Screwing around matters less than screwing up

Righteous public wrath can be a laudable thing, particularly when it is harnessed to compel political accountability by government. A pity, then, that it is being squandered to force President Jacob Zuma to stop screwing around, rather than to force him to stop screwing up.

The past fortnight has seen a tsunami of outrage and scorn directed at Zuma, following reports that he had made pregnant the daughter of an old friend. Coming on top of the fact that this was his 20th acknowledged offspring, that he had just married his umpteenth wife and was freshly engaged to yet another lass, it proved to be the final straw for many.

The scale of public anger has taken aback the African National Congress. Its initial response — that this was not only an unjustifiable media intrusion into the privacy of the president, but also a trampling of the child’s rights — was predictable from an incumbent party grown arrogant on successive two-third electoral majorities. When it however became apparent that the outrage was not confined to opposition-voting whities lacking in cultural sensitivity, there was a scramble to salvage the situation.

Zuma cancelled a planned township walkabout and issued a hasty apology. In one of those cynical routines typical of modern politics — which assumes that the public is dumb — he was earnestly applauded for doing so by an ANC which just days earlier had insisted that he had nothing to apologise for, nothing to explain.

They were right first time around. Zuma has nothing to apologise for.

Everyone has known that he has a cavalier attitude to safe sex and young women. The ANC endorsed him for president full knowing that Uncle Jacob enthusiastically beds the daughters of his erstwhile struggle comrades. The electorate last year turned out in droves for Zuma while fully aware that he sired numerous children outside the polygamous marriage structure that he professes to be committed to.

It is spurious to argue, as Business Day did, that Zuma’s lack of respect for the social boundaries of marriage should make us tremble over his attitude to the checks and balances of the Constitution. Zuma has amply proved his disdain for the Constitution, indeed doesn’t seem to understand its function.

Former president Thabo Mbeki once graphically described whites as having racist stereotypes of blacks as “rampant sexual beasts, unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants”. It might be unfortunate that Zuma, with his suggestive “bring me my machine gun” lyrics and unconventional lifestyle feeds every such racist cliché, but that is nevertheless entirely his own business.

The widespread disapproval of Zuma’s latest escapade is a reminder that SA, despite the pragmatic accommodation it has come to with polygamy, traditional marriage, and new-fangled same-sex civil unions, is a socially conservative society. It should not surprise us that a country in which most disapprove of abortion and homosexuality, might just eventually articulate repugnance towards unabashed philandering.

While understandable, their ire is misplaced. Zuma’s sexual proclivities are the business only of him and his wives and girlfriends, with the proviso that he takes financial responsibility for his numerous offspring, which he seemingly does.

While it is true that he fails as a moral beacon — despite at once stage, bizarrely, being appointed by Mbeki to head the country’s moral regeneration movement — that is not his primary task as president. His first and most important duty is to govern effectively. Unfortunately, Zuma’s weak presidency has allowed his lieutenants to sow division and fan a corrosive populism.

Skewer Zuma by all means, but for his lack of political balls rather than for his overactive testicles.