Zuma’s new political party trick and the head-scratching horseplay of Men Saying Things

Allow me to take you back to mid-September 2023 when the Jacob Zuma Foundation tweeted:

“TO: ALL MEDIA

Please be advised that the Patron of the Foundation, H.E. President Zuma, will not be doing any media interviews on any matter under the sun.”

This news came as a heavy blow to South Africa’s journalists, who are thirsting on a daily basis to convey His Excellency’s views on all matters under the sun to the equally parched South African public. But bravely we soldiered on.

And fortunately, this cruel and unusual media boycott came to a shuddering halt less than three months later, when Zuma’s flunkies announced that they had “the honour to invite national and international media reporters to attend a press conference”.

The volume of international media reporters who cleared their diaries to accommodate this briefing – “Gaza? Who cares?! Jacob Zuma is MAKING AN ANNOUNCEMENT, man!” – is unknown. But South African reporters did dutifully trek to the Orlando East Hall in Soweto because, at this stage of the game, nobody is quite sure what news is any more.

I guess a former president saying something fits the bill? 

It was a crowded week on the Men-Saying-Things front already, what with ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang leaving the ANC and then taking it backsies, and what with former banker Roger Jardine being rolled out as South Africa’s next great electoral hope to a resounding chorus of “Roger who?”

The men have been busy, is what I’m saying, and it’s our job to write down what they’re up to.

In Zuma’s case, this turned out to be the announcement that he was breaking up with his political home of eight decades, the ANC, in favour of a hot young thing called uMkhonto Wesizwe. In this analogy, let’s call the ANC “MaKhumalo”.

Yet, in a physics-defying feat of Schrödinger’s politics, Zuma managed to leave the ANC while staying in the ANC. Although he would be voting for a totally separate party next year, the former president clarified that he would die an ANC member. This kind of talk is completely routine for a man skilled at adding women to his overflowing wife-basket, even though for many of us it may conceptually be a bit of a head-scratcher.

To name this new party after a cherished piece of ANC history takes some balls, it must be said. It’s a bit like Mbali Ntuli launching a DA breakaway party called “Helen Suzman’s Loyalest Warriors”. Plenty of people aren’t going to be happy.

Zuma timed the announcement of his new venture to ensure that most journalists were already drunk. Unfortunately, there are those of us with such unyielding dedication to our craft – I’m talking about myself here –  that we have been able to stay sober long enough to undertake a wee background check into the uMkhonto Wesizwe project.

uMkhonto Wesizwe vol.2 – the “dupe”, as the youth would say – was registered as a “non-profit company” (Zuma: “Hold my beer”) on 12 December 2023. It has three listed directors, and it brings me no pleasure to inform you that one of them has the same name as a man who appeared in court in 2020 charged with trying to steal Sassa grant money from the system.     

Obviously, being an alleged criminal should not discourage you from seeking the highest political office in the land. As we found out before the 2019 elections, fully one in five of the leaders of the political parties registered to contest those polls had what I called at the time “a chequered past” because I was being kind.

So you crack on, directors of uMkhonto Wesizwe. The opposition parties’ coalition ahead of the 2024 elections was briefly called the “Moonshot Pact” before they realised that name gave everyone the ick. 

What uMkhonto Wesizwe is trying to pull off is more like the “Farfarout Project”, with Farfarout being the real name of the most distant planetoid in our solar system.

The thing about Zuma is that he is famously charming. Even Helen Zille, before she became the type of person who says: “My pronouns are R, S, A”, once penned a whole column about how nice JZ is.

Personally speaking, I have been at Zuma rallies in KwaZulu-Natal and have felt an uncontained beam spreading across my face in response to his pleasing stage presence. It’s a real force: if only it could be channelled to fuel our broken power stations.

But to think that Zuma is charming enough to launch a new party at 81 and have it win sufficient votes to eat the ANC’s lunch is bonkers. How could he possibly succeed without the aid of his former brother-in-arms Carl Niehaus?

The most urgent question to come out of all this is: what has happened to the Zuma/Niehaus bromance? There has clearly been some kind of fallout, and the nation deserves to know.

When I interviewed Niehaus in 2021, he told me that the source of his undying fealty to Zuma was the fact that when Niehaus was one of the last political prisoners to be released from jail, JZ would visit him in the tjoekie. (After the article was published, I was promptly contacted by other former political prisoners who were, shall we say, sceptical of multiple aspects of this story.)

But just two years later, Jacob is out here “blessing” new political parties and Carl has finally embraced his fate as the EFF’s most openly despised mascot.

Niehaus, as City Press recently and hilariously noted, “finally acknowledged that he and his party of three people, who call themselves Areta, have no future as a political party”.

EFF leader Julius Malema magnanimously extended a hand to the man he once referred to as “that white guy who buried his mother five times”, and Niehaus and his three friends disappeared into the gaping scarlet maw of the EFF, never to be heard from again.

If only the same were true of Zuma.

But in JZ’s case, he is buoyed by the fanatical support he receives from his child Dudu, in what is the most wholesome and totally normal father-daughter relationship since King Lear.

It’s all a bit much for this time of year, and my plea to the Men Saying Things is as follows: Can we, collectively, just have a bit of a lie-down before 2024? DM