Jacob Zuma is a Great Man

Jacob Zuma is an amazing man.

Not from personal knowledge of him or anyone close to him, but he is a great man.

This is also not sarcasm.

Neither is it to garner some favour; I’m terrible at brown-nosing and have too big a mouth to be docile anyway, but I digress.

Born in Nkandla in the now KwaZulu-Natal on 12 April 1942, he was born to a father who was a policeman, a fact also known as Irony 101. His father having died at a young age, Zuma and his two brothers were raised by their domestic worker mother, and having little to no formal education he became involved in politics at a young age, which culminated in his joining the African National Congress at the age of sixteen, and subsequently its military arm, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Arrested in 1963 in Zeerust, he was convicted of conspiring to overthrow the oppressive apartheid regime and served a ten-year sentence along with Nelson Mandela at the famed Robben Island.

Upon his release – and unwilling to be cowered by the established unjust administration of the time – he immediately became involved in re-establishing the ANC in the then-Natal Province before he was redeployed. In the wake of the brutal Soweto uprisings, thousands of exiles were welcomed to Mozambique by Zuma, who became a member of the ANC National Executive Committee the following year.

Forced to leave another country, Zuma fled Mozambique and moved to Lusaka in Zambia, where he was appointed Head of Underground Structures, and shortly after that, Chief of Intelligence. As one of the first ANC leaders to return to South Africa following the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, he returned with the primary dedication of rebuilding a widely racially and politically divided country.

Under Nelson Mandela’s government, Zuma played many key roles, from being a pivotal force in the ending of IFP/ANC violence in KwaZulu-Natal, to being a facilitator of the Burundi peace process; all while steadily rising up the ranks, and eventually ending with his 2005 expulsion as Deputy President of the Republic and finally, his election as our President.

In the midst of all his accomplishments, there have been negative reports, legal battles and controversies both major and minor.

In his personal life, Zuma is a traditional polygamist, a state allowed by both the laws and the cultural beliefs of the country. He has been married six times (at last count) and currently has four wives and over twenty legitimate and illegitimate children from various women, thus exercising his freedom to fully practice his cultural beliefs. In other areas we’d say… let a player play…

When watching an in-depth interview with Zuma on People of the South, I saw an exceptional, Zulu family man, who believes in his cause and attempts to juggle various vital roles to the best of his ability- just like every other contributing human being in this country. I saw a man who, despite his failings, loves the country he gave up so much for.

There is a modicum of respect to be had for a man who fought, lost his freedom, and was prepared to lose his life for you and I to be able to be who and what we want to be. It is the reason I found Brett Murray’s The Spear painting, although thought-provoking and interesting artistically, parochial; the painting took a dynamic man and reduced him to a one-dimensional character with one single focus- to get laid.

We forget that while the celebrated Nelson Mandela was serving his sentence, people like Jacob Zuma were on the ground, doing the work, and when they weren’t, they sat beside him in prison, all fighting the same struggle. We are still blessed to be in the presence of greatness, and if his daughter Duduzile is anything to go by, Zuma is also a wonderful father and - if People of the South and brief personal accounts are to be trusted – an all-round nice guy.

In July 2012, South Africa was made glaringly aware of the Limpopo text book crisis, where various public schools in the Province had still not received their curriculum-required text books, and as such, the non-Government Organisation Section 27 was in the midst of legal action against the government, who by then, had already missed a deadline to provide all outstanding textbooks to schools.

Jacob Zuma, on the Redi Tlhabi show on 702 Talk Radio, blamed the textbook crisis on the apartheid regime for excluding the black child from education, thus creating teachers who received sub-par education being expected to give above-par instruction. This could all be blamed on Hendrick Verwoed, whose policies and laws were all aimed at undermining the black child. Ergo, the Limpopo text-book crisis was not the fault of the government, but the fault of apartheid.

When the subject of the Spear came up, the ANC took both the artist and the gallery to court, and splashed out in every media possible, the fact that Brett Murray was racist and as such the painting demoralised and degraded all black people, especially the men.

Whenever the Democratic Alliance argues against government, the issues are swept under the carpet and the nation is encouraged to look at who is casting blame, and at whom the blame is cast. Even with Maimane at the helm, the DA is a fundamentally white organisation, while the ANC is predominantly black; therefore, any time the DA criticises government, it becomes a race issue.

We live in a country with various dichotomous sociological structures – the privileged few are supporting an ever-more frustrated, uneducated, deprived group who are encouraged to look for handouts from government because apartheid took their pride and there has been little effort at restoration of that pride. Our unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, with more and more people being injected into a cycle of unemployment and poverty each year.

Our education is amongst the worst in the world, crime is high and the standard of living gets higher and higher, prompting the haves to clench their fists, the sort-of-haves to pay through the nose, while the have-nots are encouraged to wait for government to help them. Service delivery protests have become part of the days of our lives; black people want their land back, practical application of Black Economic Empowerment has failed, the majority of our municipalities fail audit after audit, and then there is Nkandla-gate. Marikana. And Riah Phiyega.

I say it again- Jacob Zuma is a great man. What he has done in his efforts to free this country are amazing, and for that, we rightly honour him.

But great men do not always translate into great leaders. And for the sake of the country he gave up so much for, Zuma needs to realise that he has become destructive to the same progress for which he was willing to die.