Sad day for Zuma and my country

The Zuma baby story was expertly if also ruthlessly done. It contained all the “seeds” in all the right places in order to produce the drama and shock that was to follow, carefully dropping all the gory hints, expertly sprinkling all the grains of doubt, seedlings of outrage all nicely tucked in, “gently helping” the reader to make all the “key connections”. It was a story written to horrify and anger the average South African. And horrify it did. Admittedly, it was all made too easy by the behaviour of the president. With a main character like that, writing a story like that could not have been too difficult.

Off goes my hat to those among us who issued statements of analysis, support or condemnation for President Zuma hours after the story broke. I stand in awe of them who spoke first not because I agree or disagree, but rather because of the speed and the ease with which words and phrases seemed to drop off their pens and lips. Me, “I had no mouth” (as we say in my language) on that Sunday the 31^st of January 2010. The screaming headline announced one of the biggest presidential scandals this side of the 6^th of April 2009. Yet no coherent thoughts formed between my ears and no words issued from either my pen or my mouth. Immobilised into a silent stupor and numbed into a thinking vacuum, I slipped into a surreal state and have remained there for a week, at least. Nicely ensconced in the safety of my hard-earned trance, I half-listened to crude radio talk-shows where callers spitted venom at one another in support of and in sharp disagreement with the president. In that haze, I read dozens of angry letters to newspaper editors. With my eyes wide-shut, I watched the initially spirited defence offered by party and presidential spokespersons on TV. With a constant hissing sound in my ears, I listened to the spin for and against, on radio day, evening and night. Add to this the deluge of blog postings, Twitter entries and Facebook wall postings. I thought I was going to drown in a sea of words coming out of defenders and attackers alike. If only Bafana-Bafana had such defenders and such attackers, we might go further than the first round of the Fifa World Cup!

In the middle of all this, a few journalists called me for a sound bite or a catchphrase. One sent me a list of questions seeking to establish the place of polygamy in “modern South Africa”. The hope was that I would produce for them, a powerful, devastating and most memorable sound bite or catchphrase — either savagely lambasting President Zuma or idiotically supporting him. From my state of trance I used my incoherent stammer to turn them down, one by one. President Zuma described the whole saga as being “intensely personal”. But for me, as a South African citizen, as a man, as a black person, the whole episode is intensely sad and excruciatingly painful. I had not “budgeted” for this story — not emotionally, not intellectually and not psychologically. I was just too broke(n) to speak. There are certain actions whose sheer shock content is such that they cannot be fathomed or captured by words — whether they are words of dispassionate analysis, enthusiastic commendation or venomous condemnation. In the face of such actions, all we can do is to make animal-like noise and manufacture words for our own sanity’s sake, without shedding any more light on the matter at hand — there is no light to be shed on the matter at hand. The story defies language. Little anyone can say will estimate, equal, capture, enlighten or surpass the act.

At points like these, people search for meaning in rumour, humour, ridicule, sarcasm, comedy, verbosity, drama and good old insult. This is how people process and deal with the shock of the grotesque. Isn’t this how Ugandans survived Idi Amin Dada — by making jokes about him? Remember the one about Amin addressing the Queen of England not as “Her Majesty” but as “Mrs Queen”? Remember how he thanked her from “the heart of his bottom” and from “his wife’s bottom”? Nearer home, you will recall the jokes people made of the late president of the Venda homeland, Mphephu. Remember how, at a political rally, Mphephu could not read his speech because he had forgotten his testicles (read spectacles) at home? There are many others. I could argue that with his black-people-white-people jokes, his funny gestures, his marvellous story-telling ability — in the 1980s — Desmond Tutu, provided us with the comedy and sarcasm that helped us laugh at ourselves and at a system that was as cold-blooded as it was impervious to logic, humour and morality. Amin, Mphephu, BJ Vorster and PW Botha are no laughing matter. Yet tell me what else and what more people could have done.

Okay, President Zuma is no butcher, no sell-out and no oppressor. All he did was father a baby. Here we go. I could regurgitate the arguments we have heard all week. I could bore you with the predictable rebuttals — with which you have been thoroughly fed all through the week. My point in this piece is neither condemnation nor commendation. I am too sad to condemn and too sad to commend. I am sad for President Zuma and I am sad for my country. I am sad for me, for you and for all involved. I am not angry. I am not gloating, I am not moralising and I am not judging. A heavy lump of sadness sits deep in my gut. My point is, in the face of this latest scandal involving our president, we have all been failing with our words and our words have been failing with us. Hence the current proliferation of “Zuma jokes” in cartoons, emails, SMSs, in office corridors, at braais and at functions — evidence of a nation trying to cope? It is a sad day in the life of any president when the only people to support and defend him unequivocally are his own family and those expressly paid to do so, namely his official spokespeople. The party and alliance heavyweights did not condemn, but neither did they commend. For six days their silence was deafening. Only after the apology did they emerge from the woods to “welcome the apology unconditionally”.

One clear message has been sent to the president, the honeymoon is over. Some called for President Zuma to apologise, which he has finally done. They say he should resign and if not, the ANC should recall or impeach him. Cope has threatened to make the tabling of a motion of no confidence their first act in Parliament this year. I do not think President Zuma is about to resign. Nor is there any sign that he is about to be recalled or impeached. The Cope motion of no confidence will be largely symbolic — if it does get tabled. Though notice of the end of the honeymoon may have been served and duly acknowledged, President Zuma remains an immensely popular president. For a president, there is, of course, a worse fate than impeachment, being recalled or missing out on a second term. Such a fate is when a president loses so much integrity that he is no longer taken seriously inside and outside his party, inside and outside his country. It will really be sad, if this immensely popular president, to whom such an overwhelming mandate was given in April 2009, was to meet such a fate. Such a fate, redefines the notion of a “sitting duck president”. In whose interest would such a presidency be?