His face says it all. His eyes glance at me through the picture of spite and revenge that laid waste so many. But his head can’t turn: he’s too old. Flabs of neck skin reveal the greasy gutter food on which he ravenously fed whenever he lost a battle, which were many. But he always avoided his Waterloo. He always won the big ones, and the rivulets of the sweat of those battles seemed this morning to have congealed his pugnacious face as prep for Madame Tussaud’s ultimate judgment:
He’s lost. There will be no granite or even concrete statues. His legacy is wax.
Jacob Zuma is South Africa’s Donald Trump. The parrallels are so ridiculous, the episodic events so crystal clear that I can’t help believing in my heart that the earliest of the first men were black and we white folk are genetic second-thoughts.
Zuma is seven years ahead of Trump. Everything that happened to him, his family, his “loyal” underlings, his “base” and even (GHU) his Party happen to Donald Trump seven years to the day after Zuma suffers them.
Yesterday the last of hundreds of legal appeals by South Africa’s Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, elected president of South Africa in 2009, was lost. The 81-year old who destroyed so much of South Africa will die in jail.
His family is disgraced, several also under prosecution. Numerous government colleagues and business cronies are in, have gone or are headed to jail. The amount of time and resources the South African government has spent trying to put a lid on this vampirian chapter of the country’s history has spent it nearly completely.
“Special Investigators” – pointedly called in South Africa “State Capturers” – have tripped all over the billions of obstacles scattered over the politic by Zuma’s chaotic, vengeful reign. Like the FBI in the U.S., it seems that the law survived, but it did so by manifesting its timeless patience which meanwhile allowed the country to sink near collapse:
Electricity is irregular throughout the country. Inflation is truly (unlike in America) out of control. Several weeks ago the currency hit its lowest rate ever against the dollar. In the 1980s it almost achieved parity with the dollar. Now, you can get nearly 20 Rand for every dollar. Professionals are immigrating out of the country as if it were the days of apartheid’s sunset.
Zuma may die in jail. But so might South Africa, and like in America, it’s all because of…
…The Party.
Throughout all the mischief, illegality and outright treason, the Party stood behind him. Throughout the investigations the Party loyal defended or ignored him depending upon the court docket at the time. The Party refused to admit error, refused to call a spade a spade, but somehow, miraculously, remained in tact.
It was frayed. Its better parts spun off but were unable to find purchase in any rational opposition politics. They’re now tumbling somewhere in the distant universe lost among the innumerable unknown meteors of the vast unknown.
What was left had to swing East, because The West understandably developed fear from the worry that wouldn’t shake the “Party faithful.” So today South Africa saddles up to Russia as if it was always planned that way. Meanwhile Nigeria overtakes it as Africa’s prinicipal economy.
That’s the single most important fact in this story of possible South African/American duality. If the Party would only have let the evil man fall, it would all have been over so much quickly. Justice as it’s finally happening today would have been served years earlier, preventing the country’s horrible suffering.
You’d still be able to turn the lights on at sunset. There would still be plenty of laptops in the IT store down the street. You’d still be able to take a reasonable vacation out of the country.
There would still be decency and respect for you and your history.
That’s America’s challenge, today, specifically the Republican Party’s challenge: follow the King Lear of South Africa into insufferable oblivion, or wake up and play it straight.
It’s absolutely freaky. Check me out and then believe the crystal ball that tells Trump’s and some of America’s future: shake the Zuma curse and get on with it. Or prepare for seven years of hell.