Jacob Zuma, the president of the Africa National Congress (ANC) and South Africa’s president-in-waiting is the quintessential African politician. Only that he is late to the scene by 30 years. He is rough. He is randy. He sexual escapades, which he wears on his sleeves, are well documented. He has many wives. His first wife committed suicide. In the last written note testimony authored, she blamed Zuma for her death. He famously said as a Zulu man he never seduces a woman to have sex. He simply knows from the way the woman sits whether she is inviting him to have sex or not. Once he notices the lady’s posture, he proceeds accordingly depending on his dress mode, by either unzipping his trouser or more easily by throwing to the side the skin garment loosely dangling around his waist.

Things being equal, he will be crowned the next president of South Africa. This is the same man who famously said by taking a shower after unsafe sex he will be protect himself from contracting Aids! There is no doubt Zuma presents Africa’s past, not its future leaders. With a mindset of this nature, South Africans are waiting for a threatening hurricane, and they are not blinking yet. Africa’s fascination with the ugly, the bully, and rowdy leaders has for a long time fascinated anthropologists and South African’s flirtation with Zuma falls into the same setup.

The events that led to the resignation of Thabo Mbeki as South Africa’s president has shown the intriguing nature of politics in South Africa. On one side the orderly transfer of power to the interim president, Mr Kgalema Motlanthe and the sweeping edicts from the higher echelons of the ANC was breathtaking.

This is the oldest political party on the continent, and by recalling the president in a most undignified style, it showed how power is not only wield, but its filtering process was brutally on display too.

Mbeki despite his intellectual aura has the charisma of an undertaker and that did not help.

The enormity of power displayed by the ANC in recalling president Mbeki must be appreciated at several levels. First, it must be acknowledged especially in this part of the world that a party with historic continuity and memory is good for the politics of any country. ANC has shown that it has structures, and that it has teeth to bite. In Kenya for instance, where the average lifespan of a political party is three to five years and the party dies and a new one created as a result of ethnic reconfiguration, ANC’s power structure and discipline was poignant lesson for local politicians.

Second, Mbeki by answering the call of his party in throwing in the towel showed the maturity of politics in South Africa. He definitely has his support within the party.

Nelson Mandela

He could have counterattacked the Kenyan way by shouting loud that foreign money was poured to fight him or even go personal with Zuma. Remember, he won over forty percent of the vote during the leadership contest for the president of the ANC when he lost to Zuma.

Third, the silence of the great man Nelson Mandela was telling. He simply kept mum, not because he was for either side of the political divide. No! As a dignified ex-president he knows his role as an elder statesman and left politics to politicians.

That was an excellent lesson for those retired presidents with itchy fingers for powers like Jerry Rawling of Ghana.

Zuma’s ascendancy to the pinnacle of political power is a cruel reply of what has happened in other African countries in the 1980s and 90s. He has faced all kinds of allegations ranging from corruption in an arms deal to a rape allegation.

On corruption, we see a replay of the typical African politician’s strategy. Zuma had a financial adviser who was convicted and is currently serving sentence for his role in the corrupt arms deal. Zuma was heavily implicated as an accomplice by the judge who sentenced his adviser. He was then rightly fired as vice president. Pursuant to that, the government undertook investigation and referred criminal charges against Zuma. Being the typical African politician, he frustrated the legal process in all manners conceivable. Challenging and appealing every decision made against him by any court. At the same time, he was fermenting the party against Mbeki.

Zuma’s presidency will be calamitous. He is supremely unsuitable to be the president of any country, leave alone South Africa with its past tortured history and promising future. He will take South Africa down the ruinous road tin-god dictators with similar background took their countries in Africa.

With a party that sees his weakness and vices as the archetypical African male strengths, one will soon see the replay of unsavoury scenes reminiscent in other parts of Africa replayed gleefully by Zuma and his supporting orchestra. What is South Africa’s enthralment with this horrid character and his seedy past?

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Writes: BOB HERBERT

Race is like pornography in the United States — the dirty stories and dirty pictures that everyone professes to hate but no one can resist. But I suspect that even porn addicts get their fill sometimes.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

Most of the electorate understands that the U.S. is in sorry shape, which is why more than 80 percent of poll respondents say we’re on the wrong track. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has nothing to do with any of that. The idea that his nonsense may shape the outcome of this election is both tragic and absurd…[more]

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Editorial Reviews: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

From Publishers Weekly: In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug.

The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a “package deal,” the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans’ ingrained “stupidity” and willful blindness, unsalvageable.

Berman’s attempts to tie every American dysfunction to an all-encompassing sickness of soul overreaches, leading him to lump together serious issues like poverty and the Abu Ghraib outrages with trivialities like annoying cell phone yakkers or the “freedom fries” phenomenon, which he bemoans as “symbolic of an emptiness at the core.” Often stimulating and insightful in its particulars, his indictment, like the jingoism it abhors, is too sweeping and essentialist to fully capture American reality.

From Booklist: A despairing analyst of contemporary America, Berman continues criticism begun in The Twilight of American Culture (2000). One character crystallizing Berman’s thoughts is President George W. Bush, under whom, according to Berman, the U.S. is incipiently, if not actually, suffering a “presidential dictatorship,” a “de facto Christian theocratic plutocracy.” In that vein, Berman undertakes a wide-ranging condemnation of American economic and foreign policy of the past 50 years, which he believes has propelled America into disastrous decline.

That Berman inveighs against free markets and thinks the cold war was partly a dynamic of the Soviet Union acting defensively infuses this work with a solidly leftist viewpoint. In Berman’s vigorous arrangement of evidence, current events are propelling us upon an irreversibly downward trajectory toward a societal situation resembling the Dark Ages. However, Berman offers no positive ideas to reverse this perceived free fall, making his tome more of an alarm than a solution.– Gilbert Taylor

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