01 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon |
Original Publication: BDlive
As Zuma views his imminent
re-election, he might pause to contemplate what his political legacy will be,
other than Nkandla, writes Tony Leon
THE Delphic oracle, according to Greek legend, provided answers about
the future, on a cryptic basis, via Pythia, the priestess of the god Apollo,
and then only on the seventh day after the new moon. No doubt she had reasons
for her silence, since she was believed to be connected to the divine.
Some two-and-a-half-thousand years later, give or take, African National
Congress (ANC) leader in the Northern Cape John Block announced, according to a
report last week, that "walking with President Jacob Zuma is like walking
with God". Apparently this might have been mangled in translation or
transmission since the local ANC denied the remark was made with reference to
the president. That’s a pity, as I thought the remark added some spice to a
remarkably lacklustre election campaign to date.
But although Zuma is known for his long silences, and often enigmatic
remarks, he is in many ways a leader of tradition who has the misfortune of
being a politician in the modern age of instant communication. He couldn’t keep
his counsel forever, or for much more than two weeks after the release of the
report on Nkandla by the public protector. But his defence of it remained
Delphic, or at least question-begging. He was quoted as saying: "I’ve done
nothing wrong. Even if they look underneath a tree or a rock they won’t find
anything against me. I’m not guilty."
About a decade ago, when he was fending off one or other corruption
scandal on his watch, president Thabo Mbeki berated parliamentarians for
attaching the American suffix "gate’’ to every local act of political
skulduggery or financial impropriety. Then it was "Oilgate"; but no
one apparently listened to this admonition as 10 years later, the saga of
improper expenditure and undue enrichment in the president’s private homestead
has been dubbed "Nkandlagate". Zuma’s line of defence, uttered at the
weekend in Gugulethu, in Cape Town, did have a slightly familiar, Watergate
ring to it. After all, then US president Richard Nixon memorably said in a
major speech on the scandal which engulfed, and ultimately destroyed, his
presidency in November 1973: "I have never profited from public service. I
have earned every cent. People have got to know whether their president is a
crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got." Within
nine months of that remark, and notwithstanding a sweeping re-election victory
in November 1972 (by 61% to 37%, one of the greatest margins in the US) shortly
after news of the scandal first broke, Nixon resigned.
Of course, Nixon was not done in by this self-described "third-rate
burglary" of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the
famous Watergate building but by the subsequent cover-up and essentially by one
so-called "smoking gun" tape which conclusively proved his personal
involvement in the scandal and covering its traces. But, in terms appropriate
for a Greek tragedy, his downfall was owed to another Grecian term:
"hubris" or overweening pride and arrogance. Nixon installed his
secret Oval Office taping system in order to capture for posterity his
geo-strategic designs to reshape the modern world order. Instead, in a frisson
of local familiarity, the "smoking gun" tape revealed that the
president and his key aide, HR Haldeman, discussed having the Central
Intelligence Agency ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to halt its probe
of the Watergate break-in by claiming the burglary was a "national
security operation".
Nkandla — thousands of miles and decades removed from Nixon’s White
House and the Watergate building — at least provides political continuity for
the disreputable political stratagem of misusing the concept of "national
security" — or in local jargon a "national key point" — to cover
up a political scandal. But there are probably far more differences than
similarities between these two presidencies and the mushroom clouds of scandal
which engulf both. For one thing, Zuma is not apparently involved in a cover-up
but more in the origins of the Nkandla project itself and on his own version
sees nothing wrong with the expenditure of more than R250m on his private
residence.
But the other major difference is that while Nixon’s presidency and his
persona will be imperishably associated with the Watergate scandal and his name
will be memorialised as a synonym for the corruption of high office, it is not
the only legacy he left to posterity.
He also achieved what he set out to do in terms of reshaping the world
order. He was the first US president to visit both Beijing and Moscow and to
have begun the extrication of US forces from the quagmire of Vietnam. It was —
in the words of supreme US historian John Lewis Gaddis, in other respects an
arch-Nixon critic — "a performance of the great grand strategists
Metternich, Castlereagh and Bismarck".
As Zuma views his imminent re-election, he might pause to contemplate
what his political legacy will be, other than Nkandla.
• Leon is the author of The Accidental Ambassador (Pan Macmillan).
Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA
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