teenaged girls, Gaetz was too clownish even for Trumpworld. Once he stepped back, Trump put forward the comparatively reasonable Pam Bondi, and only mildly morally-corrupt former Florida attorney general. 

Now, the bait and switch is not a new phenomenon, and as wily as JZ may be, he can hardly be credited with inventing it. But it’s fair to say that most of the illiberal tactics Trump has initiated over the course of his many years in politics bear a striking resemblance to Zuma’s good works.

Again, I doubt that Trump is aware of Jacob Zuma’s existence, and no one at Mar-a-Lago is scouring the history of the State Capture years for pointers. Instead, Zuma remains an avatar for post-liberal kleptocratic rule that has been widely embraced in many other democracies.

Like Trump, Zuma understood his role to function as a middle-man between the state and connected cronies, so that his cabal effectively became the state, and slurped up most of the lucrative contracts that form the core of any functioning bureaucratic system.

Like Trump, Zuma used a sexual assault trial and numerous corruption allegations to cast himself as a perennial victim. Despite serving as deputy president for nine years, and despite decisively winning two general elections and serving as president for nine years, he was the good guy, and all the folks pursuing him on corruption charges were the baddies.

Like Trump, Zuma turned the perceived harassment he received from the legal establishment on its head by making appointments like Busisiwe Mkhwebane, who in turn began to harass his enemies. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander – this is the way that countries break down. 

Like Trump, Zuma established his own version of reality, and because real reality was so abjectly shitty, his version seemed more appealing. 

Like Trump, Zuma has risen from the dead, and his MK party represents the most powerful threat to South African liberalism since 1994.

Like Trump, Zuma is a big fucking liar.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Zuma asserted that South African democracy has never existed, and that secret ballots in fact represent an anti-democratic impulse. (What is democracy if you don’t know who to kill for voting against you?) He claimed to have registered his disappointment in the process all along – but that simply isn’t true.

Not once during his leadership did Zuma complain about winning sizeable majorities. Not once did he complain about the long lines people stood in to cast ballots for his party. And not once did he imply that the South African system was fundamentally broken. At least, not while it served him so well. 

In fact, Zuma was a relatively tame politician during his salad days, expelling party members if they called for nationalisation of banks or mines, and generally busying himself with capturing state institutions for personal gain. Derided as a leftist, Zuma, like Trump, is instead a chauvinist revanchist, whose ideological incoherence was obvious in every statement he made, but especially regarding the economy. Never once did he make an attempt to render South Africa more economically inclusive.

The brief under Zuma was simple: Steal the state into penury.

There was, however, an ideological component to Zuma’s corruption—or rather, a rationale to his corruption programme that attempted to justify away all the damage. Zuma’s cabal claimed, correctly, that the formal economy was skewed in favour of wealthy established players, the majority of whom were white, and therefore the Constitution was flawed as a mechanism for redress.

This was not untrue, except for the fact that the Constitution is a piece of paper, and the ANC was in charge of policymaking and implementation. For 30 years, the party had hundreds of redress mechanisms at their disposal. All of which they screwed up or ignored. If the Constitutional Court acted as a restraining force during the State Capture years, that’s because Zuma and his people were so clumsy, incompetent and impatient.

Lifelong victim with murderous instinct — Jacob Zuma is an unkillable zombie stalking South Africa

Now, with MK, Zuma has fired up a base of extremely and justifiably upset people. And he’s willing to use them to fundamentally alter South Africa’s trajectory. Like Trump, he is unkillable, because he speaks many people’s truths. Like Trump, he may be old, but he ain’t going anywhere.

And like Trump, if you discount him running the country again, your bespoke reality has grown dangerously impermeable. And you’re in for a nasty surprise. DM