Zuma is a failure but we’ll survive him!!!
WATCHING President Jacob Zuma answering questions in Parliament is good fun. He is really quite good at it. Sure, his English is poor, but it probably isn’t even his third language. And, yes, he chuckles even at serious questions, clears his throat constantly and pushes back his glasses. All of which are extremely irritating.
At one stage on Thursday he complained that "the country is not going down. It is not going backwards since me. SA is being governed responsibly." Obviously, given what we see around us daily, we can all have fun with that. But pause a moment.However absolute we might want to be in our judgment of Zuma, his dreadful cronies and the friends he has running state-owned companies and the absolutely pathetic excuse for economic policies that he parades as "developmental" and designed to rescue the masses from poverty, it is important to calm down now and then and catch your breath.
This is still a good country to live in. In business, you can still make a pile of money if you’re clever and determined. You can still send your kids to some of the best schools in the world and get the best medical care. You can still rely on the central bank to ensure your savings are not devastated by inflation, and on the courts to be fair and independent.
Leave aside our new best friends such as Russia and China, both corrupt, totalitarian and cruel to their own people — even what we might think of as mature democracies, or at least interesting ones, are much worse places to live in than here in SA. Imagine the terror of being Mexican? Or Greek? Imagine being an Argentinian, where to report the actual rate of inflation is to invite arrest?
A lot, perhaps most of what is still good in SA happens because our private sector is strong, competitive, intelligent and robust. But it’s not all that.
Even the African National Congress, divided, fractious, arrogant, frightened and a general mess, deserves some of the credit. It has always been an ideological disaster. It was absolutely useless in exile and its performance in the government has been true to form. But it has a good heart and it hasn’t lost it. Founded by doctors and lawyers 100 years ago, it is still a fundamentally middle-class organisation. Liberal even.
Zuma somehow embodies that. He did on Thursday. He will embody it perfectly when, as I have no doubt he will, he leaves office in 2019.
Of course, attempts will be made to fix the succession and to embed cronies and hide some loot. But it will not be the worst I’ve seen. And the good thing is, we can only do better after he goes.
As president of an industrial democracy, Jacob Zuma has been a failure. But it is his failure. As a country, we have not failed and we will survive him and get better.
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| President Jacob Zuma answering questions in Parliament is good fun. |
This is still a good country to live in. In business, you can still make a pile of money if you’re clever and determined. You can still send your kids to some of the best schools in the world and get the best medical care. You can still rely on the central bank to ensure your savings are not devastated by inflation, and on the courts to be fair and independent.
Leave aside our new best friends such as Russia and China, both corrupt, totalitarian and cruel to their own people — even what we might think of as mature democracies, or at least interesting ones, are much worse places to live in than here in SA. Imagine the terror of being Mexican? Or Greek? Imagine being an Argentinian, where to report the actual rate of inflation is to invite arrest?
A lot, perhaps most of what is still good in SA happens because our private sector is strong, competitive, intelligent and robust. But it’s not all that.
Even the African National Congress, divided, fractious, arrogant, frightened and a general mess, deserves some of the credit. It has always been an ideological disaster. It was absolutely useless in exile and its performance in the government has been true to form. But it has a good heart and it hasn’t lost it. Founded by doctors and lawyers 100 years ago, it is still a fundamentally middle-class organisation. Liberal even.
Zuma somehow embodies that. He did on Thursday. He will embody it perfectly when, as I have no doubt he will, he leaves office in 2019.
Of course, attempts will be made to fix the succession and to embed cronies and hide some loot. But it will not be the worst I’ve seen. And the good thing is, we can only do better after he goes.
As president of an industrial democracy, Jacob Zuma has been a failure. But it is his failure. As a country, we have not failed and we will survive him and get better.
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